TTL 9

Your Second Brain is only as good as the content you put inside.

👋 Good Morfternight, this is Paolo Belcastro, with the ninth issue of TTL: Tools & Thoughts for Leaders.

Today, we’re diving into one of the most crucial aspects of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM): how to collect and centralize your knowledge effectively.

I’ll use Reflect.app to show you how to set up your personal information curation flow, and collect everything you need in a single place, where it is at your fingertips.

The Importance of Knowledge Management

Imagine trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle with pieces scattered everywhere—some at your house, some at your best friend’s, and some on your colleague’s desk.

That’s what managing your knowledge feels like without a central hub.

If you’ve ever done a puzzle, you know the process: first, you gather all the pieces and make sure none are lost under the sofa. Then, you organize them—sorting the edge pieces first and grouping the rest by color or pattern.

Similarly, consolidating your knowledge into one place lets you distill, analyze, and find patterns more effectively. With everything organized, you can make sense of it all and see the big picture.

Knowledge Management Apps

From the classic Evernote to the trendsetting Roam Research, Obsidian, Logseq, Craft, and the sleek Tana, there are many tools for gathering your insights.

Each offers its own set of features for note-taking, collecting, triaging, organizing, and finally using, information.

However, Reflect stands out for me by striking the right balance between simplicity and sophistication, and it excels in integrating numerous sources through its robust API.

It’s also available on desktop, mobile, and web, and comes with end-to-end encryption so that your data remains yours only.

Before diving into the specifics of the tools I use, I’d like to give you an overview of my method so you can adapt the approach to yours.

From scarcity to abundance

For the longest time, human society was one of information scarcity. Mere access to information was extremely valuable, information was power.

Since the advent of the internet, we have shifted into an era of information abundance.

Google, Bing, and now many new tools powered by AI, put the entirety of the world knowledge at our fingertips. Information per se is not valuable anymore, and becomes rapidly outdated.

What matters is curation. Having access to the right information.

As a general principle, I do not save anything I can easily Google or ask Perplexity about. That’s why most of my funnels focus on gathering information from the humans I interact with. When I save highlights from books, or web pages, they are generally motivated by feelings.

While it’s easy to ask Perplexity, Google, or Bing about tangible information, it’s almost impossible to Google back a feeling. My PKM in the end stores highly curated information, from which I can expand to current knowledge in a couple of clicks at any time.

For reference, if you are eager to learn more, check this article by Tiago Forte, of Building a Second Brain, the course that taught me most of what I know on the subject of PKMs.

Keep only what resonates The word “capturing” often brings to mind an analytical way of thinking. But analysis is time-consuming and tiring. In deciding which passages, images, theories, or quotes to keep, don’t make it a highly intellectual, analytical decision. Instead, your rule of thumb should be to save anything that “resonates” with you on an intuitive level. This is often because it connects to something you care about, wonder about, or find inherently intriguing. By training ourselves to notice when something resonates with us at a deeper level, we improve not only our ability to see opportunities, but also our understanding of ourselves and how we work.

Information Sources

So, where does information come from?

• Web Content: The obvious source. Sometimes I want to just save a link, at other times I’ll highlight a passage on a page and save that.
• Kindle Highlights: While nothing can quite replace the smell of real paper, a Kindle is invaluable when you need to leave a digital footprint. When you’re deep into a professional book, highlighting passages like a literary detective, then gather them to make sure your Kindle insights aren’t lost in the digital ether.
• Messages: Most of my interactions with family, friends, and colleagues happen in various instant messaging tools. I generally keep them where they happen, but occasionally, I want to send one from Slack or Telegram to Reflect, to conserve it there.
• Emails: While I don’t rely on email extensively for work, there are occasional messages—particularly automated reports I need to act on—that I prefer to keep in my notes.
• Personal Notes and Thoughts: Those brilliant ideas you jot down on the back of a napkin? They deserve a home in your PKM, not just in your chaotic desk drawer.
• Tweets: Some threads are so rich in useful content that I save them for later reference.
• Audio Recording and Transcription: If you’re too busy to type (happens more than you think), record your thoughts and let the tools handle the transcription. It’s like having a personal secretary who’s always at your beck and call.

Collection Methods

You have your information, now to gather it.

Quick and easy entry methods are the unsung heroes of effective knowledge management. In general, you are exposed to what you wish to keep while doing something else. Any friction in the process will either distract you from the original task, or lead you to not save the note at all.

“I’ll note that later” is where ideas go to die…

I use Alfred, an app that enables quick text entry via a shortcut. Raycast is also a suitable alternative if you’re looking for something even more powerful (but also more complex). I also use Telegram because that’s a tool I have always handy (that’s where I communicate with the most important people in my life).

Alfred and Telegram help me manage two types of notes:

• Simple notes, anything that comes to mind.
• Interstitial journaling entries, combining two techniques learned from Anne-Laure Le Cunnf.

(Read “Interstitial journaling: combining notes, to-do, and time tracking” and “Plus Minus Next journaling” to learn more.)

Today we try something new! Here’s a video showcasing Alfred & Telegram flows to insert notes in Reflect.

For emails and Slack messages, I use the simplest action available in each. Whenever I “star” an email in Gmail, or “save” a message in Slack, their content is sent to Reflect, via Zapier.

Connectors

To automate and streamline your workflow, Zapier is your best friend. It connects Reflect with other apps, making sure that everything flows smoothly without manual intervention.

Zapier is a very flexible tool, it can receive data from apps like Gmail or Slack (and many more) natively thanks to pre-built connectors, but can virtually receive it from any app that can send an HTTP request via their webhooks.

Once the data reaches Zapier, it is possible to read it, transform it, decide which path to follow based on it’s content, and finally send the result to one of many compatible apps (there are literally thousands).

This may sound all very abstract, so here’s a short video showing the Zap that connects Alfred to Reflect.

By the way, if you wish to try any of these workflows, go check this post on TTL.blog. I’ll add the links to the Alfred Workflows and Zap templates as the first comment there.

Readwise

Last but not least, Readwise is another important piece of this setup. Its function is to collect every Kindle highlight, every highlight on a webpage, and every Twitter thread I save.

It can gather highlights from other places, but these are the ones I set up.

I have then connected it with Reflect (again, it can connect with many other apps like Notion, Evernote, Obsidian, Logseq, Roam, Tana, etc.) and set up to send all my highlights over there.

Here’s a snapshot of the list of highlights sent to Reflect from Readwise:

and here’s the content of one of those notes:

Conclusion

• Benefits of Personal Knowledge Management: In a world where every information is accessible instantly, at all times, the danger is drowning in it. Our brains aren’t built to remember so much in detailed ways, which is why it is critical to rely on a digital Second Brain, containing a highly curated selection of the little pieces that resonated with us for a reason or another.
• Importance of Low-Friction Input Methods: Feelings and ideas are extremely ephemeral. We switch context faster than any generation before us, so the risk of losing those fleeting moments is high. A setup allowing us to capture the information we need instantly and without friction is the key to a sustainable workflow.
• Next Steps in Using your Second Brain: This will be the object of a future issue of TTL, where I’ll guide you through the methods and principles that will allow you to leverage the data you curated and captured to create and publish new content.

That’s it for today.

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Here on TTL, we dig into practical leadership tips and effective strategies, with a particular focus on tech leadership and managing distributed teams (that’s what I do every day, add me on LinkedIn).

Whether you’re steering a tech startup or leading a remote team, these insights are designed to help you navigate the complexities of modern leadership.

I also publish on paolo.blog and monochrome.blog

Cheers,