Why I'm building a second brain
So I’m reading Building a Second Brain right now and I’ve already had some realizations about how I actually work, both as an engineer and as, you know, a person trying to keep their life from leaking out of their head.
Two things have hit me hardest so far. Let me get into them.
The loading bar problem
Every time I start a new project, it feels like I’m starting from zero. Which is wild, because I’m not. I’ve been doing this for years. I’ve solved most of the gnarly stuff before, at least once. Sometimes twice.
But that’s never how it feels.
Here’s the analogy I keep coming back to: it’s like a loading bar. I work on something, I get to 85%, I learn a bunch, I ship it. Then I close the laptop, start a new project a week later, and the bar resets to 0% 😵💫. So I crawl my way back up, re-Googling the same flexbox quirk, re-discovering the same React gotcha I know I figured out last year, re-writing the same Tailwind config I’ve written ten times.
A second brain fixes this. Not perfectly, but enough that the bar doesn’t reset. I want to open a project and start at 85%, because the CSS thing I figured out in March is already written down, the React pattern I landed on 6 months ago is already a note, and the weird Vercel deploy gotcha I hit last week is already searchable.
That’s my dream. Collecting a list of pitfalls, gotchas, and quirks I’ve solved before and having that at my disposal immediately than trying to remember roughly how I solved it before
Everything else also belongs outside my head
The other takeaway is bigger than code.
I currently keep most of my life in my head. Finances, cooking recipes I want to try, health stuff I’m tracking, future goals, side-project ideas. All of it just kinda floats around up there without much structure.
A second brain lets me colocate all of that. Literally, into one repository. One place I check. Finances next to cooking next to goals next to engineering notes. It sounds somewhat chaotic (and misorganized) but it’s actually the opposite. It’s the cognitive load of holding all that in your head, simultaneously, that’s chaotic. Putting it all down somewhere cohesive is the peaceful part, however, I’m still figuring out the best way to inter-relate all of these concepts so that my second brain is even more cohesive across different topics (more on this later).
Still reading
I’m not done with the book yet, and I’m slowly working on building my second brain. I’m still in the “wow, big realization” phase, which is the cheap phase to be honest. The expensive phase is the next few months of actually building and sticking to the habit.
But here’s what I’m taking away even before I finish:
- The friction of restarting at 0% has been quietly costing me a ton of time
- Most of what I think I’m “remembering” I’m actually just re-deriving
- The stuff outside of work deserves the same treatment as the stuff inside it
- A second brain isn’t a productivity hack, it’s an offloading strategy
More on this once I actually start building it 🧠.