Building a Second Brain… and Why I Didn’t

Emil
6 min readAug 11, 2023

I’ve always thought a lot about productivity and organization. We want to get more done in life because that’s good, right?

Right?!?

This is something that is rarely questioned.

It falls in that dangerous area of beliefs that we hold that we don’t think to question.

This is the stuff we don’t know we don’t know or in the words of Donald Rumsfeld — the unknown unknowns.

This is Part 1 in what turned out to be a 3-part series. Links to Parts 2 and 3 can be found at the bottom of the page

It was 2020 and my online coaching business was booming. I started it in 2015 which had given me plenty of time to iron out the kinks. In 2019 I hit an inflection point and started to make some serious money. In 2020 when the whole world moved online, I was ready and it started printing money.

If you’re in Bali and working inside on your laptop, you get extra points right?

I was juggling a million and one things and always trying to cram more into my personal and business life. I was struggling to keep track of it all.

Like most people, I was just trying to be organized to get more done and I spent a LOT of time looking for solutions and trialing systems — I used all the apps (Trello, Asana, bullet journals, normal journals, spreadsheets, Airtable, etc) and read all the books.

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Emil

My goal is to learn and debate with kindness, honesty & humility.