Build a digitally sovereign second brain

Build a system to keep information and notes organised, searchable, synchronised, and backed up using Raspberry Pi. Build a digitally sovereign second brain. We thought we’d go big this Maker Monday, what with it being the serious business of Back to School and all.

Here’s a tutorial from the latest issue of Raspberry Pi Official Magazine that shows you how to keep everything in your brain organised and searchable, from notes to appointments and ideas. A while ago, we read the book Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte ( Figure 1). It starts with the idea that we are all a little overloaded and bombarded with information, and how overwhelming it can be to not be able to retrieve the information that we need at a later time.

The foundation of a Second Brain is to increase the capture and cataloguing rate of information, and the book delves into lots of custom systems to tag, organise, prioritise, and retrieve information. This Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) idea feels similar to the ideas of David Allen and the older, but still brilliant, ‘Getting Things Done’ system. Logseq running on Raspberry Pi OS; this is a ‘graph view’ that shows all your tagged information, along with the connections between the tags At the heart of these PKM systems is the concept of ubiquitous capture: the idea that, as a start, we need to capture the information of interest.

This is also an idea in journalling and is basically being proactive about note-taking.