the Idea Factory he used to build a team of 20

employees and a 3-million subscriber YouTube channel.

In this detailed walkthrough, we'll talk about the

four steps of Ali's Second Brain process:

his system for where notes go,

and the specific apps he

uses every step of the way.

This is Ali Abdaal's Second Brain. ?

First, let's start with Capture.

So Capture is about getting it outside of your brain,

social media, the world, and into some trusted single place

where you can start to work with it.

What are the different ways

that you capture information?

Okay, so many.

The first one is Physical Notebook. Perfect.

I still like Physical Notebook.

I kind of go between various

ones, depending on how I'm feeling. Recently.

Last week or so.

I've started Morning Pages.

So I have this other notebook where I do

three pages of, like, handwritten-y text – uh, text – uh, WRITING (both laugh)

And if I'm capturing notes on the fly,

usually I just use Apple Notes because all

the other apps, they kind of suck online.

And I'm often in for example, if I'm in a restaurant

and I'm in the toilet downstairs where there's no

signal and no WiFi, and that goes into Apple Notes.

That's apple notes on your phone, right? That's right.

Occasionally apple notes on my Mac as well.

It's very easy to just pop it open

with Alfred (app) and I have multiple folders.

It's basically almost like, Evernote, but

it's just such an easy place to just chuck stuff into,

and I can kind of forget about it. And I know that,

again, (tip from your course)

if I ever need to find something, I can just

search for it rather than having to worry about the

specific folder and the specific tag and all of that.

Generally, I do a lot of automated capture stuff. Okay.

So I don't have to think about it too much. Perfect.

So Readwise is like the center of my capture

system, so that if I'm reading on Kindle and

I highlight on Kindle, it goes into Readwise.

If I'm reading on Instapaper, it goes into Readwise.

More recently, I'm using the beta version of Readwise's

Reader app, which is sort of Mac web iOS.

So when I highlight on that, it goes into

Readwise, and then Readwise syncs into my Roam and

my Notion and all that kind of stuff

further down the line. I use

Day One as my journal app.

So if it's like journaling and it's

private, I'll turn it into day one.

Often, if I'm writing a daily note in Roam,

I'll just copy paste it into Day One anyway,

just because I like having the data.

And I've been using day one for five years

plus now, so it's a nice stream of daily

journaling, daily thoughts, that kind of stuff.

I do use Todoist as, like, kind of – if it's a

task and I want to capture it, I'll chuck in Todoist.

Occasionally I'll just do a voice memo,

But the app I use most often is Otter.ai,

for example, I'm having a conversation with someone and I

know this is a conversation that would be useful to

record and transcribe things, I'll just open up otter on

my phone trying to put it down in between us

and it's just doing it. Cool, isn't it? It's so cool.

Do you have anything for YouTube videos?

Clips from or transcripts from YouTube videos?

No, I don't really watch YouTube

videos for that kind of knowledge.

I tend to watch them all for the entertainment

or the oh, that's a cool transition.

But actually when that happens, I use an app

called CleanShot which lets me capture a sort

of screen recording and turn it into a .GIF. Perfect.

And so when that happens, I get that GIF and I

put it into a mood board for the YouTube channel.

Nice title and subtle entrance animation. Very cool.

From this masterclass by Gary.

I want to do this for our channel and

then I just send this to our editors to

be like, hey, this is a cool thing.

In my mind, when I capture something, I have

an idea of what I'm capturing it for.

So for example, I tend to use Apple Notes

and Roam – a combination of the two for

personal note taking, and also for my book.

But we exclusively use Notion for anything related

to the team, anything related to YouTube videos.

If for example, I have random thought in the shower

"Daily Highlight method for productivity", then

I'm thinking, okay, is it relevant for a book thing

or is it relevant for a YouTube video thing?

If it is relevant for a book thing, I'll

chuck it into Apple Notes or into Roam.

And if it's relevant for a YouTube thing,

I'll just chuck it straight into Notion.

Sometimes it's both and then it gets a bit messy.

But I don't think about it too hard.

There's no speed limit.

You can go as fast as you want and if you know

where to put something absolutely why waste the effort

that you just put in to decide where that goes?

Just put it straight there.

What I would question though is what happens when

you don't know what is the plan B?

Is there like a safety net where things can

go, like a Daily Note section or an inbox

where in case you don't have time to decide

where it goes, you can just stick it there?

Yeah, I usually just stick it in Apple Notes

and then I usually forget about it because I

don't actually have a solid review process.

