The second brain concept, it’s a personalised external knowledge management system that captures, organises and helps you leverage information and ideas outside your biological memory.
— Heather Smith 

Recently, I delivered a short session at the Sydney Accounting and Business Expo on a topic that has quietly transformed how I work. The concept is called Building a Second Brain, popularised by Tiago Forte.

At its core, a Second Brain is a personalised external knowledge management system. It captures, organises and helps you leverage information outside your biological memory.

Now, if you are an accountant or bookkeeper, you might already be doing elements of this. But what the Second Brain framework does is give language and structure to something many of us do inconsistently.

And in our profession, inconsistency creates friction.

Why Accountants Need a Second Brain

We are operating in an era of information overload. In a single week, we process more information than someone in the 1800s processed in a lifetime. We jump between apps, respond to messages, attend webinars, meet with clients and absorb regulatory updates. It is exhausting.

Add to that decision fatigue and constant context switching, and it becomes clear that our biological brain cannot be the sole storage device for our professional lives.

A Second Brain provides backup storage for your professional thinking.

It reduces overwhelm.
It supports consistent advisory.
It creates space for strategic thought.

Most importantly, it gives you confidence that your best ideas are not lost.

The CODE Framework

The framework commonly associated with the Second Brain concept is CODE:

Capture
Where are you storing ideas, insights and epiphanies? If you are not capturing them, they are disappearing.

Organise
Arrange information by context so you can find it again. This might be through tagging, folders, databases or structured notes.

Distil
Refine information to its most important insights. What actually matters from that webinar or conference session?

Express
Use what you have learned. Share it in a team meeting. Turn it into a LinkedIn post. Build it into client advisory conversations.

When I attend conferences, I often capture notes using tools like Otter.ai. I then distil the insights and express them through posts on LinkedIn or through my newsletter.

Expression reinforces understanding.

Tools for Your Second Brain

There is no single perfect tool.

Digital options include:
Obsidian
Google Keep
Evernote

You might also use voice memos, email-to-self systems or structured project management tools.

Analogue systems work too. A notebook beside your bed for nighttime ideas. Index cards. Sticky notes.

The tool is not the point.

Trust is the point.

If you do not trust the system, you will not use it. And a perfect system you do not use is not perfect.

Your Calendar Is Already a Second Brain

For many professionals, the calendar is the most trusted external system.

If it is not in the calendar, it does not exist.

That trust is powerful. Imagine extending that same reliability to your meeting notes, client insights, template libraries and advisory frameworks.

For accounting firms, your Quality Management System is effectively a firm-wide Second Brain. It stores processes so individuals do not need to rely on memory.

Reducing Decision Fatigue

When knowledge is stored externally and structured clearly, your brain is freed from holding everything.

That energy can be redirected toward:

• Strategic thinking
• Creative problem solving
• Higher value advisory
• Innovation

It is similar to the principles outlined in Atomic Habits by James Clear. Habit systems support behaviour. A Second Brain supports thinking.

Together, they create sustainable professional performance.

Signs Your Second Brain Is Working

You trust it.
You use it daily.
You can retrieve information quickly.
It helps you create.
You feel lighter.

That final point is important.

If your knowledge system makes you feel heavier, it needs redesign.

A Practical Starting Point

This week, block time in your calendar for epiphany processing.

Review what you have learned recently.
Identify key insights.
Store them intentionally.
Decide how you will use them.

Small changes compound.

You do not need a complex digital ecosystem. You need a reliable one.

Building a Second Brain is not about technology. It is about clarity. And clarity is one of the most valuable assets an accountant or bookkeeper can cultivate.

Read here more on “Build a Second Brain: How to Create a Specialised Content Hub GPT”: https://www.heathersmithsmallbusiness.com/2025/09/29/create-a-specialised-content-hub-gpt/

Heather Smith

Hi. This is Heather Smith, and welcome to the Accounting Apps Podcast exploring the accounting and business apps community.

Today, I’m sharing one of the talks that I gave at the recent Sydney accounting and business expo. And the talk was about building a second brain. And this is a concept that has been popularised, popularised and clearly defined by Tiago forte, that is T, I, A, G, O, F, O, R, T, E.

