Myth 9: Maintaining a Second Brain will force me to sit in front of a computer all day

I want to end with what I think is actually the biggest myth that I had, and that is the idea that building a second brain is going to force me to spend more time at my computer. I spend so much time responding to emails, working through different documents, writing things, and Tiago, the last thing I want to do is spend more time on my computer. And this is how so many people feel. So by building a second brain, am I just going to be on the computer even more?

Yeah, I totally get this. It's a computer centric. It's a device centric way of note taking. There's no doubt about it. The way I think about this is when I hear and see how much time people spend on their devices, the main conclusion I draw is that they're spending that time very, very inefficiently. Computers vastly accelerate the rate at which we can get things done. I mean, in every way possible. They accelerate the knowledge we have access to. Think about a Google search, think about, you know, millions of results in a fraction of a second. Websites that you can go on online banking and just do something yourself versus make a phone call or even go there yourself. Remember that the speed at which we can communicate, the speed at which we can bring together different kinds of information in one place. And so the fact that we're spending more time on these devices instead of less, to me is an indic. It's not the fault of the computer. Right, because the computer just responds to our demands, what we're trying to do with it. I think it's important to zoom out and recognize we are in a very, very early stage of our relationship with computers. I was just speaking with a friend the other day talking about some of the pioneers of the Internet, Tim Berners, Lee and Ted Nelson. They're still alive, they're still working, their careers aren't even over. This is like talking about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and they're just like over there, you know, oh, we have a question about the Constitution. Just, you know, send. Can you just call up George Washington and ask him, like, what did he mean by that? It's really easy to lose sight of this. You know, we're in the first minutes of the first inning here. And so I think part of that sort of immaturity in our relationship to technology is it's very black or white. Are computers good or are they bad? Is spending time on the Internet good for you or is it bad for you? It's very just like black, white, you know, good, bad type thinking. And of course, the Internet is way more subtle than that. There's many meanings of the Internet. There's many things you can do there. Yeah, you can use it for really terrible things, or you can use it to create art and have amazing entertainment and make friends and collaborate in ways you could never collaborate. Right. I think it's important to realize that the Internet is like a mirror. It just mirrors and reflects back whatever we bring to it. It just amplifies whatever tendencies we already have. And so my question is, you know, how can we make use of the time we're already spending on the Internet? Right? How can we not spend more time or less time? Because the Internet is not inherently good or bad. But given that you're going to spend, you know, the average person, this was before COVID spent over 11 hours per day consuming media on devices. Now it's probably over 12, 13 hours. I don't even know. But how can we make use of that time? Like as an example, if you're reading a book, okay, serious investment of mental resources, five to 10 hours, that is some serious effort you're putting in, right? If you're already already going to put in five to 10 hours, how much incremental time does it take to make a few highlights, put down your finger and just drag it across a few sentences and then at the end export those highlights to your digital notes. An extra maybe 15 minutes, maybe 20 minutes at most. It is such a tiny incremental amount of effort to capitalize, to make use on the 10 hours that you're already spending. Those are the kinds of opportunities I'm looking for. Not taking on whole new endeavors and whole new note taking projects that you weren't already going to do anyway.

I think of this with research. If we're writing a memo at work or something, or trying to pitch a presentation to our boss, we'll need to do some research. And the way that a second brain saves you from spending time on the computer is that rather than doing what I call active research, which is where you very deliberate process, you need to free up an afternoon, do lots of deep work. You can't be focused on anything else. Very divergent process. So it takes a long time. Or you can have a system that has collected information passively for years and then rather than spending the five hours to do that active research, you can spend an hour, hour and a half collecting the ideas that you've already collected. You will spend less time doing it, produce higher quality output, and you can take the extra time and go hang out with your kids.

Or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, there's a funny thing here where people really undervalue their time, really, by just so much. I mean, I have this whole part of the course where I show people kind of the classic graph, like a visual representation of your life. Like, if you think about it, you know, let's say you have a long and healthy life. You're going to live 70, 80, 90, even 100 years. Great, okay, but your career is really like 40 years, right? 40 solid years. You have to create what you want to create in the world to make the difference you want to make, to have the ideas you want to have, to have the career or build the business you want to have. Okay, in a given year, let's take one of those years, you have 2,000 hours, which is the typical working year. Okay? But in those 2,000 hours, take away, you know, meetings and phone calls, which most people would say is not like their peak creative work. Take away, you know, all the administrative stuff, checking emails, just, like, looking through papers, filling out forms, take out breaks and lunches. Like, take out. Take away all the stuff that just everyone has to do, and you're probably left with at most. At most. At most, couple hundred hours, two, maybe 300 hours, if you're really lucky, your entire career, what you're going to look back on and either be embarrassed by or proud of, comes down to just a couple hundred hours at most per year. And then people do things, like you said, do research. They spend like a whole morning doing research, which in my experience, when I just watch people do this, is sort of opening a lot of tabs, randomly clicking around them, reading random stuff and sure, learning some things, gaining some interesting, you know, takeaways, but. But almost always just in their first brain, which, the minute they walk away to go to lunch, to go to the bathroom, to go into that meeting, just dissolves. Like, imagine a sandcastle and the waves just washing over. The sandcastle that someone spent hours meticulously crafting just melts. That is how most people work, which to me is a radical undervaluing of, honestly, human life. Every minute of human life is precious because human life is inherently precious. And it drives me insane to see people throw away their attention, their most precious resource, without any effort to capture, save, preserve even 10%, even 1% of that for some time beyond the present moment.