The rise of Second-Brain applications: Notion, Obsidian, Mem

The 20th century brought with it a deluge of paper. As American businesses grew in number and scale in the wake of the Civil War, so did their printed materials; there were charts, memos, tables, forms and more correspondence than ever. This “paperization” eventually spread to the home, where an increase in personal documents meant homes were filling up with bills, letters, tax forms, receipts, birth certificates, magazine receipts. As these archives skyrocketed, a new technology gained popularity: The Filing Cabinet, whose history academic Craig Robertson documents in The filing cabinet: a vertical history of information. A 1918 advertisement described the binder as “looking like an oracle” with a “huge gigantic memory”: “It’s just a little bit of steel, but no brain was ever made / It could completely replace it with busy businessman. The binder was therefore better than a human brain – it could contain and organize the entirety of a person’s work and home life, broken down into discrete pieces of information and made retrievable at will.

Not everyone was happy with the invention. Writer Montrose J. Moses was wary of the way filing cabinets exteriorize personal memory: what would be the consequences of trying to turn every aspect of your life into “information” to accumulate for later? “You can’t expect to say, when you give your wife the first kiss, ‘File it, my dear, for future reference,'” he wrote in 1930.

Almost a century later, the anguish of Moses has become our reality. We are constantly turning our lives into data, much of it non-physical: photographs and screenshots and stray notes, reams of text messages and tagged tabs, and other digital junk. I could tell you with a glance at my iPhone where exactly I was on October 24, 2015, or how many hours of sleep I got last night. This collection of self-knowledge only seems to expand, prompting our devices to expand with it: the maximum storage space of the first iPhone was 16 gigabytes, while the last version offers a terabyte. Right now, we can even trust the memory of our devices so completely that we’ve lost our ability to remember things without them. But the content of our digital memories has itself become heavy, fractured across multiple devices and accounts, impossible to process.

Amid this flood of data, a new category of apps has emerged, one that promises to collect all the digital material we generate in a single, transparent interface. They are sometimes referred to as “knowledge management systems” or “personal knowledge bases”, although many users simply refer to them as “second minds”. The best known is Notion, which came out in 2016 and has grown from 1 million to over 20 million users in the past two years (and was recently valued at $ 10 billion). There’s Roam Research, founded in 2017, and Obsidian, founded in 2020, and Mem, which is in public beta. Like the workbook of the pre-digital age, these apps are designed not only to store everything our brains can’t hold – shopping lists, passwords, meditation schedules, work tasks – but also to help us. to better retrieve the information in them. Instead of tabs and folders, they allow us to sort our archives into customizable, easy-to-navigate tables – and, in the case of Mem and Obsidian, can even show us how a piece of information (e.g. your to-do list ) is linked to another (notes from a recent meeting). “Our thinking is, If a thought cannot be retrieved, then it is not a useful thoughtsaid Kevin Moody, the 26-year-old former Google employee who co-founded Mem, which recently raised $ 5.6 million in venture capital. Srinivas Rao, an author and podcast host who uses Mem, said one day described the app as “the closest thing I’ve seen to being able to upload your brain to the internet”.

These platforms fostered flourishing subcultures of devotees. Enthusiastic Roam users call themselves Roamcult, and the Obsidian Discord server has nearly 50,000 members. On huge Facebook groups, fans who identify as “Notioneers” swap models they’ve built on the platform: custom boards like “Plants Manager” or “Pokémon Collection Tracker” that others can download. There are Certified Notion Consultants who help businesses and individuals organize their lives using the app. There are Notion influencers who make educational videos. On her YouTube channel, lifestyle influencer Michelle Barnes, who works with Notion, shows how she organized her notion into a huge “Life Dash” that includes her main to-do list. This to-do list is then broken down into categories, including a list of things she wants to buy along with a “Life Impact” column, in which she assigns a number to the extent to which the item will improve. his life. (“Buy blackout curtains for the bedroom” gets an eight, while “Buy silver scissors” gets just one.) These apps can often encourage a drastic level of self-documentation, especially the more that people migrate there the most prosaic details of their lives. . (“I joke that if someone tells me something, I won’t keep that information unless I immediately enter it into Notion,” William Nutt, consultant and user of Notion told me.) its notion, TikTok user @lilianisobel has created “a database of every book I have read or want to read” – among them King Lear, Pure Mathematics Year 1, 12 rules of life, and the Holy Bible. There are about 30 columns on this list and a five-star rating system.

Some people have even applied this tabular logic to something as mercurial as attraction. A few years ago, Annie, 27, in New York City, started taking notes about her love life. She started using the Evernote app, but then migrated her record keeping to Notion; the database (which she calls her “Notion Love Tracker”) now sits next to tabs dedicated to travel itineraries, her favorite doctors, her apartment cleaning routine, and articles to read. After each date, Annie connects with the notion she likes and dislikes about the person, how she felt after the meeting, and the answers to questions she always asks, such as ” What is your role in the group of friends? For Annie, the Notion Love Tracker works almost like an alternate memory – which once or twice has helped her clarify the amorphous gut feelings she was experiencing. Once, after a first date, “I remember thinking, This guy is so much fun, but he looks really immature, said Annie. Then, on the third date with him, she was having fun but started to feel a little uncomfortable, like “something was gnawing at me that I couldn’t put my finger on”, he said. she declared. She went home and checked her Notion Love Tracker; there, in her carefully organized tables, she realized that she had noticed his immaturity from the start. She stopped seeing him.

As I watched the Notion evangelists describe their systems, I kind of remembered those who devote themselves to Marie Kondo’s tidying methods. But rather than emphasizing withdrawal as an antidote to chaos, the answer lies in the act of continuous accumulation: every book you’ve read, every glass of water you’ve drunk for months, every hunch. or feeling inexperienced. I was wondering, Do we really need all of this information? Rao thinks so; you never know when something will prove to be valuable, so capturing everything you can is a godsend. It is tempting to consider: the idea that the answers to all our questions are searchable in our own history and our own experiences, as long as we are able to save everything (and organize it in an orderly fashion). Some of these second brain apps, like Mem, even use artificial intelligence tools that can resurface information we’ve stored and then forgotten (for example, using time and location data to remind you of what you ordered from a restaurant when you return a year later). Mem sees itself as a research company – a company that will let you browse a visualized version of your own brain.

In early October, Annie began to feel overwhelmed by dating. So she turned to her love tracker Notion. After analyzing her entries, she realized that she had recently gone on four dates with different people in quick succession. She also learned that she lost track of time on her first dates and ended the night feeling exhausted. Since then, she has determined that while they go well, first dates should be limited to around an hour and a half. The sprawl of her life had been broken up into neat chunks of data: interconnected, searchable, easy to see and operate. “It’s like creating your own Wikipedia files,” Annie said.