A Second Brain in Plain Text

Knowledge workers—which includes engineers, of course—often find they’re trying to hold too much information in their heads. When that happens, they frequently turn to what’s popularly known as a “second brain”. This can take many forms. There are dedicated applications, Zettelkasten implementations, and home brew solutions for it but is can be as simple as a set of notes. Of course, to be useful they have to be searchable, which means the user has to impose some structure on those notes.

Junji Zhi is a software engineer at Gusto Engineering who found himself needing a second brain. He started with the usual assortment of general tools such as Evernote, Apple Notes, Slack, and many others but wasn’t happen with any of them. He finally settled on using a plain text file as a second brain.

He started with a simple text file but quickly discovered that it needed a bit of structure to be usefully searchable. After a while, he moved his notes to an Org file. That brought him an outline structure, better formatting, and even syntax highlighting for his code. The Org file is still plain text so he’s not locked into any particular application. He can, if he feels the need, easily move those notes to any other application.

Although Zhi doesn’t mention it, Org-mode has a template system that can greatly simplify the input of items into the database and handle structuring it by date automatically. If you’re looking for a simple way of implementing a second brain, take a look at Zhi’s post.

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