The Illusion of Personal Knowledge Management

Exploring the limits of building a second brain

You’ve always been ambitious. You strove to get into a famous college and graduated straight into a job that impressed your friends. You showed up to your first day of work in a pair of shoes that you bought specifically for the occasion. They turned out to be slightly too small, but you wore them anyway, then promptly discarded them with a grimace at the end of the day.

Since then, you’ve achieved a lot.

You raise your hand for everything, always asking the most insightful question in the room. You volunteer to write for the company blog, and your posts generate thoughtful conversation and boost the company’s reputation as a thought leader in the industry.

Your boss is into photography, and so that you have something to talk to him about, you sign up for a photography class. You surprise yourself by actually enjoying it. You buy a nice camera at a price that makes you slightly uncomfortable and slightly proud. You make it a habit to develop your photography skills in your free time.

You get promoted several times, always before you feel ready. You tell yourself you’ve worked hard to get where you are. Your colleagues seem to respect you, but sometimes you wonder how they have it all together, and if you’re really as good as everyone thinks you are.

You check your emails a little too carefully. You give a presentation and stumble over your words. You forget the name of an important client. You can’t recall a relevant stats concept you’d planned to discuss in a meeting. These mistakes are hardly noticed, but they bother you. You wonder if you’re losing the edge you had on your first day in your slightly-too-small shoes.

One day, while scrolling through social media, you come across a post about something called personal knowledge management (PKM). The write-up is espousing a strategy called the second brain. Curious, you start reading more about this method of organizing information and ideas.

As you read, you wonder if the imposter syndrome you’ve struggled with at work is actually due to your inability to keep track of all the information that comes your way. Suddenly, it seems like creating a second brain could be the solution to help you manage it all more effectively.

Excited by the possibility, you decide to give the second brain methodology a try. You start by signing up for a digital knowledge base, which you will use to store all your notes, ideas, and resources. You cancel your weekend plans (meeting friends at a baseball game, going to a new part of the city to take photos, and studying for a relevant professional certification). Then you start categorizing everything you know, using tags and labels to help you find what you need quickly.

As you start to interact with your second brain more and more, you notice that you feel more organized. You wonder if your colleagues are aware of your newfound sense of confidence. As you spend hours reorganizing your system, you wait for them to notice your efficiency and start asking you for tips on how to set up their own second brains.

You feel like once you find the right way to manage all the information coming your way, you can go back to meeting up with friends, enjoying your hobbies, studying for the certification, and taking on new projects at work.

Weeks pass while you’re getting your second brain set up. You don’t have as much time to check over things as carefully. Sometimes in meetings, you’re so busy perfecting your notes that you forget to ask questions or add to the discussion. A couple of months go by, and you get passed over for promotion. In your performance check-in, your boss wonders aloud why you haven’t finished the professional certification you’d planned for last quarter and asks why you’ve stopped contributing to the company blog.

What’s going on?

The concept of the second brain recently entered the intellectual milieu via Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. It’s an exciting concept —

what if you had a personal tool that helped you compile your knowledge and make better decisions?

Used effectively, a personal knowledge management system can help unleash creativity and productivity. I argue that taken to its extreme, PKM can serve as a significant distraction, displacing productive work with a facsimile that feels good but doesn’t actually produce any benefit.

In this article, I discuss the potential impacts of the second-brain version of personal knowledge management on your work and on your ways of thinking. I conclude with a section on several simple approaches to personal knowledge management I find to be effective.

Working with a Second Brain

The second brain approach definitely works for some people. For example, Ray Dalio talks about creating such a tool in his book Principles. For Dalio, the tool is an AI-backed decision-making aid.

In the book, Dalio describes the process of comparing his intuition, honed over many decades as an investor, to the course of action recommended by his second brain system. If instinct and recommendation are not aligned, he considers recalibration. Dalio’s second brain system is a continually evolving collaboration partner for the challenges he’s faced as he’s amassed a net worth of $19.1B.

Sidebar: check out Dalio’s animated Principles Youtube series.

As we move into the future, maybe everyone’s second brain will look more and more like Dalio’s, wherein we are interacting with artificially intelligent agents.

In the meantime, I too have been thinking about how I can use the second brain system to…

1. collect and store knowledge I might otherwise lose,

2. make better choices, and

3. become fabulously wealthy (no plans yet, but call me if you figure this one out 💎)

Yet every time I try to get started setting up an elaborate personal knowledge management system, I end up working on something else instead. My uneasy feelings about the second brain were put into words by Sasha Chapin in his article, “Notes Against Note-Taking Systems.”

I am waiting for any evidence that our most provocative thinkers and writers are those who rely on elaborate, systematic note-taking systems…

Leonardo da Vinci kept all of his notes in one big book. If he liked something he put it down… it is about how detailed your note-taking system should be unless you plan on thinking more elaborately than Leonardo da Vinci.

While some thinkers are drawn to the second brain, I am more inclined to see it as a distraction. Preparing to do the work may act as such an effective imitation of getting the work done, that it actually prevents us from getting the work done.

