My second brain

Do you feel overwhelmed by all the information coming to you ? There's nothing more daunting than having to sift through all the "facts" and "news" and "reports" and "advice" and "WhatsApp forwards" and wondering what is true and what's from ill-informed sources. But there's also the things you feel you want to save for keeps, or at least put aside for later reference when you have the time. How do you handle the huge volume of snippets of articles, news, recipes, programs, exercise regimes, how-to manuals, course notes, etc so that you can double-back to them when you have the time ?

The information explosion started for me way back when the first hard-drives were available on the PC. I copied and archived lots of things, much more than I could ever hope to recall, review or revisit. Moving along, storage devices advanced from megabytes to Giga to Tera and even Petabytes. As you know, videos are the biggest occupiers of storage space.

The saddest thing for me was to lose a large chunk of all my projects and computer programs that I wrote. No matter how careful I was, if a hard disk fails it fails. I've learnt some hard lessons and so I am more religious in doing backups nowadays. The good news is that HDDs and SSDs are much cheaper as compared to the good old days.

But the point I want to make is : how do you save and organize all that data that you need ? Thankfully, notebooks can now be had on our smartphones and PCs. There are several apps like Evernote, OneNote, Keep, etc that you can use to organize all your to-do lists, diaries, notes, thoughts, articles, and media. You can use a combination of the cloud and physical devices as backups. The idea is to always have a copy of anything in at least two places.

I think I have it all covered, more or less. I cannot nowadays remember everything, and I don't have to. What's important is that you organize it all well for later convenient retrieval whenever you need to. It's even more pertinent for me for my studies. There are lots of other helper apps to lend a hand of course but mostly I depend on my own ingenuity with the few resources that I use. Essentially, what I have done is to build a "second brain".

So, if you feel overwhelmed and have yet to start thinking seriously about finding a solution to archiving and organizing your daily inputs, it's time you did.