When Roger Ebert first reviewed Groundhog Day, he liked it but didn’t love it. He thought it was a good movie, and funny, but gave it 3 stars out of 4. In 2005, 12 years later, he added Groundhog Day to his list of Great Movies. So why did he grant that 4th star?

In Ebert’s words: “[T]here are a few films… that burrow into our memories and become reference points. When you find yourself needing the phrase ‘This is like Groundhog Day’ to explain how you feel, a movie has accomplished something.”

Second Brain: my Groundhog Day

I’m no Roger Ebert, but I’ve had a similar trajectory with Tiago Forte’s Second Brain analogy.

I first encountered the Second Brain idea a few years back, near the start of my own journey as a productivity coach. And I thought it was fine. I liked it. But (1) I “filed” it more under Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) than productivity, and (2) I thought I could come up with a better analogy.

Now, I echo Ebert’s mea culpa. I was wrong, on both counts.

On the first point, PKM is an integral part of productivity—storage, retrieval, idea incubation, etc. And on the second point, if there’s a better analogy out there, I haven’t come across it. Like Ebert with “Groundhog Day,” I find myself needing the phrase “Second Brain.”

A Second Brain stores what your wetware brain can’t. It’s structured to help you think clearly and remember important tasks and information. It frees up mental bandwidth when you offload from your Main Brain.

And, critically for my approach to productivity, a Second Brain can grow organically as storage and retrieval space is needed.

💡 Optimize your Second Brain for Action-Powered Productivity 💡

👆 That’s your weekend upgrade.

Action-Powered Productivity basics

To explain how the Second Brain concept works for me, I need to lay a little groundwork.

My approach, Action-Powered Productivity, has a simple tenet at its core: The only moment you have any real control over is Right Now, so any system you build must help you Take Action Now.

Action-Powered Productivity (APP) uses an Agenda and Log mechanic—a “Daily cycle” and a “Now cycle”—to convert tasks to completed work. There are many benefits to this approach, but in this newsletter I want to focus instead on its two major challenges.

First, how do you create an Agenda? Sure, an Agenda answers the question “What do you intend to do with the coming day?”, but what information do you draw on to create it? Do you just write down what comes to mind, or do the tasks and events come from somewhere specific?

And second, what becomes of the information you generate as you pass through Now? There will be ideas and tasks that need to be captured—some intended, others that are tangents that may be valuable later. Where does that information go?

Your Second Brain meets both these challenges. And most important, it meets them without requiring you to build an elaborate system in advance. Your Second Brain should grow as you use it, optimized for two processes: (1) storage and retrieval, and (2) distilling information into action. The actual implementation of those two processes is flexible. (Tiago Forte teaches his PARA and CODE methods, which are good high-level guides that allow for many different solutions.)

My Second Brain for productivity

My Second Brain is built mostly in Tana. I store tasks and projects in Tana, including project support information (or direct links to that information). I retrieve those tasks in Tana, too, via surfacing—which I’ll discuss in a moment. Tana is also where I do much of my work developing ideas and making them actionable.

I use additional apps like Drafts for quick capture on the go and Craft for writing (where I’m writing this, in fact). Calendars are part of your Second Brain too, for storage and retrieval of events. I use Fantastical linked to various Google Calendars. Other tools like Typinator for templates and Keyboard Maestro for macros make it easier for me to move information into or out of my Second Brain, or to develop information within it.

This is the glory of my Second Brain growing as I use it—it’s easy to add new tools or reconfigure old ones, because nothing is set in stone. It’s simply optimized for saving and finding information, and for making information actionable. The rest of the structure emerges, and I define and refine it when I need to.

A Second Brain for Action Now

Let’s return to the two challenges I mentioned above.

Creating an Agenda

How do you create an Agenda? By optimizing your Second Brain to retrieve the right tasks at the right time. This process is called surfacing.

I surface tasks by scheduling them for a date or by tracking them using a Horizon field in Tana—with values like “This Week,” “Available,” “Deferred,” and so forth. I also surface recurring tasks based on what day of the week, month, or year it is.