This talk, I only had pushing 20 minutes for the talk, and I have given it in other settings, and the talk goes for about well over an hour.

So let me know what you think I was kind of thinking, Should I re record it and give you a full hour.

Or should I just give you the 20 minutes?

So I’m going to give you the 20 minutes, and if you would like to hear more, let me know, and I will, I will re, record another longer session, which covers everything.

Of course, if you’re involved with the conference, you can always invite me to the conference to give this talk.

For the most part, the talk, it’s a theoretical concept, and it’s about processes, and it’s, I think you’ll, as I say in the talk, I think you’ll actually know a lot of of it. But what I do is, what this concept does, is it frames it, perhaps in a different way that you’ve not heard before. So it was a area that I became interested in and deep dived into. And hopefully you do, you will too. It’s only 20 minutes, so I do encourage you to listen. It’s very focused on accountants and bookkeepers, and a number of people have told me that it has introduced them to vocab, vocabulary and processes that they have just easily adopted, easily adopted, and sort of made them more intentional, made them more intentional, So that that’s a good outcome for it.

Okay? So hope you enjoy. And as always, I encourage you to stay up with the content I’m sharing by signing up to the accounting Apps newsletter available at accounting apps.io and joining the accounting apps mastermind group. And of course, while you’re listening, hit subscribe to the podcast so more people can find out about it.

Wow. Full House five minutes before starts. Well done. Wasn’t expecting anyone to turn up for this talk. Actually, I just thought it’s going to be me and a few people who wanted to rest and recover from the session. So thank you so much for turning up. We’ve got about four minutes before we get started. So who is?

Heather Smith

My name is Heather Smith, yes, it does say that up there. So that was easy.

Who is here at A&B Expo for the first time?

Oh, excellent. Welcome. Welcome.

Heather Smith

I think I’ve been speaking at the A&B Expo for maybe six or seven years now, and I also go over to Singapore, when they run the conference there and speak. So very much. Hope that you’re getting a lot out. I think there’s a lot of great content today. I’m likely not to mention the two letters AI in the next talk. Okay, so if you need to leave, now, if there’s not going to be enough AI in the talk, you can leave. But, yeah, it’s going to be a very grounded and theoretical talk, but exciting.

My name is Heather Smith, and I was scrolling across the internet, and came up the came across the concept of a second brain. And I thought, oh, that sounds interesting. And I constantly think about my brain and how I can use it efficiently, how I can rest it, how I can fuel it. And then when the thought of the second brain came along, I was like, Yes, I need to find out that about that. So I’m not an expert at second brains, but what I did was I read lots of books, listened to lots of podcasts, and what I’ve done is surface what I think. Will be interesting to the accounting and the bookkeeping community.

Heather Smith

So who here identifies as a bookkeeper?

Thank you so much to the bookkeepers in the room for coming along, beautiful bookkeepers.

And who here identifies as an accountant?

Excellent.

And who here is maybe small business owner?

Fabulous, excellent, oh, is my time start now. I can pretty much officially start now. Yeah, so I think it will be relevant for everyone

Heather Smith

Today, in this session or earlier today, how are you capturing your epiphanies? Do you have who has a method for capturing?

Yep, we’ve got a digital phone there. Digital phone there. Excellent. So this concept, I want to know how you’re catching your epiphanies and what you’re doing with them.

So as I said before, I’m Heather Smith, I, for those of you who don’t know me, I’ve spent about 20 years in the industry. I am an accountant, management accountant, probably in storyteller. So I have now written, it’s actually out of date, sorry. I’ve written 11 books. I wrote another one over Christmas. I write a lot for acuity magazine and for accountants daily and for carbon various organisations like that. And I produce a newsletter focused on accounting technology, on bookkeeping technology, on business technology, okay, the Accounting Apps newsletter. I produce a podcast on the Accounting Apps, so I encourage you to subscribe to that. And I also facilitate a community where we talk about accounting apps. All of that is free to access, join, Subscribe to I would encourage you to do that. Can I also hands up? Who’s also a Small Business A ccountants & Advisers Brain Trust, Australia (SBAABTA) member?

Okay, so for all of the people over there who were not remember that, remember the anagram, and go and search and join that group, it’s a great group, and that’s not even my group, so I’m just saying it’s a great group to come together and talk about things, okay, but all of that is free for you to join.

Why does your professional brain need backup storage?

Many of you have information overload. What you process in a week is more than what someone in the 1800s processed in their entire lifetime. We have decision fatigue. We’re constantly, constantly making decisions and things we don’t even understand deeply about and we are prone to context switching. We’re jumping between our app talking to people, phone calls coming in, the news coming on, and that is quite exhausting.

Heather Smith

So the second brain concept, it’s a personalised external knowledge management system that captures, organises and helps you leverage information and ideas outside your biological memory. Okay, so, as I mentioned, as accountants and bookkeepers, we want it to reduce overwhelm, to serve our clients better and to serve ourselves better, to enable our advisory to stay consistent, to know where things are and be able to find them when our brain has more capacity to rest and think and do things. We can think bigger. We can create space for creativity, strategy and innovation and fun, and as I mentioned, it helps us not drain the energy. It helps us. It beats fatigue and helps us feel more rested.

So concept, I’m going to talk about the code framework, tools and technology, practical example, and the mindset shift. So this is the code framework, which is talked about when we talk about second brain capture. Where are you going to save the ideas and information that resonate with you? So the information, the ideas that you’re coming across, where are you saving them? Organise, arrange them by relevant context, so they’re easily accessible. Tag them. Categorise. Them, put them in a place that you can find again, distil review, refine and strip down the information to the most important points. So identifying what you really need to take away from the session and express. Utilise key knowledge to drive creativity and sort of your strategic initiatives, capture, organise, distil, express, you’re all account many of your accountants and bookkeepers in the room. You’re doing all of that already. What this does is put a different framework around what you’re doing.

Heather Smith

So there’s various tools and technology that you can use to assist you with this. Okay? And you may have your own tools. There may be things like Google Keep notion Evernote voice memos. I frequently will record a voice memo and send it to myself and email, send an email to yourself when I since I’ve got into the second brain concept, I use obsidian, and it’s desktop software, and it is this mass network of me being able to put things in and then connect them into a network, And then I can sort of pull, pull them in different ways. So it looks like a giant spider web, but it’s quite interesting, and I like the way it works. So there are some digital options, and there, you know, there are other solutions out there as well that you possibly come across.

Analogue options, index cards, notebooks, sticky notes, rocket book. And if you don’t have, I’m sure some, I’m sure you’ve got all of those. But if you don’t have an analogue option, that’s a good reason to go and grab a notebook from one of the vendors out there, isn’t it? The thing is, when you record that epiphany, and I remember we talked about that right at the beginning. How are you capturing it? You need to give it context. So what was the epiphany? What triggered it? What was the insight? What date was it on? And what do you hope to come from it?

I’m sure. Is there anyone in this room who has not come across a note that they themselves scribbled, and they cannot read, and they don’t know what it is?

Yeah, no one. So it’s about trying to just be clear about that. So if you were working with a notepad, make sure there’s a date at the top. Make sure it says something like AB Expo, and then sort of go through and they we don’t need everything recorded, but you can put small notes in there to understand it.

Heather Smith

Oh, I forgot to mention, oh, excuse me at the at the top end was a QR code, and it’s going to be at the bottom end as well. If you want the slide deck, I will just send it to you. This is a long presentation, but I’ve only got a short amount of time, but I put on all the resources and all the books to read, etc, so you can copy that, so you can just scan it.

