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Everything in life depends on our ability to capture, organize, and retrieve knowledge. From our professional careers to our ability to cook delicious food, our brains must have a system for knowledge management. But just like a dream upon waking, our mental notetaking ability can be fragile and fleeting. 🍃

To put it into perspective, we now consume information equivalent to 174 newspapers every day, which is 5x more than the average in 1986.

However, there are ways to manage the immense amount of information we encounter daily.

☑️ A System for Knowledge Management

Over the next four weeks, we will delve into the unique challenges of the nurse educator role and apply concepts from Tiago Forte's book Building a Second Brain. As teachers and nurses, we face distinct challenges, particularly in the realm of knowledge management.

We will focus on four critical steps in managing knowledge—capturing, organizing, distilling, and creating. If you have ever felt overwhelmed by your notes, had too many to-do lists, used various tools to manage your work, life, and home, or felt frustrated because you could not “find” an idea, this is the series for you.

🧠 A Second Brain Specifically for Nurse Educators

This series will also demonstrate my Second Brain tool of choice, Notion. In previous emails, I have shared a bit about how I manage ideas and organize my projects in Notion, but this will be a more behind-the-scenes view.

I’ve created a template that you can use to manage your knowledge, projects, and life. It is called the Nurse Educator Operating System (NEOS), a complete system for managing work in academia alongside a fulfilling life. NEOS includes features such as task management, learning plan organization, idea capture, note management, and more. These features are specifically designed to help nurse educators effectively manage our unique roles and responsibilities.

Here are a few benefits of using Nurse Educator OS:

• Organize tasks related to courses, clinicals, and committee work
• Plan and organize learning plans, meetings, and projects
• Capture ideas and reference them when you are ready
• Maintain your connections and meetings with ease
• Manage all of your notes in a complete, searchable database
• Create a connected scholarship hub for all reading, writing, speaking, and reference information
• Integrated tutorials so you can build your system as you learn

I’ll share more about Nurse Educator OS with the waitlist every Thursday before it becomes available at the end of the month. Everyone on the waitlist will get a small discount and some bonuses … so if you want to join the waitlist, click here to join.

Nurse Educator Operating System A complete system for managing work in academia alongside a fulfilling life. Join the Waitlist

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The first step in Building a Second Brain is to capture information. As educators, we do a great job encountering information through websites, articles, professional journals, conferences, podcasts, and hundreds of inspirational sources. But where I have struggled (and maybe you do too?) is capturing it in the moment to a place where I can save it to reference later.

🥅 Ways to Capture Ideas

Here are three quick ways to cast a net around the things you learn that you want to keep:

💻Use a “read later” app - The moment you encounter something is not always the best time to read it. Take this email for example - It may be irrelevant to what you are trying to get done at the moment. Maybe you are interested in reading it but your task for the next 15 minutes is to clear out your inbox. A “read later” " app allows you to bookmark what you find online and save it for later reading.

• Example - Instapaper, Matter (can turn text into podcast and podcast to text 🤩) Readwise (ability to highlight and annotate)

📰 Manage electronic reading - Most of what we read, especially related to scholarship and research, is now online. Having a tool to manage, highlight, annotate, and search research articles is essential. Many options have AI-assisted summaries, explanations,s and ideate functions to make getting through large volumes of reading or research quicker.

• Example - UPDF (includes AI features), Readcube (an interesting literature review process for those conducting research), Paperpile​

✂️Web Clipper Tool - Grabbing a quick screenshot on your phone or leaving a tab open on your browser for days can work, but using a web clipper is a more efficient way to manage the knowledge we encounter online. You can quickly grab an idea, image, social media post, etc., and save it in a way that is easily referenced later (much easier than looking through the thousands of photos on your phone for that one screenshot).

• ​Raindrop, Nimbus, or Notion web clipper (a handy Chrome extension that allows you to save a clip directly into your notes system)
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The key to capturing information is to make it feel effortless. This step should feel easy and allow you to save your mental bandwidth because you are not trying to store it in your mind.

Here is what my phone home screen looks like with my capture tools front and center:

And here's the best part-you cannot do this step wrong. If you capture something and it doesn't feel helpful when you reference it later, no problem! The nature of a Second Brain is that it is adaptable, easily editable, and malleable to fit your needs.

Capturing information is the first step in the system, and once you have established a system, it is easy to move to the next step, which is organizing all of your knowledge. I'm looking forward to discussing that topic next week!

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