External Brain
Two heads are better than one
Your brain is amazing. Its knowledge store is vast. Its fetching of that knowledge at a moment’s notice is crazy. It makes fascinating connections. And then there is the creative genius that comes out of it. We don’t know how most if it actually works, but thankfully that’s not a prerequisite to being able to use it.
Most times when I hear Paul McCartney’s “Listen to What the Man Said”, I am vividly returned to an 11-year-old me and a 10-year-old friend Todd sitting on the side of a concrete culvert after he fell into the creek that feeds Lake Surrey, with his shirt laying on the hot concrete to try to dry it before returning home so we don’t get in trouble. And every time I hear Enigma’s “Return to Innocence”, it’s 1994 and Charu and I are sitting on my couch in the house I had just bought, caught up in an hours-long conversation about religion, family, etc. while various CDs were playing in the background … what later became termed our first date.
If my brain can readily summon all of this, why couldn’t it reliably and easily recall the 50 dates that were part of the US History course that I had taken and needed to leverage for my final exam? In the infomercial era of the late 80s and early 90s, Kevin Trudeau showed up on the scene with Mega Memory1, and demonstrated over the course of his late night 30-minute television slot how his approach to proper memory storage led to the ability to recall random facts on demand. If I had three easy payments of $19.95, I may have even found out how he did it, with the help of his eight cassette tapes and accompanying workbooks. But as a starving student, this didn’t clear the bar for purchases at the time. And it also felt like more of a gimmick.
Ten years later, I discovered that I didn’t need to worry about recall anymore when Microsoft released its new OneNote product. OneNote notebooks became my dumping ground for everything that I described as, “I don’t know where to put this, but I’m sure I’ll need to remember it at some point.” It didn’t matter where I put it, as long as it was somewhere in any of my various OneNote notebooks, it was one search away. OneNote had all kinds of wonderful features to help with structure and organization. But the only two features that mattered to me were text input to type stuff in and search to find what I had typed before. Even in this most rudimentary usage, it still became one of my most valued tools.
Another ten years later, I found David Allen’s “Getting Things Done”2 (GTD). For one easier payment of $18, I got a paperback book full of gems that became the 2nd book in my “productivity trilogy” ( 1 - “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”3, 2 - GTD, 3 - “Atomic Habits”4). Of the many varied gems in this book, the best is David’s concept of the External Brain. Use a tool that can capture more of the important details and be readily and reliably recalled, instead of depending on your brain to keep all this stuff straight. When you do this, your free your brain up to do what it does best.
OneNote as my External Brain
You can use whatever tool you want for your External Brain, but you do need to have one tool that can do it all. If your External Brain spans different tools, you create the digital equivalent of brain fog. For the folks that I have worked with, the three most commonly used tools are (in no particular order) OneNote, Obsidian, and Notion5. Pick your favorite note management tool, just make sure it has at least the following five features:
Structure. The more you put in your External Brain, the more organization you’ll want to be able to provide. In OneNote, the three structure elements I use the most are Notebook, Section, and Page. When you’re starting out, you may use none of this. When I started using OneNote, it was just one “dumping ground” notebook. But once you perfect your capture ability of getting more relevant context into your External Brain, you’ll naturally progress to wanting to organize it.
Rich Search. Reliable and fast recall is one of the most important features of your External Brain. So the horsepower of the search feature is critical. The more you add structure to your External Brain, make sure the search feature can leverage that structure. With OneNote, I can control the scope of my searches to be This Page, This Section, This Section Group, This Notebook, and All Notebooks.
Rich Linking. The fragments in your External Brain aren’t islands. Many will interrelate. So having the ability to link across your External Brain (and outside of it), is critical. OneNote allows links at pretty much every altitude: Paragraph, Page, Section, Section Group, and Notebook.
Rich Media. Far better than your actual brain, the fact that your External Brain is digital means it can readily contain attachments of any format. This allows your External Brain to become a very rich repository containing any related content.
