The Power of a Second Brain in a Developer's Workflow

Well, hey, everyone, my name is Braden Coyier. I'm a husband, a father of two little girls, and a senior front-end engineer working at LogiGate. Now balancing the responsibilities of work and family as an engineer that's working from home can be quite the juggling act. I'm sure some of you probably know, right? Context switching is really the only constant that we have in our lives, right?

And so because of this, the rise of AI in recent years has been really exciting because it's promised the opportunity to offload tedious tasks and to get nearly instant feedback on everyday problems. But I noticed that I was growing too... I noticed a tendency to lean too heavily on AI to solve all of my coding problems. And you might say, well, Braden, what's wrong with using AI to solve all of my coding problems? It's great. And that's true. There's nothing wrong with it. I do think it's great. I use it every day. But I noticed a near instant reaction to turn to AI whenever I had a problem. And because of this, I wasn't actually learning new information. In fact, I tended to forget to forget the information nearly as quickly as I found it because of that.

And so it's almost like these smart AI solutions almost made me less knowledgeable in certain areas. So instead of finding answers and then immediately forgetting it, I want to learn and I want to grow. And so over the last year, I've made a concerted effort to slow down and to try and become an active learner, keeping the information that I learn readily available even when my physical mind can't remember it. And I'm doing this with something called my second brain. Now, for those of you who aren't familiar with the PKM space or personal knowledge management, a second brain is essentially just a curated list of digital notes, usually, that span different aspects of your life, of work, and your hobbies. And the real power of this digital knowledge repository comes in its ability to form connections between different ideas, mirroring the workings of our own minds. And you can kind of think of a second brain as your own personal Wikipedia that's tailored to your own thoughts and your own ideas. And so you might be saying, well, Brayden, you already don't have a lot of time. Why are you investing time in a second brain and writing these notes? There's two things I want to point out for you today. Number one is enhanced memory retention. So if you're intentional about how you build out your second brain, you don't just find the answers, you tend to remember them and retain them. Studies show that we lose nearly 40% of new information within the first 24 hours of encountering it. 40%. And as someone who helps lead a team at work, that statistic is pretty alarming, because it means that I need to be super intentional about the information that comes my way. But studies also show that by slowing down, being an active learner, and writing down information in your own words can greatly improve retention. And this works, by the way, whether you're jotting down notes on pen and paper, or if you're using a keyboard and mouse and writing digital notes.

And this whole idea of digital note taking probably isn't new to you. We've probably all done note taking in the past. But why do we stop taking notes about new things that we're learning when we graduate college? And just like if we were learning something new, we should return to our second brain regularly, because the repetition of reviewing notes aids in recalling that information.

And for those times when we can't physically recall it, we don't have to worry. We have our digital brain right there. Maintaining a second brain is an investment. But it's worthwhile for me. Maybe it is for you, too. Number two, one of the coolest benefits of maintaining a second brain as a developer is running across, often unintentionally, these tidbits of information that I didn't even know that I needed in the moment. I call this contextual discovery.

But here's an example. Hopefully it's easy enough to read. Here's a note that I wrote years and years ago about how to change the most recent Git commit message using the Git commit amend command to say that five times fast. The note itself is short and sweet. It shows some syntax. I wrote it in my own words. But I also included a note that's in my second brain as kind of a heads-up if I ever come across this note again. Because in this situation, I was working in a repository that had pre-commit hooks. It would take the JIRA slug based off of the branch name and append it to the commit message, which means that when I ran the amend command, I actually ended up with a commit message that wasn't what I thought it was going to be. It was unintentional side effects.

Yes, this example is simple on purpose. But I wanted something that we could all relate to. But it highlights the idea that you can link content together based on past experiences, and that can be helpful. It's also amazing, and you might relate to this too, how quickly you can recall certain information when you find it in your past context. So if I ran into a problem a year ago and I found a note that includes details about that problem, because I ran into the problem and I struggled with it, I remember the problem, it pains me, right, I can recall a lot of that information, both the stuff that worked and the things that did work. And so keep that in mind as well. So now, how can you build your own second brain? Well, thankfully, it's pretty easy, and generally it's tool agnostic. Keeping up with it tends to be the hard part, at least for me. But you can use any tool that you want. Many of these you've probably seen, such as Notion, Obsidian, Reflect, Rome Research, and Tana, just to name a few.

And as you build out your second brain, you want to start small. You want to write about information that's self-contained, meaning that the information you're writing about is scoped to a specific idea or a specific concept. And over time, you can find your notes that you've written and form a mesh, a web of related information.

Okay. I know I'm a little over time, and I'm the only thing keeping you from lunch, so let me wrap up. If there's one thing you take away from the talk, remember that passive learning is fleeting, but active learning is enduring. And I needed a way to remember all my information, and the way that I chose to do that is by remembering that I can't remember everything. I realize that, and I needed a system that I can rely on when I can't physically recall the information. And I don't have to worry if I can't. I can just turn to my second brain.

So the next time you run into a problem, don't just find the answers. Consider retaining them with a second brain. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you.