Jeff Su is a full-time product marketer and part-time YouTuber. He makes videos about practical career and productivity tips.

Check out his YouTube videos here.

Brain Tour

Jeff's system is very minimalistic. He captures every idea and task in Todoist on his phone and organizes everything on his laptop.

Stuff that belongs to work goes into Google Workspace, personal events in Google Calendar and YouTube-related captures goes into Notion.

His 2nd Brain apps are:

• Todoist for adding tasks and collecting ideas throughout his day

• Google Workspace, which includes Slides, Forms, Keep, and many more

• Google Calendar is the location where information are used

• Notion is the place where all of his information are stored

Q&A

What is your number one tip for building a 2nd Brain from the ground up?

Do whatever you can to minimize the friction between point A (having the idea in your head) and point B (writing it down). A second tip is to start your tasks with an action verb, e.g., take, bring, recover, etc., because this way you won't be left with something ambiguous.

What features in one of your 2nd Brain apps have you found most beneficial?

The app itself doesn't matter. For example, the free version of Todoist is absolutely fine because it has a responsive widget, and capturing ideas and tasks takes less than 10 seconds. Notion, on the other hand, is too slow. The loading animation and having to fill out 1 or 2 property fields took too long, which decreased the motivation to write things down.

Why are you building your 2nd Brain?

To manage a full-time job and take videos in part-time for the YouTube channel.

Disclaimer: This edition was created by analyzing and summarizing videos by Jeff Su.