The “building a second brain” trend has gained popularity in recent years. Productivity experts like 

 promote the idea of creating a personal knowledge management system to help you organize your life, be more creative and increase your overall productivity.

In this article, I will discuss why you should probably ditch the whole “build a second brain” thing and talk about what you should do instead.

If you are like me, you follow content creators in different media channels. Creators who produce videos, podcasts, and books that you find valuable. At the same time, they reference other creators who produce valuable content. This never-ending cycle ends up creating an infinite set of potentially valuable content.

Hopefully, your life is not only about consuming other people content. You have friends, hobbies and work to get done. In the face of this complexity, you start searching for a way to become more organized and productive.

So, you start listening to some productivity experts that claim to have a system for organizing your whole life. A system to process all your life information and use it as efficiently as possible. The fear of missing out starts to creep in.

This whole situation is pretty anxiety-inducing. I feel like I have infinite projects I want to work on, an infinite list of content to consume, and a limited time and energy to do it all. Cherry on top, it seems like other people know how to perfectly organize their lives and here I am, struggling to organize my to-do list.

, humans tend to feel deeply uncomfortable facing finitude. And who wouldn’t? Again, if you are like me, you love to learn new stuff and the prospect of not being able to learn everything ever created feels frightening.

Sadly, instead of fully embracing this feeling, we start seeking ways of distracting ourselves. We start fooling ourselves by thinking we can become infinitely efficient.

One way to solve this situation is to create a “second digital brain”, a system that can process any information as efficiently as possible.

I have to admit that the name of this system is brilliant. The brain is an information-processing organ. The problem with organs is that they have flaws that computers don’t. For example, your 

 organizes information unpredictably and has memory leaks. By contrast, your 

 can organize notes in clearly defined folders and back them up in the cloud forever.

Just by reading this previous paragraph, one could think that building a second brain is a great idea. Sure, you may not be infinite, but why not build an efficient system to process that information? At the end of the day, you are finite, may as well use your time as efficiently as possible, right?

This is the point of the article where you need to be honest with yourself. Are you spending most of your time choosing tools, tweaking them, organizing notes, changing tools, searching courses for better note-taking, changing tools again, and feeling paralyzed because you don’t have a good enough system? Is this whole “second brain” thing a way of procrastination?

, then you can leave this article right now. You don’t need my help. I’m truly happy that you have built a system that works for you.

But, if you are like me, most likely your answer would be a painful 

. I feel that pain. I’ve tried every tool, methodology, system, and course out there just to feel more overwhelmed and helpless than before.

I’m going to present you an uncomfortable solution. This solution will not be easy at the start, but if you go through that initial discomfort, you will find it tremendously liberating at the end. It won’t be a permanent fix since you will still find ways to trick yourself into thinking that you could be doing things better.

That’s it. Realize that you don’t need any system. Most of the people you admire, the greatest minds of history, did not have any generalized digital productivity system. Most of them just read a ton of books, took some notes, and pursued the creation of things that made them the type of person you can admire a hundred years later.

My intention with this article is not to discourage you from taking notes, saving interesting quotes, or using any particular system. What I am telling you is that 

. I’m saying that you are using this whole thing as a sophisticated way of procrastination.

Just start reading that book, writing that article, or doing whatever you don’t feel prepared to do now. It will feel uncomfortable but embrace the challenge. Once you start doing something other than building a system, you will find out what you actually need. Maybe you realize that highlighting some parts of a book to later review them is just enough. Perhaps taking notes after reading a chapter helps you engage better with the content. Or maybe, just maybe, you find out that you can start reading the next book on the list without any regrets.

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Who knows, maybe I’m wrong and I’m missing a lot of benefits by not building a second brain. If you decide to build it after all, I wish you the best.

Meanwhile, I will spend time building my first brain, the one who wrote this and the one that will die with me.

Building a first brain

Using your task manager as a CRM is a great way to stay connected with the people important to you, whether personal or business. Instead of juggling multiple apps, you can use your existing task manager to remind yourself to contact people you care about.

 can seem a bit sociopathic for some, but I find it a great way to integrate relationships to my day to day planning. This way I don't accidentally prioritize other things over people.

