This video by Tiago Forte explains a simple, intuition‑led framework for choosing a digital notes app. It presents three primary note‑taking archetypes — Architect (structure-focused), Gardener (exploratory/connection-focused), and Librarian (collection/retrieval-focused) — plus a Student archetype for short‑term, ease‑of‑use needs; each archetype is paired with example apps (Notion; Roam/Obsidian; Evernote; Apple Notes/Google Keep/Notability/Simplenote). The presenter recommends selecting an app based on your goals/needs, the product’s culture/community, and the feature set that supports your most important work.
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How can you pick a digital notes app that will increase your productivity, reduce your stress and your worry? Help you keep track of your most important priorities in life? After working with thousands of students and writing Building a Second Brain, my book about creating digital notes that actually enhance your life, I've actually discovered there are three steps to making this decision. First, you need to consider your goals and your note taking needs. Second, you actually need to look at a note taking app's culture, the company that makes it, and the and the community around that product to see if it aligns with your style. And finally, you want to pick a note taking tool that has the set of features that best enables you to do the work that you actually want to do that matters most to you. If you can get these three factors right, you'll be well on your way to building your second brain, a personalized system to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential. Let's get started. This video is the first in a series where I'll walk you through how to pick the best digital notes app for you. One that you'll actually want to come back to again and again. In upcoming videos, we'll break down the most useful, effective notes apps currently on the market. I'll look at their features and their use cases, and I'll even show you the most popular apps being used by thousands of Second Brain students. But in today's video, I want to start with you. Your personality, your temperament, your note taking style. One of the most useful models I've found that instantly resonates with many who are trying to choose their notes app was introduced to me by my friend and fellow creator, Annlor Lecomph, who is the founder of Nest Labs. Annlor noticed that there are three archetypes that many modern note taking apps and modern note takers fall into. These archetypes are the Architect, the gardener, and the Librarian. First, we have the Architect. Many note takers long for structure a clear system to organize every facet of their life. They're looking for a level of customization that blends practicality, function and aesthetics. If you're an architect, you might find yourself trying to create the ultimate edifice to organize your information. The architect approaches everything about their note taking with a systems mindset of architecting their knowledge. Next is the Gardener. If your primary feeling when it comes to note taking is one of wandering, dreaming, imagining and making spontaneous creative leaps, you're probably a gardener. You want to cultivate new ideas, cross pollinate concepts, and sprout lots of creative possibilities. You're looking to upend your existing concepts, maybe create something new, and you're probably not necessarily trying to create a system that knows where it's headed. The Gardener approaches everything about note taking with a nurturing, exploratory approach of reimagining the relationship to information and making novel connections. The third approach to notes is that of the librarian. The librarian has a deep desire to find the most useful or interesting things that exist in the world and then to capture them to be able to retrieve and study them as needed. If you're always collecting new bits of information, categorizing your learnings, retrieving your insights, collecting, combining old and new information into a new understanding, and especially sharing your favorite learnings with others, you are likely a librarian. Librarians often have a project orientation like architects, but instead of architecting their entire life, their research supports specific projects and learning obsessions. The librarian approaches everything about note taking with a fundamentally practical relationship to information. By the way, if I sound like I'm a bit too much of a fan of librarians, it's because that's the archetype that I most closely associate with. I love collecting tidbits of insight, and to me, the purpose of information is to support my projects and my life areas. Take a look at these archetypes again. Do any immediately resonate with you? I found that it's often as simple as the feeling you get when you hear the words architect, gardener, librarian. See, note taking is a highly personal process, and for that reason it's based on intuition and feeling much more than people realize. It's about what resonates and connects with you. Once you identify with one of these archetypes, you can start to investigate the apps most associated with each. For the Architect, Notion is a popular app. It allows you to create personal dashboards just in time, indexes of notes and information that can be tagged and categorized and sorted and updated dynamically as that information changes. For the gardener, two of the most recognized apps today are Roam, Research and Obsidian. These apps are very different in how they organize knowledge, but they're both fundamentally about creating new connections between disparate pieces of knowledge, a map of content that organically grows as you do and surprises you even with new insights you didn't plan for yourself. And finally, for librarians, the most recognized and my personal daily driver is Evernote. Evernote kicked off the modern note taking phenomenon and has specialized over the years to be the best in class at collecting information from any number of different sources. It's quick, it's accessible across all your devices, and it's just a highly dependable platform for modern knowledge work. These are four of the most recognized note taking apps. These four apps alone represent 75% of all of our students, so you already know each one of them has a very strong community of users ready to support a new note taker like you. Finally, I've discovered that there is actually a fourth archetype that doesn't quite fit the mold that we've described. This kind of note taker doesn't have a strong bent towards any of these three archetypes. They either resonate with several of them or none of them, or all of them. Or more likely, they just find the whole decision really confusing and kind of unnecessary. If that's you, I have some good news. You have your own archetype. You are a student. We were likely all students at one point. And as students you tend to just naturally have a shorter term orientation, such as for a test or an essay or a class. Students prize ease of use in note taking. They need something quick, something easy, something accessible. They need to be able to manage many different aspects of life, but not necessarily go too deep into any one of them. In fact, going too deep can be a liability. You already have enough on your plate and you have a specific purpose in mind for taking notes as a student. Your notes are likely a mix of documentation, practical notes to dos, and even word for word transcripts. But the student archetype is actually the most common type of note taker. It's what we default to when we don't have extra time. With that in mind, there's a specific set of apps that work great for students. Apple Notes, Google Keep, Notability, and simplenote are a few that I enjoy that work well. These apps are simpler. They're more pared down in their features than the apps we've discussed already. They're kind of unopinionated. Just a few key features that allow practical, quick, flexible note taking. If you already know which archetype you identify with architect, gardener, librarian, or student, leave a comment below and share with us. Subscribe to this Channel to get access to the next videos in this series, we'll dig into how many people are using each of the most popular notes apps. We'll look at which ones are growing the fastest, and then we'll look at what are the most important features that distinguish one notes app from the next. Thanks for watching and I hope you'll join us on your own journey of building a second brain.
