Notes To Nobody

Why your second brain might be making you dumber

When I have nothing to do, I make lists of things I need to do. When something comes in and I’m already deep in work, I leave it for later: bottom of the list, top of the list, or squeezed between two lines that were already fighting for attention. When I get something done, I cross it off.

I have a daily list, a weekly list, a yearly list. A list of books to read and one of books I’ve read. Movies to watch, places to visit, music to buy. A grocery list, a wishlist, a list of important decisions still pending. What I don’t have yet is a bucket list. Apparently I haven’t gotten around to planning my life either.

The irony? I revisit maybe three of these lists regularly. The rest are digital monuments to good intentions.

Somewhere around 2018, a new religion swept through the productivity world. It had prophets: Tiago Forte⁽¹⁾, Roam Research evangelists, every Notion influencer on YouTube. It had sacred texts. And it had rituals: tagging, linking, and colour-coding notes at 11pm while feeling extremely productive. The premise was seductive: capture everything, connect everything, and your accumulated knowledge will one day produce brilliant insights on demand.

So we built systems. Beautiful, elaborate, meticulously organised systems. And then, for the most part, we stopped using them.

This isn’t just a personal quirk. Systems lose their purpose at every scale, from company-wide processes down to your own note-taking app. The mechanism is the same: the system starts serving itself instead of you. But while organisational amnesia is at least visible to others, personal knowledge rot is completely silent.

Here’s what nobody tells you in the PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) world: the act of saving information releases a small dopamine hit. It feels like learning. It feels like progress. Your brain logs “task completed” and moves on.

But reading a highlighted article, dropping it into Notion, tagging it with five categories, and linking it to three related notes is not thinking. It is organised archiving.

Senior professionals and founders fall into this trap especially hard. They’re surrounded by important information constantly market signals, competitor moves, team dynamics, strategic decisions. The instinct to capture it all makes sense. The execution usually doesn’t.

The question to ask is not “Did I save this?” but “Will I ever actually use this, and when?”

If you can’t answer that second question, you’re building a graveyard, not a brain. The more sophisticated your system, the more time you spend maintaining it instead of thinking with it.

You know the pattern. You start simple. Then you add folders. Then tags. Then nested tags. Then you discover backlinks, build a Map of Content, watch a two-hour tutorial on progressive summarisation, and spend a Sunday afternoon reorganising your entire vault, again.

At no point during any of this are you actually doing the work.

This is not a tool problem. Notion, Obsidian, Roam, Logseq, they’re all fine. The problem is that the system becomes a substitute for output, not a support for it. Every hour you spend perfecting the architecture is an hour you didn’t spend writing, deciding, building, or leading.

For a COO managing operations across multiple functions, or a product manager juggling 30 open threads at once, the cost is real. You’re not just wasting time on the system, you’re generating cognitive overhead that actively gets in the way.

A few things that hold up in practice, regardless of what tool you use.

Capture less, process more. The goal is not a complete archive of everything interesting you’ve encountered. The goal is to think clearly and act decisively. Most of what you save, you don’t need. Be ruthless about what earns a permanent spot.

Write to think, not to archive. The most valuable notes are the ones where you worked something out: connected two ideas, challenged an assumption, reached a conclusion. A note that says “interesting article about churn” is nearly worthless. A note that says “churn in our Q3 cohort follows the same pattern as X, hypothesis: onboarding gap at day 14” is a decision waiting to happen.

Schedule a return visit or don’t bother saving. If information is worth capturing, it’s worth a specific moment of re-engagement. “I’ll get back to this” is where notes go to die. “I’ll review this on Friday when I’m preparing for the strategy session” is a system.

The best setup is the one you actually use. A worn notebook (I currently use a A3 hard cover 200 pages one) beats a pristine Notion workspace. A simple weekly review beats an elaborate GTD⁽²⁾ implementation you abandoned in February. Consistency beats sophistication every time.

I still make lists. I always will.

But I’ve made peace with the fact that most of them are aspirational rather than operational. The film list, the book list, the places I want to visit, they’re not systems. They’re a written version of hope. And that’s fine.

The lists that actually run my week are short, ugly, and constantly updated. A paper blocknotes for weekly todos. Outlook for what’s next. Meeting notes for every recurring conversation. Post-its for whatever can’t wait. And Apple Notes on my phone for everything personal.

Unglamorous? Absolutely. Effective? Every single week.

Your second brain doesn’t need to be smart. It needs to be there when you need it.

Start there.

Further reading:

1. Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain
2. David Allen, Getting Things Done