What If Writers Could Create A Second Brain? I Made One For Myself!

This is how to never lose a good idea again.

As a full-time writer and entrepreneur, my days are power-packed with work, but my mind keeps crunching new ideas 24×7.

What can be the topic of my next YouTube video?

What are the problems new freelance writers face that I can help resolve?

How can I grow my business from A to B?

I find a hundred answers to these questions throughout the day but most of them get lost in the deep oceans of my thoughts. Often I find myself creating business plans in my head, or even pitching them to prospective clients — but I barely remember anything from those super-convincing pitch decks.

After all, we humans still carry a monkey brain that can only remember so much without context.

A solution to the information overload?

After several bouts of forgetting and regretting some absolutely brilliant ideas, I decided to take action.

I actively started looking for a reliable knowledge management system where I can feed in my ideas, revisit them whenever needed, and access them from all my devices. The app stores are saturated with note-taking tools, but I wanted a system that doesn’t leave me with the task of tagging and sorting my notes but makes connections on its own.

I found several brilliant apps that served one purpose or the other, but Napkin came the closest to being the ideal app for my requirements: easy capture, and resurfacing the idea when it becomes relevant again. Honestly, I was expecting another basic note-taking application when I installed Napkin, but ended up creating an idea vault that helps me generate even more ideas.

How? In this article, I’ll walk you through my tried and approved process of creating an idea vault that saves all your million-dollar schemes.

A system that helps to generate new ideas by remixing your old ones

Napkin is not your old sack of notes and pins that you’ll probably never open again.

Think about it! How often have you created notes thinking they can help you in the future? Now be honest, how many times did you go back to check later?

We never really do, and it’s such a wasted potential.

That’s why I wanted a knowledge management system that is not just an idea collector. It should also help me recall them when needed.

Napkin’s AI model connects different ideas and creates more inspired renditions of those ideas. It can be your go-to thinking partner where you dump all your thoughts, and after a short time, the tool will automatically show your previous related ideas to refresh your memory.

As you continue using Napkin for jotting down your thoughts, the AI model trains to be better at suggesting older notes at the right time.

Napkin — more than a note-taking tool

Napkin is a powerful note-taking tool, but its utility goes beyond it. We live in an information-loaded world where content is bombarding from all sides. Social media, email notifications, to-do lists, meetings — there’s so much to remember and only so little concentration.

Having a knowledge management system with Napkin can be your savior when you feel overwhelmed by all the good ideas you come across and that pop up in your mind.

Whenever you think of an idea, you can immediately collect it in Napkin. You can use its Chrome extension or iOS app to send notes and clips directly from websites to your Napkin account. It can also integrate with Readwise, so all your book highlights will go there automatically.

In the background, Napkin adds tags to every note and instantly shows all the notes with the same tag, no matter when you collected them. This feature helps reconnect with your previous thoughts and merge them with new ideas — and the results can sometimes surprise you.

The longer you keep collecting your ideas in Napkin, the better your results get without even searching for them.

That’s why I feel like Napkin is my second brain. It generates ideas from my inputs and helps me remember 100% of my important thoughts — without information overload.

How to make the best use of your second brain

Jot down your ideas

The first step to start training the Napkin AI is by collecting your ideas on the app. Don’t overthink which ideas should go to Napkin and which should not. Every idea you come across that you want to have an impact on your future thinking, mindset, and life goes there.

Napkin Collect — a lightweight application that brings Napkin to your iPhone and allows fast idea capture via text entry, scanning from books, and dictation — is currently available for download on iPhone from App Store. Collecting ideas on your computer can be done directly in the web app, or you collect ideas with the Google Chrome extension while browsing the web. You can also sync your highlights via Readwise.

Magic tagging

Whenever you create a new note, Napkin AI will analyze the content to assign tags (like keywords) to your notes. For example, you have written extensively about digital business ideas. All these thoughts will have tags like digital and business, for ease of access. For new notes, Napkin offers tag suggestions based on your previous tagging behavior.

Review notes

Napkin ensures that you keep reflecting upon your notes and that none of your thoughts gather dust. You may not remember an idea you had six months ago. But Napkin will pull it out later when you store a related idea. Napkin’s daily mix feature contains a few ideas from all times that you can review for inspiration and motivation.