Cross-device. Your External Brain needs to be accessible and editable on every device you own: phone, work computer, home computer, etc. This is because once you have your system purring along, you will want the ability to capture any additional context at a moment’s notice. Alternative to this feature is to just send yourself email to add it, and then your email triage system can bring it into your External Brain later.
This is how my External Brain is currently structured.
Work notebook - This is where I manage all of my work related to my uplevel pro business.
Actions, Projects, Someday, and Routines sections - I will talk about all four of these in the Work Management System section below.
Microsoft section - My coaching began with former Microsoft colleagues, so there was enough of my business connected specifically to Microsoft that it deserved its own section,
Virginia Tech section - As I’ve explained in previous posts, I am getting increasingly involved in my alma mater, and recently it warranted the creation of a Virginia Tech section here.
Business section - This is where I track all of the back office aspects of my business, e.g. licensing, taxes, legal, banking, and website administration.
Bogdan notebook - This is a shared notebook that my whole family uses (yes, I was able to convince them that all of our information in one place is a good idea).
Actions, Projects, Someday, and Routines sections - Similar to my above Work notebook, but this is for my family’s work management system, not mine.
Family section - This is where we have all information for the family, e.g. house, car, medical, and relevant research family members have done.
Family Travel section - We now do enough of our trip planning in OneNote to earn its own section, where we have a page for each trip we’re organizing. We also keep these pages around so that we can refer to them if needed when planning another trip.
Microsoft Archive notebook - I spent so many years at Microsoft and built up so much rich content in my External Brain during that time that I didn’t just want to lobotomize my External Brain when I left. It remains as an archive that I can reference, mostly for my writing, but also occasionally for my coaching.
Writing notebook - This notebook is my creativity notebook. Everything related to my writing is in here, and is my oldest active notebook (Microsoft’s was older, but has now moved from active status to archive status). The format for all of my writing is that, for each delivery vehicle, I have two sections, a queue (which I have abbreviated to just the letter Q) section and a published section.
uplevel Q and uplevel sections - All of my writing for my uplevel pro substrack.
BogBlog Q and BogBlog sections - An archive of all of my writing for my BogBlog at Microsoft.
Inspiration Q and Inspiration sections - All of my notes associated with books I’ve read, podcasts I’ve listened to, or presentations I’ve watched.
vehoergosum Q and vehoergosum sections - All of my writing for my vehoergosum (”I ride, therefore I am”) biking blog.
Presentation Q and Presentation sections - Ideas for presentations I want to deliver, and then the actual presentation once I’ve delivered them.
Book Q section - I was working on a book for the year after I left Microsoft6. This has the entire first draft of that book and all feedback received, as well as all the supporting writing I did for that book.
Soundtrack section group - This is a fiction book I started more than a decade ago. I would say I’ve been nursing it along.
Loose Scribbles section - This is my dumping ground. If I don’t know where else to put it, or if I’m short on time, I just drop it here to make sure it’s captured. I mentioned this in my Raising Your Own Awareness7 post, and I will also be going into more detail about this in an upcoming post on the triage process for my Brain input.
Work Management System
I used the term “work management” in last week’s Triage Shield8 post, but I didn’t crisply define it there. So let me do that now.
Returning to the ER example from that same post, does a triage nurse ever walk back into the ER, tell the doctor verbally about your situation, and then send you to the doctor? No, the triage nurse enters your information into the system. This is so that anyone else who works with you has the information readily available to them in a predictable format, and can add more information into the system following that format. This system is the ER’s work management system.
Your work management system is the formalized representation of any and all work that you are responsible for performing. “Formalized representation” means that you have designed a specific format for how the work is represented, and you have also defined a structure wherein all of these representations are organized. “Any and all” means the work equivalent of the US motto “e pluribus unum”: “from many, one”. You will have requests for work coming from any of your various inputs (email, chat, person, meeting, team’s task list, customer, brain, etc.). These requests come in a variety of formats. But in the process of triaging each of these inputs, your accepting of the input as work needs to result in you converting that input into a standard format in your work management system.
