You’re in the middle of a workout or cooking dinner, and suddenly, a crazy idea pops into your head. You scramble to find a sticky note, or worse, tell yourself, “I’ll remember it”.
Spoiler alert: You won’t.
And then the moment passes, leaving you with nothing but the nagging feeling that you just dropped at least a $100 on the floor (with no clue of how to get back to it, ever again)
Other times, you’re at your computer, trying to focus, but your brain feels like a chaotic mess.
Tasks are darting through your head, and you’re spreading them thin—jotting some down on paper, others on your phone, and a few left lingering in your head space.
And then, just like that, you realize you’re not getting anything done.
The chaos in your mind prevents you from focusing on the work at hand. No matter how hard you try, you can’t seem to shake the “other things” out of your head long enough to actually make progress.
This scattered approach leads to mental overload, making it difficult to focus on any single task.
You end up juggling multiple things in a limited headspace, making you feel like you’re at the brink of a breakdown.
The problem isn’t that you lack great ideas—it’s that you don’t have a reliable system in place to capture them the moment they hit.
Traditional “just write it anywhere” methods just can’t keep up with the pace of your thoughts. You’re still trying to hold onto ideas with sticky notes, notebooks, or worse—by relying on memory.
And let‘s be honest, scrolling through endless notes on your phone or flipping through pages of a notebook isn’t exactly the most efficient way to retrieve past knowledge.
- sticky notes get lost
- notebooks stay closed
- memories fade faster than you’d like to admit
This fragmentation makes it impossible to find ideas and action items when we need them most.
BUT what if I told you that your biggest advantage lies in your limitations?
As a human, you either think or do. And that is exactly why I am gifting you a simple, but wildly powerful approach: notes and tasks.
Notes
If I could reclaim the hours I wasted creating tables and organizing in Notion, I’d likely have launched—and started earning from—my first digital product by now.
Notes are your gateway to rapidly capturing information without getting lost in the details of structure or losing track of your focus. Don’t fall for the architect’s curse or that productivity guru telling you to create a table in Notion for everything.
Tasks
Imagine remembering a task after the deadline…
And then recalling that there are at least a dozen more tasks that depend on it.
Each forgotten task triggers another, until you’re overwhelmed by a flood of missed deadlines.
It’s like dropping a pack of needles or thumb pins on the floor and trying to pick them up with your bare hands. You’re bound to miss some, and the ones you do catch might prick you in the process. The more you scramble to gather them, the more scattered and chaotic the situation becomes.
But all of this chaos comes to an end today.
Meet the Second Brain OS Todoist Integration.
Whether it’s 8:30 AM and you’re experiencing a burst of ideas, or 3:00 AM and “pending” tasks won’t leave your mind, adding them via the Todoist Widget syncs them to your Second Brain OS, capturing and organizing them in real-time for you.
The steps are simple:
- Make sure you’re on your laptop/desktop
- Head over to the Todoist Website and create your account (feel free to use an existing one)
- Create a new project in Todoist called “Notes”
- And create another a new project in Todoist called “Files”
- Now head over to this link and install the Second Brain OS Todoist Integration
Setting Up Todoist on Laptop: Start by installing the Todoist Windows/MacOS app on your computer and logging in with the account you just used to install the Second Brain OS Todoist Integration. Now as long as Todoist is running in the background, you can use the “Global Add” shortcut from anywhere (browser, app, etc):
- Global Add on Windows: Ctrl + Space
- Global Add on Mac: Option + Space
Pro Tip: You can change the Global Add Shortcut to your liking as well.
- Click your avatar in the top-left
- Select Settings
- Select the Advanced tab
- In Keyboard shortcuts, find Quick Add Task
- Click the dismiss icon
- Set your unique global keyboard shortcut to open Quick Add
For advanced users, you can map this shortcut to an F-key using Karabiner-Elements (software) or to a dedicated button on devices like Stream Deck or certain Logitech keyboards (hardware).
After experiencing all 3, I mapped mine to a button on my Logitech MX Mini Keyboard. Why? When a great idea strikes, I instantly capture it with a single keypress, without disturbing my workflow or reaching for another device.
Setting Up Todoist on Mobile: Start by installing the Todoist Android/iOS app on your phone and logging in with the account you just used to install the Second Brain OS Todoist Integration.
Use the widget feature to create the. “Add to Todoist” widget on your home and lock screens—this way, you can capture an idea (note) or action item (task) with just a tap, no matter where you are or what you’re doing.
Fun Fact: Each time you add a Note using the Second Brain OS Todoist Integration, it’s automatically related to past ideas. You can forget about organizing or relating new knowledge to past knowledge because it’s fully automated!
And being able to search your notes, see meaningful connections, and access them with the Second Brain OS customGPT helps you eliminate “monkey brain” for good.
For the tech-folks, a minor digression: whenever you add a note to Todoist, the Second Brain OS will immediately turn it into a vector embedding, allowing to be semantically clustered & related. When you search for an idea, it’s closes vector counterparts are returned allowing the results to be “meaningfully related”.
Your Life After the Second Brain OS Todoist Integration
Whether you’re coming out of the shower, or you’ve stopped your car to capture that crazy idea, the Todoist widget on your mobile’s screen zaps that thought in 1/100th of a second to your Notion Second Brain OS.
You reach home to find your notes and tasks neatly organised and ordered from latest to earliest. Not a single thought has been left behind!
As you scroll past each idea, reflection, concept, action item or observation your brain starts building intricate connections.
Now you can go wild!
Press a simple shortcut on your laptop’s keyboard and bombard your Second Brain OS with one idea after the other.
You pause. You realize it’s 2024.
You head over to the Second Brain OS customGPT, and now you’re talking to your ideas. Ask AI to dance for you and dance it shall.
You ask it group your ideas related to {topic} and turn into a Newsletter Outline. One that makes perfect sense!
Creative Chaos? Pfft.
You’re in Creative Clarity without Clutter.
Time for action? No problem!
You hit the Todoist shortcut again on your laptop keyboard, and out comes your first task.
You chat with your Notes, build a killer outline for a Newsletter and write it. Hit publish and tick off that task.
Boom!
Notion smiles back at you: Newsletter Published, Task completed!
What’s next?
You pull out that Newsletter and ask the Second Brain OS customGPT to break it into a few viral ideas.
Each viral idea is a Tweet. 5 to 10 Tweets turn into a Thread. And a Thread is a YouTube Short or TikTok in text.
Now we are converting that long form gold into short, sweet bursts of “value dopamine”.
Write and Publish 5 Tweets? Tick!
Take those Tweets and write a Thread? Tick!
Turn those Tweets into a LinkedIn Carousel? Tick!
Merge the Tweets and Thread into a YouTube Short? Tick!
29 ideas down, 5 posts up and 6 Tasks ticked. No getting lost in emails, google drive or folders (for good).
Phew, we’ve covered a lot today!
I hope this gives you a crystal-clear path to capturing and organizing your ideas and tasks without losing momentum. With the Second Brain OS Todoist Integration, you’re not just storing notes—you’re creating a seamless flow between thinking and doing, turning your chaotic mind into a powerhouse of productivity.
Remember, the magic lies in simplicity. By capturing your thoughts and tasks in real-time, you’re freeing up mental space to focus on what really matters: taking action and making progress.
But we’re just scratching the surface.
Tomorrow, we’ll dive into how to leverage this system even further, turning your captured ideas into actionable, revenue-generating content that practically writes itself.
Imagine having a system that not only remembers everything for you but also helps you create, publish, and scale effortlessly with authenticity.