So Keith Richards, in 1965 was in a hotel room, went to bed. Beside him, on the bed was a tape deck. He woke up in the middle of the night with an epiphany. He dreamt something, and he grabbed the tape deck. He went and grabbed his guitar and he played a riff. Dun, dun, dun. A riff, and he said some words, and then he put the guitar down, went back to bed, fell asleep, and woke up in the morning, saw that he had recorded something, played it, and it was the words, I can’t get no satisfaction. And then it was 40 minutes of him snoring, and he has no recall, no recollection of that moment. He has no recollection of waking up or doing that, but he had that, and with that, he was able to take that riff, those words to his band, who were the Rolling Stones, and they distilled they distilled it, and they expressed it into a song, which many of you will know. Hopefully, the older people in the room know, maybe the younger people in the room know, and they made $50 million off that epiphany, because he had a way of capturing that information.

Heather Smith

Who has something beside their bed to record their nighttime epiphanies?

Yes, yes, we got a few people again. Grab that notepad, put a pen beside it and put it beside your bed, just in case those epiphanies come. If you’re not recording them, you don’t know about them, you so various ways that you can various tools that you can create your second brain in. And it can be multiple brains. It can be various different ways of storing them.

So one of them could be LinkedIn, okay, so this is an example. I will come to a conference. I will capture information at the conference, and then I will organise it to make some sense. And I may capture that with otter. I may record the session. I may organise it. I distil it, I pull out what I think is going to be important for my LinkedIn audience, and then I express it in a LinkedIn post so frequently, I encourage you to connect with me. But frequently on my LinkedIn post, I’m sharing things that I have learned myself that I think will be interesting for other people. Typically it’s three to five things that I think will be interesting. And it’s that way of me keeping that information with myself and then expressing it in a LinkedIn post. But that could be a blog post or an article or something, something longer or bigger, but by doing that, people then come to you and start having that conversation with you about what you have shared. So it is a very organic thing about putting it out into the universe.

Heather Smith

Another way that I do it is if I see articles that are of interest, and I’m sure you’ve seen things that are of interest and you want to share with people. I grab the links to those and they feed in to my newsletter database, okay? And I push them out as a newsletter. So I’m capturing what’s interesting to me. I’m organising it, I’m distilling it. I’m deciding what is worth you reading as well, what I think will be of interest to you, and then expressing it so just sort of different ways that you can use it.

If you don’t have a method for capturing your ideas, then you have an ideas graveyard, which is worthy of the image that possibly I found on the internet the ideas graveyard. But what I’m talking about doesn’t necessarily mean to me LinkedIn or a newsletter. It could be your practice management system. It could be an organised practice management system. It could be a project management system. It could be various other sorts of types of solutions out there. What it does is give you confidence of where to find past work, notes, insights, which you can then surface and use as you need to use them.

Heather Smith

So, signs that you’ve successfully built a second brain. And so we were talking about calendars before a calendar, if everything is sitting in the calendar that you need to be aware of that’s coming up, then that’s effectively your second brain. And signs that you have successfully built a second brain is that you trust it. You use it daily, frequently. You are able to find things fast. It helps you create. It helps you think and create, and it helps you feel lighter. So I know for myself, everything’s in my calendar. If I’m not close to my calendar, you can’t have a conversation with me about what we’re going to do in a month’s time. If you want to try and fit it into my calendar, I need to be next to the calendar to get it in there.

And for accountants and bookkeepers, sometimes we’re talking to our clients about business transformation, and I imagine a lot of you actually knew a lot of these concepts, but didn’t have necessarily words for them, or used different ways of phrasing it. And sometimes when you or your clients hear something differently, it gives you a fresh perspective on that. So that was kind of the concept. I thought, Okay, well, do we need it? Do we not need it? But I did think that’s that fresh perspective, and you can talk to them about Heather Richards, okay. But also a key thing here is, if you’re not using the perfect system, it’s not perfect. So a perfect system. Them you don’t use isn’t perfect. And as we all know, if you put something in and it’s not being properly used, then there is a problem. Whether that is one of the tools out here you’ve put in, or whether that’s an existing solution that you’ve put in and you’re not using it, you’re not using it consistently, it’s being used haphazardly. Then there’s an issue, and it needs to be reviewed. Another taking it a bit further, in our practice, your QMS is effectively your firm’s second brain going through all of your policy processes and sort of control processes there, so your people don’t have to it’s sitting there if they need to refer to it now.

