Build Good Habits

Your brain is bad at remembering things. Not broken-bad — designed-bad. The human brain was made to make connections, spot patterns, and generate ideas. Storing facts reliably? That was never the job. Your working memory holds about four items at a time, and long-term storage is lossy, biased, and constantly overwritten by newer input.

We process more information now than any generation before us. More tabs, more tools, more Slack channels, more side projects. Meanwhile our biological hardware hasn't had an upgrade since the beginning. The gap between what we consume and what we can retain keeps widening. Something has to give.

For me, it gave multiple times.

I first heard about "Today I learned" entries years ago. Started keeping notes in a Word document. Then it evolved into blog posts on WordPress. At some point I migrated to Notion — early adopter, couldn't resist. Each time I built a solid library of notes. Each time I eventually stopped.

The pattern was always the same: I'd review old notes months later, find genuinely useful stuff I'd completely forgotten, feel annoyed that I didn't stick with it, start again with enthusiasm, then slowly drift off. Classic habit loop failure — the cue was missing and the friction was too high.

The second brain fix

The concept of a "second brain" — an external system that captures and organizes what your biological brain shouldn't be responsible for — clicked when I stopped thinking of it as a productivity hack and started treating it as infrastructure. Your brain generates ideas. Your second brain stores them. Clear division of labor.

The trick isn't discipline. It's reducing friction until the habit runs on autopilot. James Clear's cue-routine-reward loop applies perfectly here: if the cue is obvious and the routine is effortless, the habit sticks. If it takes more than 10 seconds to capture a thought, you won't do it consistently. I know because I didn't, three times.

Making capture instant

My second brain lives in Notion. But the key wasn't Notion itself — it was removing every barrier between having a thought and storing it.

I built an iPhone shortcut that does one thing: opens a text input, takes whatever I type or speak (more recently), and sends it straight to my Notion inbox. No app switching, no finding the right database, no formatting. Share sheet or home screen tap, type the thought, done. The whole interaction takes under five seconds.

That's the micro-habit. The cue is the thought itself. The routine is a single tap. The reward is the relief of knowing it's captured — and my head is free to keep thinking instead of trying to remember.

I have a second shortcut specifically for todos. Same idea — tap, type the task, it lands in my task database in Notion. Separate from notes, separate workflow, but identical friction level: near zero.

The background organizer

Raw capture is only half the system. A pile of unorganized notes is just a different kind of forgetting. So there's a process running in the background that sorts incoming items: notes get tagged and filed, todos get dates and priorities. The inbox empties itself into the right places.

This matters because it means I never have to organize in the moment. Capture is fast and messy. Organization happens later, systematically. Two separate concerns that never block each other.

Why now

We're in a weird sweet spot. The tools for building a personal knowledge system are better than they've ever been — Notion APIs, iOS Shortcuts, automation platforms. At the same time, the volume of information we deal with daily keeps growing. The people who build capture systems now are the ones who'll compound that advantage over years.

I've made this public — both the TIL entries and the writing — because that adds one more cue to the loop. Knowing someone might read it makes "I should write this down" feel a little more urgent. And urgency, when it's just enough, is the best cue there is.