The actual mechanic for surfacing in Tana is Live Queries. I have queries on my Daily Node for tasks scheduled for today, recurring tasks for today, overdue tasks, and “This Week” tasks that I might have extra time for.

I combine the surfaced tasks with the events on my calendar and organize my Agenda in a logical sequence, grouping similar tasks to save time on transitions and distractions.

If the task system in your Second Brain instead utilizes a task management app like Todoist or Things, that’s fine too! As long as your Second Brain can surface appropriate tasks each day, without subjecting you to your entire list, you’ll be able to create an Agenda.

Handling information as you create it

And challenge two: What do you do with information created as you work? You optimize your Second Brain to quickly store the information. This process is called capturing, and it applies to project-related information as well as tangents or ideas that may would be distractions if you followed them now, but might be valuable later.

Capture in Getting Things Done requires a dedicated Inbox you review at the end of the day. In Action-Powered Productivity, you instead create Bins within your Second Brain. That way, tasks and ideas can be quickly captured to their relevant Bin (or directly to a project) so you won’t have to spend time reviewing an Inbox later. Bins organize tasks using categories like “Home & Auto” or “Church Work”—roughly aligned to your areas of responsibility or roles you fill in your work or life.

Which Bins should you create? You discover those as you go. As long as creating and maintaining Bins is easy (and in Tana it is very easy), you add them organically to your inorganic Second Brain.

Action-Powered Productivity: Two Brains Collaborating

I’ve mentioned Action-Powered Productivity so many times that I need to clearly define it.

Action-Powered Productivity is a set of tools, strategies, and mindsets to help you work effectively and live a fulfilling life.

That boils down to three core concepts. APP is:

1. A workflow for deciding what to do Right Now that can handle unexpected distractions or interruptions without permanently derailing your day.
2. An interface between your Second Brain and Main Brain which (a) makes capture and storage simple, (b) surfaces the right work or ideas at the right time, and (c) shields you from all the other information and task lists when you don’t need to see them.
3. A design philosophy for aspects of your Second Brain, complete with mechanics and best practices.

It coordinates your Main Brain and Second Brain so you can pay attention to what’s important to you and focus on the right work at the right time.

Introducing the Action-Powered Productivity community!

For two and a half years, I have hosted communities (powered by Circle) for the hundreds of people who have purchased my productivity courses. I am now opening the Action-Powered Productivity community to everyone!

There are two tiers of community membership: free and pro.

The free tier includes:

• Full access to the APP forum
• The (upcoming) mini-course Intro to Action-Powered Productivity
• The ☀️ Daily Activator space for helping you through each day
• Live pop-up Q&A sessions
• Join the free tier here: https://rjn.st/join-free-app-community​

For $9/mo., the pro plan includes all that, plus:

• Full access to the most recently completed cohort of Applied Action-Powered Productivity (currently Cohort Seven)
• Scheduled Office Hours & Workshops
• Full access to Tana for Tasks (if you need a Tana invite, there’s an additional one-time payment)
• Priority Registration and Discounts for future cohorts and courses
• Additional future cohorts on many productivity topics, led by other community members
• Join the pro tier here: https://rjn.st/join-app-pro-community​

What do I do next?

(1) Take 2 minutes and answer this question: What’s one thing I learned in this newsletter that I can put into practice right away?

By committing to a specific action, you make it much more likely you’ll do it.

(2) Ask yourself: how effectively can you capture and surface information with your current system?

Not in theory—in practice. If you’re struggling to get ideas into or out of your Second Brain, investigate and optimize those processes for Action.

If this was valuable for you:

Share the newsletter with someone you think would also get value from it! https://rjn.st/weekend-upgrade-newsletters​

Until next time, friends:

Two brains are better than one, even if both brains are yours!

R.J.
​rjn.st/links​

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P.S. Special thanks to the brilliant Felipe Fraga (@FisFraga on Twitter) for finally convincing me to embrace the Second Brain analogy. Check out his newsletter!

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