Heather Smith

So for some of you who may be aware, I talked a lot about atomic habits a few years ago, and this concept sits alongside it, maybe sits sort of next along.

Who’s read Atomic Habits?

Okay, good. Few people look, if you haven’t read it, I would encourage you to read it again. There’s a lot of things in the book you won’t know, but it crystallises them for you, and sort of helps you go, Ah, this will help me do this. This will help me do this, and build upon those habits. And then this concept of building a second brain moves into that so the atomic habits gives you the what and the why of habit formation. And if you do read it, I’m sure you’ll go, suddenly, oh, everything that everyone’s talking about in this thing I now understand, because there’s a lot of phrases in there that are actually frequently used. And the second brain gives you the where and how to store, to manage all of that data, that information. And so they’re really good, solid duo to be across both of them. And one of the things, typically, I’m talking about management, accounting, typically, I’m talking about reporting, and as small as accountants and bookkeepers, you are the custodians of small business data, and so having that understanding about having it in a really secure place that You can access quickly is really critical.

Heather Smith

And as I mentioned before, lots of different ways and concepts of using a second brain, client, Knowledge Hub, building an FAQ, database, troubleshooting notes, meeting notes and the the meeting recording solutions can be another way of storing all of your meetings if you have permission to record those meetings. That can be a useful way of doing that.

And I think are there people from I think I saw people from vinyl walking in the room. They left. Okay, nope. Template libraries. Okay, so for those of you, if you jump in, you can, I’ll give you the QR code, but I wanted to put a list of second brain gurus in there. Got a photo of that, and again, I added in all the resources that I used there.

Okay, so I encourage you to think about from the session.

Is there something that you are going to take away and are going to do differently?

And I also encourage you to look at your calendar and block off some time if you’re Thursday or Friday, to think about anything that you’ve learned over the last, the last, today or tomorrow, and what you’re going to what it means, how it impacts you, and what you’re going to do with it. Oh, the countdown just changed. Okay, so I encourage you to do that block time in the calendar for your epiphany processing. You can do that now on your phone, and there is the QR code if you want to download that, download the presentation.

Heather Smith

Okay, so I’ve still got two minutes. Then is that correct?

Okay, I just got some extra time. So I’m going to give you an example of another second brain, if you’re using a large language model like chat GPT. And I know chat GPT, but I think it would happen in the other ones, you can go and create a GPT. Okay, you can go and just create, and it’s very simple. It sounds extraordinarily complicated, but I’m an old lady with grey hair, and I can do it. So I’m sure you’ll be able to do it as well. You create the GPT. And so I have one. Called AI webinar transcripts. And whenever I register for an AI webinar, I afterwards, they typically give you the transcript, or my author has recorded the transcript, okay? And I have then two people leading people in the industry talking about AI. I download that and I upload it into my GPT. So I have this single space, the single GPT that has knowledge about all these AI webinars. Oh, no, I mentioned AI. I’m sorry. I’ve got this one space that I talk about all these AI webinars. But it also has phrases. It also has the names of the people. And then if I need to research something, I can go into a very context sensitive area and surface information that I can then use and distil and express okay. So thank you so much for coming along. Hope you if you want to download it, you grab it there. So thank you so much. My name is Heather Smith, and I encourage you to connect with me.

Thank you, Heather, that was just fabulous.

Heather Smith

Hey. I hope you liked that. So this is Heather Smith again, and remember I suggested this was just a 20 minute session.

This just really bite size, but if you would like to hear more framed in a way that’s suited to accountants and bookkeepers. Let me know, and I will make the effort to record a longer episode and sort of deep dive into some of the areas that I skipped over into in the session. I kind of had to make a really jam-packed slide deck, and then if it’s shorter, I just skip through things. So I sort of expand on a few stories and show people what I think will be relevant for them right here, right now.

So really, thanks for listening in. You’ve been listening to the accounting apps podcast, and I do encourage you to hit subscribe if you haven’t done so already. Leave us a five star review anywhere would be wonderful, so other people can find out about the podcast. And I’m your host, Heather Smith, and I’m pretty easy to find on social media platforms, and I look forward to connecting with you.