Enjoy magical associations

If you enjoy reading a lot and making connections, then you’ll love the magical associations Napkin can make. You can click on any idea and Napkin will pull all associated ideas from the past. Having a collective view of these ideas widens your horizon and often, you have your AHA moment just by connecting some seemingly unrelated ideas.

Benefits of building a second brain on Napkin

A minimalist approach to personal knowledge management

Today, I see Napkin as my thinking partner and I’m no longer afraid of putting a cognitive load on my brain. I can read multiple books at once because I no longer have the psychological need to remember everything. I simply enjoy immersing myself in a book and storing all critical parts and learnings on Napkin.

The more I use it, I understand that it’s a personal knowledge management system that analyzes my thought process and augments my thinking pattern with the least possible friction.

Great source of inspiration

The daily playlist feature on Napkin is my go-to inspiration section every day. When I see all my loosely connected ideas in a sequence, it releases a flow of new thoughts in my head. Most of the time, I derive great ideas in the context of the old ones stored on Napkin.

Structure your writing

Napkin is great for storing the highlights from anything you read. At the same time, you can also store valuable ideas and send them to stacks (micro-collections). These stacks are easily transferable to any application you write/publish on, making Napkin the best idea-collecting app for writers. Napkin can be your personal space where you curate your brilliant ideas without any distractions.

Memory compounding

Our brains can’t grow at the speed of technological development. Instead of fighting this change, we have to leverage AI tools like Napkin. This idea collection tool builds an idea library over time beyond the limits of your active memory. You can consume more content and compound your learnings and inspiration by putting it all on Napkin.

Is it worth your investment?

You know where you’re in your personal growth journey — so it totally depends on you whether you want to invest in Napkin.

I want to dedicate my time to creating more passive income streams and giving back to the writing community, instead of thinking about forgotten thoughts.

For me, not having Napkin is far more expensive than $10 a month. Napkin also offers a 30-day free trial of all its packages, so you should definitely give it a spin.

The tool is still in beta and gets constantly improved based on user feedback. The company behind it refused to take outside investments to secure the freedom to stay true to its vision: A world in which curious minds thrive in information overflow instead of feeling overwhelmed and stressed out.

When it comes to my most personal thoughts, I don’t want my data to be compromised and sold to advertisers, so I appreciate the high privacy level and am happy to pay for it.

Your thoughts can change your life story

I keep going back to a quote from Steve Jobs — “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.”

This quote triggers my imposter syndrome to certain levels but also calms me down because it tells me how creativity works. We connect ideas until we hit our AHA moment and create something wonderful.

Till then, we keep putting words to our thoughts and hope we remember them.

But can we keep it all in our active memory?

Imagine remembering 100% of such life-changing ideas you had 5 years ago. Today, you could have been a different person simply by recalling your thoughts. I know I’d have.

Ever since using Napkin, I know that 5 years down the line, I’ll be thankful to my present self for building this idea reservoir.

Build a second brain for yourself

The potential of Napkin truly feels like having a secondary source of ideas alongside a reliable repository of all your thoughts.

For me, Napkin is like Spotify, but for my ideas. Spotify creates playlists of songs according to my taste. Napkin builds playlists of my ideas according to the topic I am pondering at the moment.

Having this tool as my primary knowledge management system makes me feel extraordinarily empowered. My ideas have always been my source of strength — whether it was leaving a stable income for entrepreneurship or building multiple income streams as a writer in 2023.

Napkin is taking my knowledge management to its maximum productive level by being my thinking partner. I can read more, learn more and remember more without unnecessarily loading my cognitive capacity.

I can trust my second brain, Napkin, to show me relevant ideas whenever I’m thinking about a topic.

Check it out for yourself and get a 30-day free trial on all their packages.

Author’s note: This post is a sponsored collaboration with Napkin. This article is based on all the features I absolutely loved after using Napkin, even though the company is monetarily compensating me to write this. I believe in its potential to help my entrepreneurial journey, so I had to recommend this tool to you.