I know that in the productivity space we want examples so we don’t start from scratch. Here is how I have my personal CRM set up in Things 3:

 I group them using headers to be exxxtra organized. You can even use tags if you are more popular than me.

 This way you get reminded to contact that person again. Setting the interval length can be challenging. As a suggestion I ask myself how long will be too much without contacting this person.

 In most task managers you have a description section where you can write anything. For more business-like contacts this can be really useful.

With all of this I just need to enter my Today view to see:

This system is simple but effective since it is already integrated in your daily workflow. Once you start including people in your task manager you will start discovering new ways to improve your relationships. For example you can keep a list of presents to buy or birthdays to wish. You can also create ad-hoc tasks in your Relationships area to ask your friend how their vacations were or a ask a family member how she is recovering from the cold.

Productivity tools should not be an end in itself. Their purpose is to help us better use our time, and what can be better than spending time with your loved ones.

Using your task manager as a personal CRM

 award in 2022. It is becoming more common for websites to have a 

 shortcut to open a command palette for navigating or performing certain actions faster. In the last WWDC, 

 giving more power to the native MacOS command launcher. At the same time we have tools like 

 already offering powerful alternatives to it.

With all of this in mind I want to untangle the relationship between all of these launchers and see how the future of command launchers will be, taking into consideration things like AI.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child
‒ Cicero

Before diving into the future, let's do a brief and inaccurate history lesson on how command launchers came to be. The term 

. Before modern desktop environments came with their fancy windows and workspaces, humans interacted with computers by typing commands into a terminal. They commanded the computer to do things like listing the files inside a folder.

Some years later the internet was integrated into the personal computer, allowing users to browse the web from the comfort of their homes. As comfortable as listening to a few minutes of hellish sounds.

Users still wanted to list files, but this time the files were in someone else's computer in the form of websites. Instead of typing commands into a terminal, users browsed the internet using search engines.

 became easier to do with gestures and clicks. Instead of having to type a command into a terminal, users could simply click or swipe through the file explorer to find what they were looking for. However, as users accumulated files this approach became slow. In 

, a framework for MacOS that allowed users to search files faster. It started as an extension of the Finder file explorer, but it soon became the globally command launcher we know today. Spotlight continued to evolve giving users the ability to open applications, do simple math and search the internet. Even thought users had simple interfaces the strive for a faster way to interact with computers remained over the years.

If you are interested in a better history lesson about command palettes I will highly encourage you to read 

To see how things may evolve we need to have a mental model to understand the differences and features of all the modern command launchers.

This statement summarizes how most users think of command launchers today. Some command launchers like MacOS Spotlight or Alfred are 

 since they can be accessed everywhere and are used for high level actions like switching applications. Whereas applications like Figma or Slack have 

 command launchers that can only be accessed while using each application.

This distinction between local and global launchers will become increasingly important as we move forward through the article since the line between the two could disappear in the future.

Every software can be broken down into two types of 

In every application users go back and forth between getting information and modifying it. This is what humans do after-all, but let's stick to users since I am a software developer not an environmental biologist. With this in mind, we can picture our users going into an endless loop of getting information, changing it and getting it again. Inspired by Nick Milo's knowledge loop, we will call this the 

As we will see later, if we want to be more productive our goal should be to optimize this loop.

Let's see an example to understand why the current situation is suboptimal. Say you are a web developer implementing some Figma design. Let's examine in detail what actions you will probably follow if you try to do everything using the keyboard:

Notice that you need to clear the website cache

Some may say that you can automate certain steps, use multiple monitors or have a workspace with everything prepared. I know this is a contrived example, but I am trying to make point. In this article I want to explore if there is a 

Being productive means spending less time in what is unimportant. Usually we end up using tools that reduce the friction between what we want to happen and it happening. In physics terms, we want to optimize the 

. The following sections outline what could be the future of commands launchers and how we may engineer it.

