The Perfect System is a productivity myth that’s costing you time.
Last year, I spent 147+ hours “organizing” my Notion.
Building complex databases. Creating the perfect dashboard.
The result? A beautiful system I was too overwhelmed to use.
Let me ask you something: How many times have you:
- Started from scratch with a new productivity app
- Spent hours setting up the “perfect” dashboard
- Created complex tables for everything in your life
- Watched countless YouTube videos about productivity
- Abandoned it all a week later
Turns out selling things that waste people’s time is a huge pinnacle of the productivity market.
And the way they sell it to you is by giving you complicated, fancy systems. The paradox? These feature rich applications make you spend more time organising than doing.
But I wanted to be messy and disorganized. I wanted messy to be my biggest superpower.
And you know why? Because that “messy” brain is a powerhouse for creativity.
Messy is just a word we use to define thoughts connecting to each other in ways that don’t feel logical.
We’ve been sold so hard on “cause and effect” that we forget the basis of thinking outside the box is our natural way of thinking (and the basis of every great invention).
In fact, let me define wasting time:
- sorting
- filtering
- labelling
- searching
- color coding
- creating tables
- creating pages
Anything that’s to do with “organising” information as opposed to “using” it is a waste of time.
I knew to beat the “Productivity Gurus”, I needed a Second Brain Operating System.
So I stripped everything down to its core:
- Lightning Fast Capture (< 3 seconds from thought to note)
- Automatic Connections (let AI figure out where my new idea belongs)
- Instant Retrieval (find anything the moment you need it and discover new connections)
Every idea, breakthrough, concept, reflection, observation, epiphany, memory and thought is a “note” in the Second Brain Operating System.
Which means I don’t create a table in Notion just so I can track the furniture in my home. And I certainly do not waste all day browsing through Obsidian to look at how my notes are connected.
No complex workflows. No rigid systems that feel unnatural.
Everything is designed to work the way my & your brain does—because the most powerful system is the one that actually gets used.
The Second Brain OS has become my daily driver because it’s simple to use.
Today’s Action Step:
Add up the hours you’ve spent in the last year:
- Watching productivity YouTubers
- Setting up new productivity apps
- Figuring out what tables & fields to add
- Building pretty dashboards for tracking
- Syncing 3 or more apps together using ZapierWhy
And then…. drum roll… abandoning it all a week later because it wasn’t usable.
Now imagine investing that time in actually publishing your ideas to the world on social and building an audience of 1000 true fans.
P.S. Want to see the power of simplicity to go from random ideas to automatically organised with the Second Brain Operating System? Here’s how to set it up:
