Second Brain System Design

Act as a personal knowledge management (PKM) expert and productivity systems designer who has helped hundreds of knowledge workers, creators, and entrepreneurs build second brains that stick. Design a complete, personalised second brain system for me.

My role: [JOB TITLE OR MAIN ACTIVITY]
What I'm trying to manage: [ideas / research / meeting notes / projects / learning / writing drafts / all of the above]
Current tool: [Notion / Obsidian / Roam / Apple Notes / Logseq / Bear / None yet]
Current biggest problem: [losing ideas / not finding things / starting but not finishing / too many systems]
How much time I can invest weekly in maintenance: [X minutes/hours]

PART 1 — SYSTEM PHILOSOPHY & DESIGN PRINCIPLES

Before building anything, establish the rules:
• Capture friction principle: how to make capturing ideas easier than NOT capturing them
• Progressive summarisation: when and how to process notes from raw → useful
• Just-in-time vs. just-in-case: how to avoid hoarding information that never gets used
• The "minimum viable system" constraint: what's the simplest version that works vs. the over-engineered version that collapses under its own weight?

PART 2 — INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE (PARA + Extensions)

Design the folder/database structure:
• Projects: definition, examples for my role, and how to decide what counts as a project
• Areas: definition, how many areas is too many, examples for my context
• Resources: what goes here vs. Areas, how to avoid it becoming a graveyard
• Archive: rules for when to archive (not delete) something

Extensions to PARA for my specific use case:
• Daily notes or journal: do I need them and how do they connect to the main structure?
• Inbox: should I have a dedicated capture inbox and how often to process it?
• Templates: which 5 note templates would have the highest leverage for my work?

PART 3 — CAPTURE WORKFLOW

Design a frictionless capture system:
• Quick capture: how to capture a thought in under 5 seconds regardless of device or context
• Web content: how to capture articles, tweets, YouTube videos with enough context to be useful later (not just links)
• Meeting notes: the live capture template — what to record during meetings vs. what to process after
• Reading notes: the progressive summarisation workflow — raw highlights → key ideas → my synthesis
• Spontaneous ideas: what to do with the 2am idea or the shower insight

For each capture source, define:
• Where it lands first (inbox / specific location)
• What metadata to add at capture time (tags, links, context)
• When it gets processed and how

PART 4 — LINKING & RETRIEVAL STRATEGY
• Atomic notes: how to break ideas into the right granularity so they can connect and recombine
• Tagging taxonomy: design a tag system (limit to 3 tag types — topic / type / status) with your specific tag list
• Backlinks vs. folders: when to use each and why (especially relevant for Obsidian/Roam users)
• Search vs. browse: how to make both work — what to optimise notes for findability
• The "note that connects everything": what are your Map of Content (MOC) or index notes and how many do you need?

PART 5 — WEEKLY REVIEW RITUAL (The System Maintenance Protocol)

Design a sustainable weekly review:
• Total time budget: [set a realistic limit — 30 minutes or 60 minutes]
• Step-by-step checklist for the weekly review (write the exact checklist I can run each week)
• Monthly review: what to do once a month that you don't do weekly
• Quarterly review: system health check — what to prune, archive, or restructure

PART 6 — PROJECT PIPELINE
• How a new project gets set up (template walkthrough — write the template)
• Active project dashboard: what does the weekly view of my projects look like?
• Project closure: what to do when a project is done (what to keep, where to move it, what to delete)
• The "someday/maybe" list: how to manage ideas that aren't projects yet without losing them

PART 7 — TOOL-SPECIFIC SETUP GUIDE
Based on [TOOL NAME], give me:
• The specific database / folder structure to create (exact names)
• The 3 most important views or filters to build
• 2 automations or integrations that save the most time
• The one feature most people underuse in this tool that would transform my workflow