OneNote as my Work Management System
Above I listed the Actions, Projects, Someday, and Routines sections of my Work and Bogdan notebooks. This is the standard structure I have created for my work management system, and it follows David Allen’s GTD model.
Actions - Each page in this section represents a task that I can complete in one sitting. The title of the page is the action to be completed and my estimated time to complete it, and the page content begins with a link to the Project that this action is part of, followed by all relevant information to assist in taking that action. One recent example is a page called “60 | Get measured for tux rental for Caroline’s wedding”, where the contents of the page begin with a link to the “Plan trip for Caroline’s wedding” project, followed by the Men’s Warehouse address and hours and a link to the wedding invite that detailed the attire requirements. The 60 in the title is my 60min estimate to perform this task.
Projects - Each page in this section represents a more complex task that cannot be completed atomically. Such tasks get the term “project”. The title of the page is the project name. Then the contents are typically in log format, where each entry starts with the date when this project was worked on and is then followed by the notes of what work was done on that project, including links to any newly created Actions that came out of that work. The “Plan trip for Caroline’s wedding” project contains at the top of the page a link to the output of this project, which is the actual completed plan residing in the Family Travel section under the 2025 Page Group, a page called “October - Caroline Wedding”. The project page detailed the need to book flights, book hotel, rent car, rent tuxes, select dresses, and order a gift.
Someday - Each page in this section is a project that has been put on the backburner, or is otherwise not being actively worked on. This is where ideas go so that you don’t losing them. The format of these pages is identical to the pages in the Projects section. In this section, I have a page called “Habit Tracker App”, which is where I collect all of my ideas around an application to track habits. It details the features I want the app to have, different experiments I’ve done such as an excel spreadsheet full of formulae to model this tracking, and my research of existing apps and where they meet my needs vs. where they don’t.
Routines - Each page in this section represents a routine that I follow as part of my workflow. I have Page Groups titled Daily, Weekly, Biweekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Semi-Annually, and Annually. The page title is the name of the routine, and the contents describe the process I follow for that routine. My Weekly Review page details how I spend the last 55min of my work week.
[5min] Someday - any new projects to capture? Time to promote anything to Projects?
[20min] Projects - any new projects to capture? Any to demote to Someday? Check related OKRs9 to make sure I’m advancing them. What is the next action to be performed to advance this project?
[15min] Actions - scan meeting notes (using OneNote’s Find Tags feature) for the week to find any action items assigned to me and create new actions for those, linking back to the meeting note that generated that action. Are there actions that are stalled or obsolete?
[10min] Calendar - add work blocks for next week for all actions that I need to make sure I do next week. Assess meeting density for the week and select meetings to decline or move to create needed space.
[5min] Telemetry - run my script to calculate the total number of actions and total time for those actions. Then count the number of scheduled actions accomplished this week and the number of scheduled actions that had to be moved to a later week. This telemetry helps me see over time how well I’m managing my actions week over week.
Your work management system is how you pass notes from present tense you to future tense you. And, as an added bonus, it’s also how you can effectively delegate any work to someone else and set them up for success: because you can share all the information for that work item from your system when you hand it off.
This will no doubt look overwhelming to someone who is just starting the exploration into building an External Brain. When you are initially constructing these processes, it will be slow. Just keep in mind how I closed last week’s post8: Practice makes faster.
Develop your External Brain, offload the processes and information to a place that you can reliably and predictably track them, and give your real brain the space to do what it does best: imagine and create.
Footnotes
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, David Allen (Goodreads)
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey (Goodreads)
Three structured notes tools: OneNote (Microsoft), Obsidian, Notion
The “OKRs” section of Habit-Propelled and the “The Best Example” section of Play Your Part
Love the organizing structure. Super helpful to see your example to imagine what ours might look like.
The key is to make it your own. So take the framework I have as an example if you don't know where/how to start. But over time, you'll hone it to be perfectly suited for you.