The New Indian Express ·
Hoard Drive
Open your phone and you’ll find an archive of good intentions. You’ll notice hundreds of bookmarked articles, a fully choked folder of photos, and saved reels you swear you will watch eventually. PDFs have been downloaded “for future reference” along with newsletters waiting for that mythical free afternoon when you’ll finally catch up. The more ambitious version of the same impulse is what psychologists call the “Second Brain”. Apps like Notion, Obsidian, Roam, and Google’s NotebookLM guarantee the user that technology will store what our increasingly distracted minds cannot. The term was popularised by Tiago Forte’s 2022 book Building a Second Brain, though the underlying idea is of an external memory you can search, connect, and trust. It is obvious people are remarkably good at collecting knowledge, but are far less certain about what happens afterwards. Somewhere between saving an article and actually reading it, procrastination is usual. The Second Brain trope raises important questions, especially if you are a student or researcher seeking to build real expertise. Pressing “save” feels satisfying, even when you know you will probably never get back to examining or at least look at what you have saved.
Does storing information reduce the anxiety of forgetting it? Or is procrastination a disguise? As AI makes retrieval nearly effortless by surfacing, summarising, and connecting information at extraordinary speed, is the Second Brain getting to be more useful and a more seductive proposition? Suhas Motwani and Sanket Bajaj are two people who built an external memory system, only to discover its limitations the hard way. Bengaluru based Motwani, 31, co-founded The Product Folks, a community for product enthusiasts across the globe. He didn’t like what he found. “I promised to do or get things done during meetings, intros, and follow-ups, but would end up dropping one-third of them,” he says. “Because things were falling significantly, I built an external memory.” The system worked because it caught all of what he was forgetting or dithering about. “Note-takers call this syndrome the collector’s fallacy,” he says. “My archive grew fast in months, but my thinking didn’t match up.” Motwani’s confession is relevant particularly for students. An archive that expands while your thinking stays the same is not learning; it is a storage system dressed up as learning. In March this year Sanket Bajaj, 25, who handed over his financial advisory firm, Viable to his sister after four years on the job. When he opened every folder to find a usable record of everything he had collected almost nothing was worthwhile. “No tool could encompass the knowledge and the context of what I had accumulated, connected and carried in my mind,” he says. “Unfortunately, you can’t transfer brains.”
An entire industry has been built on the premise that with the right tool, our collected knowledge can be useful in the end. Bajaj’s experience suggests a flawed premise from the beginning itself because the richest aspects of expertise exist in tacit, associative, and semi-conscious connections that are never written down because they didn’t feel like “facts” worth saving. The Second Brain has failed you.
