Recipes
Build a second brain
A knowledge system whose maintenance cost is close to zero.
The scenario
You have tried building a knowledge system. It worked for six weeks, then the filing overhead exceeded the value and you stopped.
The premise here is different
Most systems assume organizing is the work. NewTwos assumes you will not organize, and puts the effort into retrieval instead: search that ignores punctuation and accents, text read from your photos, and material that comes back on its own.
So the recipe is mostly about not building a structure.
Set it up once
- 1
Do not make lists yet
Write onto your days. A list is for a topic that has already proven itself. See things and lists.
- 2
Turn on past years
Resurfacing is the engine. Settings Appearance & Accessibility Show past years. See on this day.
- 3
Leave photo text on
It makes photographing a page a real filing strategy. See reading text in your photos.
The rhythm
Capture badly and often. A half sentence you can find beats a well-formed note you never wrote.
Add three words of your own next to anything you save from elsewhere. You will search your words, not the author's title.
Make a list when a topic crowds your days. Not before. Then move the existing things into it, so it starts with content.
Link rather than file. Mention a list from a day and the backlink does the filing. See mentions and backlinks.
Make it yours
- Tag the exception, not the rule. Fewer than ten tags is a system. Fifty is a second filing problem. See tags.
- Ask rather than search when you cannot remember the words. See chat with NewTwos.
- Look at Universe twice a year to see the shape of what you have built. See universe.
What this looks like after a year
A large pile of loosely organized material that you can reliably retrieve from, and a daily trickle of things you wrote a year ago coming back.
That is a lower ceiling than a meticulously structured vault, and a dramatically higher floor, because it does not depend on you maintaining anything.