From the previous example, we can think of 

 command palettes as transitory states. In other words, by skipping transitory states we will be removing the necessity of 

 command palettes. With this in mind, the above example will look like this:

One could argue that local command launchers are a local maxima for what is possible in the global command launcher space. To be clear, I am not making an argument for centralization, as we will see later, this could be achieve with a high degree of decoupling between applications and their respective commands.

Having a single global launcher opens up the possibility to assign shortcuts to global actions whereas in the original example you could only assign 

If you pay attention to the initial example, you will notice that each command palette shortcut and behavior is different. By only using the 

 command launcher users won't need to learn different shortcut schemas for each application.

 context. Which is fine as long as you only use one application. The moment you need to juggle between different applications this becomes an issue.

For example, when I implement the Figma design I want to send a message to Jane in Slack with the URL at the same time that I mark the task as done in Todoist. Again, you could try to automate this, but you can fall into the automation trap, where you spend more time than necessary trying to automate something simple.

Since we spend most of the time getting and modifying information cross-application we can update our 

Having this global command launcher prevents context switching by having a single entry point for performing actions. In other words, no more 

When you automate a workflow you make improvements harder, because the cost of modifying the automation usually is too high. Also, the fact that you are blind to the process prevents you from making connections to find a better solution. Here is where I think AI can help us the most. Let's imagine how the command palette could behave after I implement the website design:

A few interesting commands appeared to let's explain them:

: Since we have a global context the command launcher knows that we've finished implementing the website so the launcher suggests us to publish the website. This requires for the command launcher to know what actions has the user taken in the application in order to learn from past user actions. How this is achieved technically will the explain in the engineering section

: Same idea here but with the extra benefit of our global command launcher having contextual/application-specific information to deal with. This command is dynamic. In a sense we are automating automation.

: By contrast this not a common workflow, but this a way to discovered unknown connections between the tools we use daily. Thus making our workflow dynamic, fast and personal. Here we are automating creativity.

Now that we opened the AI elephant in the room lets go deep. What if we don't need commands at all? This is a crazy idea but its worth exploring. What if instead of having a set of commands I could just ask the computer for what I want. To be clear I will do something like this:

Implement Figma design X in web project Y in the browser

Notice that you need to clear the website cache (even AI does not know how to manage caches)

I guess this could become tiresome of writing each time, but maybe if we combine it with suggestion this could shape the future of how we interact with computers.

The same way we work with multiple applications, we work with multiple humans, which perform queries and mutations in same systems we do.

By having a global context, command launchers could make suggestions based on other users actions. For example, Jane may open her command launcher and see a suggestion with the following command: 

. Some launchers like Raycast are paving the way forward by offering team shared features like private commands or text snippets.

For making all the above possible one of the following scenarios should happen:

We will need to know externally, from the global command launcher perspective, what actions can and are being performed by the user. In some sense we will need an open specification where applications define what 

 application launcher can interact with all of them. Currently, Apple has some APIs that are similar to what would be required like 

At the moment application launchers like Raycast rely on community made plugins for integrating with application using the API the tools provide. In fact many companies are creating tools in Raycast for their applications. In a sense Raycast is 

The future of command launchers

When using Supabase, you can protect your tables using 

. On SQL land is pretty common to write SQL views to make data querying easier 

If you ever created a SQL view in Supabase you may assume that RLS policies are being used in the view, since a view is just a named query. Unfortunately, 

SQL views created from the Supabase admin do not use RLS policies by default.

Views created from the admin panel use the privileges of the view's owner. When create them from the Supabase dashboard, the owner of the view is the super admin user. This user can bypass any RLS rules like an elephant can demolish a bazar 🐘

To solve this, we just need to run the below query to assign the view owner to the authenticating user.

This can be really useful in some situations. Image we were building a CMS and we had a view named 

. We know that all articles in this view are public, so there is not need to write complex security rules to hide draft articles from unauthenticated users. This approach allows us to keep using an internal 

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2022