As the founder of a test prep company, I’ve heard from my clients that they don’t want to start studying for the exam until their second brain is finished.

Here’s some more evidence of distraction supplanting action. Tyler Cowen of the excellent Marginal Revolution blog says that he acts lukewarm when friends come to him saying they want to write a book.

Cowen is concerned that, if he were to respond with encouragement, he would actually fire up the same dopamine circuits as if the friend actually achieved the completion of the book. In the counterfactual, the friend walks away less likely to get started. Cowen says he’s seen this happen in practice and so now acts nonchalant instead of supportive.

My arguments against the productivity displacement effect of the second brain are effectively summed up by Grant Dever of Seeking Tribe:

A lot of Personal Knowledge Management is a nerd snipe for highly organized people. PKM evangelists, particularly on YouTube, promise it will deliver a lot of ambiguous, compounding value by more effectively organizing people’s lives and allowing them to turn a little extra effort now into great rewards in the future.

A highly organized person, particularly one who is quite systematic, could easily get sucked into spending dozens of hours building an intricate system and hundreds of hours following through on their complex processes for little real value.

They didn’t actually have a problem that this kind of system solves, their existing more minimalist ‘systems’ were effective.

Dever continues: “I would bet that the overlap between a person who can manage this kind of system and a person who has a problem this type of system solves is smaller than we might want to believe.”

In other words, if you’re conscientious enough that a second brain appeals to you, you probably don’t need it. If you’re disorganized enough that a second brain would help you, you probably aren’t organized enough to pull it off.

In Dever’s words, the latter person “would probably be better off just writing 1–3 tasks on a notecard every day and seeing if they can complete them, or even consistently write them down. Simple but not easy!”

Thinking with a Second Brain

Have you ever studied for a test by reading a textbook front-to-back, felt supremely confident, then sat down to take the exam and bombed? Maybe it was only once you started the test that you realized you didn’t understand the core concepts well enough to answer a single question effectively. This is called the illusion of knowing.

In this study, researchers Karpicke and Blunt told students they would be taking a test. The researchers asked the participants which learning method they thought would be most effective:

1. rereading their notes,

2. creating a mindmap and material, or

3. trying to mentally recall what they had read

Students predicted their learning would be significantly better if they were given the opportunity to reread their notes. However, students actually performed much better when they were forced to practice mental recall. The experiment demonstrates that students don’t actually know what techniques are most effective for learning.

I think the same lesson applies to how we prepare for life. Creating a second brain is more like rereading your notes and less like active recall. I suspect that overreliance on a second brain can give you a false sense of confidence in your understanding of life.

Having a second brain may give you a sense of assurance in the patterns you’ve experienced in life so far, potentially blinding you when faced with a complex novel situation that renders your prior knowledge and systems irrelevant.

In the words of Steve Jobs, “Let’s go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday.”

We should always strive to remain humble and open-minded in the pursuit of knowledge, willing to acknowledge limitations and areas of ignorance. It’s possible that the second brain system makes this goal more difficult.

If you’re always trying to slot novel situations into the system you’ve developed for yourself, are you truly experiencing the present moment?

Simple Systems for Personal Knowledge Management

Throughout this piece, I have argued that far from promoting productivity, investing too much effort and importance into the second brain could serve as a distraction from effective work and thought. Personal knowledge management may seem invaluable as a means for keeping pace with the speed of today’s information-driven world. I’ll turn now to discussing some simple systems for PKM that I personally use and think you should consider.

#1 — Commonplace book

It’s hard to improve on the concept of writing down important things in a resource you carry around with you. The term commonplace book refers to a collection of information, typically handwritten. This framing possibly got its start with Aristotle, who was interested in keeping detailed notes on various forms of argumentation. Stoic philosophers also kept commonplace books to jot down their thoughts, daily meditations, and quotations from others. Later, commonplace books were used by religious scholars, Renaissance artists, enlightenment thinkers, and pioneering scientists.

Don’t leave your home without a notebook, paper scraps, something to write with. Don’t walk into the world without your eyes and ears focused and open. Don’t make excuses about what you don’t have or what you would do if you did, use that energy to ‘find a way, make a way.’
—Octavia Butler

With the development of information technology, a multitude of options now exists to supplant the functions that paper-based commonplace books served for previous generations. I like to keep it extremely simple by maintaining my commonplace book in Google Keep.

#2 — 100 rules

I first ran across this idea via Dru Riley, an IT support technician who began a habit of journaling every day, and parlayed it into this excellent practice of looking over 100 rules that he’d created over time to set himself up for success.

I’m working on my own 100 rules in Notion. A Google Suite minimalist might use Google Sheets.

#3 — Zettelkasten

German for “slip box,” this personal knowledge management tool consists of a card file composed of small bits of information stored on paper slips or cards that may be linked to each other through subject headings, numbers, and tags.

This system is good for spaced repetition — modern analogues include Anki or SuperMemo.

Conclusion

To quote Grant Dever again, “Being organized isn’t a personality but a set of transformative habits and practices.” I argue that setting up a minimum viable personal knowledge management system can help you stay organized, while giving you sufficient time for creativity and productivity.