The Daily Notes feature in Roam and

the equivalent app is surprisingly helpful.

May 17 I was just like, I need somewhere to put stuff.

I happen to have Roam with me because I

was on the computer and I was on line.

So if you don't come back to this

and kind of redo it, there's no penalty.

You don't feel bad. Didn't get to it.

Yesterday I had a chat with Daniel and Tristan from

Readwise, "Discussed Book Pitch, Read Wise and Reader

potential course idea course aiming for August 2022"

and then as I was doing that, because I've

been using room for a while, I was like, oh,

this is a course, let me make this course page.

Of course, probably have a good goal setting.

When was this?

I must have kind of done this course like two

years ago when I was getting into buying property.

I often talk to people who seem to think

they need one capture tool, one capture source, which

is absurd. I mean, look at this list!

What is the unit of output that I care about?

And then let's just do whatever it

takes to get to that as efficiently

and as sort of frictionlessly as possible.

And I think the mistake a lot of people make

is that they're wedded to the organization of the system

as if the system is a unit of output.

So, for example, no shade on

August Bradley or Marie Poulin.

But if you're them and you're selling a

course on how to use notion, then it

pays to have a really nice notion setup.

But I think people kind of overly index on oh

my God, august Bradley has made incredible notion set up.

I need to do the same rather than

thinking what do I actually care about?

Rather than have pretty money and stuff.

Now, step two of Ali's Second

Brain: Organize. So for "Organize,"

How I would think of this is just where things go.

Where do they go in terms of an app?

Where they go in terms of a

folder or a tag or a category?

You just want some place that you

know when you have the idea,

"We want animations for YouTube videos," like you showed us

with the mood board, you know where to go.

The thing is, a lot of these

"capture" sources are also "organize" sources.

And so, for example, Apple Notes tend to stay in

Apple Notes unless it is a thing that's going to

become a YouTube video, in which case it goes into

Notion because that's how we manage our YouTube videos.

Or unless it is a thing that's going to become

part of the book, in which case it either goes

into Roam or just stays in Apple Notes.

Because I've even got book folders in apple notes

of like all the different parts of the book.

These are all like various folders for various things.

And I often just add to these, organize them.

Over time, the chapter structures have changed.

Over time, when you're writing a book, stuff changes.

So I don't think about it too hard.

I just trust that if it's something related to the book

and I chuck it somewhere in this book main folder.

It will resurface itself when I'm

focusing on that relevant chapter.

So like Apple Note itself is

a bit of an organizing system.

Similarly, if we go back to Roam, Roam itself

is also I mean, I don't really organize stuff

in Roam particularly because I trust that the tagging

and the searching and stuff will resurface things.

So for example, if let's say I'm working

on chapter one of the book, I have

this sort of subtitles been drafted.

Was drafting this yesterday:

"May 17." "Draft." "Word Count." Quite a handy feature.

But I also then know that I've got a

bunch of other pages related to autonomy and mastery

and purpose and intrinsic motivation and stuff.

I will trust the automatic

organizing capabilities of the app.

So if something like notion is a little bit more

structured, we have this system, of how we work with

a team for all of our videos that we're making.

And so if I need to capture an idea I know

specifically it goes into this page, then Jamie, our YouTube producer

will specifically take the idea and put it into the relevant

place and decide what needs to happen with it.

Back when I was doing everything

myself, this was a lot simpler.

It was just basically a glorified Kanban board where

I could add a glance, see okay, what stage

of production are each of our videos at?

Writing or filming or editing?

I've got hundreds to thousands of things in my

Readwise database in terms of books and articles.

Mostly books and articles,

occasional tweets, occasional podcasts.

And this all gets rooted or routed into my

Roam, which is quite convenient whenever I get around

to refreshing the link because sometimes it doesn't work.

So depending on what kind of idea it is and

how you're going to use it, you either want it

in a hierarchy or you want it in a network.

If I'm online, I will chuck it into Roam.

Sometimes it's even the one to three

milliseconds it takes for room to load.

It needs to have a thing. Absolutely.

If I need to find something, it

will rock up at some point.

So you trust that when you read a

book, take a highlight, it's going to end

up more or less automatically in Roam?

Yeah, more or less automatically in Roam.

And if I need to revisit at some

point, I kind of know that it's there.

And what's interesting about Search, it

doesn't matter where something is located.

Have you noticed when you do a search, it

just finds the thing you don't know or care

which folder or link or tag it's part of? Exactly.