Your Second Brain Needs a Second Body
Have you ever found yourself desperately searching for a needed digital file?
Setting up a “second brain” means setting up a system to manage the massive amount of digital information many people keep. Where do you keep your ideas? Contact information? Passwords? Photos? Travel information? To-do lists? Project ideas? Articles you want to read? And can you find what you want?
If you can reliably find the digital information you keep, congratulations! You’ve set up a second brain. My physical brain feels like a prairie dog village; information pops up in my memory when I don’t need it, and disappears into dark tunnels when I do. Luckily, I also set up a second brain.
Dealing with lots of information, personal knowledge management, is not a new problem. But a second brain circa 1980 might have looked like this: a paper wall calendar, notebooks, a paper planner, a file cabinet, a recipe box, an address book or — if you were really networked — a Rolodex. One of my favorite old-school second brains is this one.
To be creative, it’s not enough to just collect information. It has to be organized so you can find it, and that’s what a virtual second brain system does. If you search online for “second brain” you come up with Tiago Forte’s popular “Building a Second Brain” program, and you come up with scientific articles about the gut.
Which leads us to setting up a “second body.” If you really want to make time to focus and create, along with that second brain, you need a second body. That is, you need an organized and orderly physical environment.
Disorder in your physical environment takes up a lot of time, too. Intentional communities like monasteries, housing co-ops and artist retreat centers know that disorder eats up time. Therefore, the functional ones have systems in place to keep things running smoothly.
When your environment is disorderly, time you might have used to create something is eaten up by trying to find things, and making superfluous decisions on the fly. If you don’t have routines for managing daily needs, time — and your mental bandwidth — gets consumed with figuring out in the moment what’s for dinner, or if the dishes really have to be done right now. Without systems, the time you want to dedicate to contemplation, making art, studying, creating, is eaten up instead by having to deal with, say, a laundry emergency.
So how does a well-functioning “second body” work, to help us find time to do the things that are important to us?
I went on retreat once at a Trappist monastery. They are a self-supporting community, so they operate a bakery. They keep to a structured schedule of work, prayer, and rest. They make a LOT of time for prayer, both in community and as individuals. Even though they operate a commercial bakery, maintain a rather large guest house (meals included), and run their own residence, they can also set aside many hours a day for prayer because they prioritize having an orderly environment: systems for getting daily needs met. They also defined how much was enough when it came to things like furniture and clothing.
The same was true of the women’s housing co-op I lived in, in college. We had plenty of time to study and socialize (very important for human flourishing, as we rediscovered during the pandemic) because we had processes — routines — for keeping the shared house clean and making meals.
In my visit to the Trappist monastery, I saw that they used the same principles the housing co-op did: both communities had defined how much was enough, and both communities had routines for dealing with daily living needs.
I knew a woman who worked at an artist’s community. MacDowell provides residencies giving time and space for artists to focus solely on their work; and that in turn comes from the organization maintaining a "second body” supporting people as they do the hard work of creating.
What these “second body” systems have in common are two things:
they all define how much is enough (e.g., enough furniture for people to gather for conversation, but not so much that you have to climb over things)
they all put processes in place to deal with daily needs without those needs becoming an unnecessary emergency (e.g., if you empty the trash on a schedule, you never have to interrupt what you are doing because the trash is overflowing)
Just as organizing our information gives us a second brain, organizing our environments gives us the “second body” to support all that creativity. Your home environment is like an extension of your body. I think it works most like the circulatory system.
It’s hard to think if the circulation in your second body gets slowed or even clogged — if there are piles of dishes in the sink, laundry baskets overflowing*. To have a healthy body, we need a circulatory system that delivers oxygen and nutrients where they need to be; and that doesn’t get clogged up with excess. In our actual bodies, circulatory blockages and build-ups can lead to heart attacks, Alzheimer’s, strokes. In our homes, when the daily living workflow has lots of clogs and blocks, that leads to anxiety, frustration, and needless interruptions that divert us from what we care about.
Just as we need oxygen going to our first brains (the squishy meat ones, not the electronic ones), we also need an environment that provides the oxygen of peace and order. Your keys, your phone, and your wallet are like nutrients that ideally get delivered through the flow of activity to designated places in your home where you can access them quickly when you need them next.
When things are disorderly, it is hard to think. It is hard to create. It is hard to make time for important but non-urgent things like study, or contemplation, or creating, or rest, when you can’t find what you need, quickly.
A disorderly system steals lots of time because it allows unimportant things to grow urgent.
Second brains, having systems in place to manage your information and ideas, are wonderful tools to help people become more productive and creative.
But don’t forget about your second body. Systems in our environments have a profound impact on our ability to focus our attention where we want it to be.
Notes
*Unless you have little kids. The laundry volume is astounding when you have small fry! I taught my kids how to do their own laundry, and it still took years to get rid of Mt. Washmore.