Build Your Second Brain in Notion
Build Your Second Brain in Notion
How to supercharge your content saving game online
Your Online Library
Today, I’ll show you how I supercharge Notion’s vanilla webclipper, turning it into a lifelong library of online tools and knowledge.
Supercharging Notion Webclipper
If you don’t have Notion webclipper yet, install it here.
There are three ways I optimize Notion webclipper:
Topic Contextualization
Tools Library
Consumption Hub
Topic Contextualization
I’m someone who despises overly complicated systems and wasteful friction. Do not spend more time building your system than working. Especially for something as simple as saving a webpage, you want the process to be fast and seamless.
As a result, I stray away from putting too many complex properties for Notion’s webclipper. I just have one relational tag for Areas/topics and two checkboxes. This is shown below. (the URL autofills, you don’t have to add that manually)
The relational tag enables me to at least categorize my webpages by the topic of my life they fall under; for example, I would label an online article about Feynman with the Area/topic “Physics”.
The two checkboxes are “Tool” & “Consumed”. You check a webpage as a tool if you will go back and use it as a service (i.e a GIF converter). If you don’t check a webpage as a tool, that means it’s something you consume and absorb as pure content (i.e article or video). We’ll go over “Consumed” later.
Tools Library
Youtube algorithm tool? Free icon website?
Throughout your life, you will probably go through hundreds of useful web tools but forget about the vast majority of them. The regular web browser bookmark bar takes ages to use, has terrible navigation, and has little space.
Thanks to Notion relations, you get to basically quickly create your own optimized bookmark bar for tools, for each topic of your life. This is shown below.
I mark a web clipper entry as a tool by clicking the “Tool” checkbox property.
Since I also tag each webclipper entry with their specific Area/topic, I can open each Area database entry and find my tools there.
For example, if I open “Design” in the Areas/topic database of my life, I have a filtered linked view for tools I bookmarked for Design. (I integrate this linked database in a template I use for all my Areas) This is shown in the above image.
Rather than scrolling through 100+ tools on Chrome’s sidebar, I can just click into a topic of my life, such as design or fitness, and instantly get 5-10 relevant tools.
Consumption Hub
Whether it be Naval’s podcasts or Paul Graham’s blogs, I tend to find consumable webpages I can’t read/watch at the moment. (thanks to sporadic lunch invitations etc.) I solve this through the Consumption Hub, which is shown below.
Any webpage that is not checked as “Tool” will end up here, in the Consumption Hub page. This means that this hub contains all the consumable webpages, such as articles and podcasts. These consumable webpages are displayed in a linked gallery view database format, with each entry having a “consumed” checkbox you can click.
Only after you finish reading the article or watching the video, you click the “consumed” checkbox and the webpage will disappear back into the original database. (achieved by filtering for webpages that have “consumed” unchecked)
This means that the consumption hub is a temporary hub for all the articles, videos, and podcasts you have not finished. So over time, you can make sure you read/watch all the consumable website content you save on Notion.
Conclusion
Online content is overpowered today. Anyone, with enough dedication and a wifi-connected laptop, can become an expert software engineer, seasoned graphic designer, or chess grandmaster, given that they consume from reliable sources.
All the way from SPAC trends to gamestonk memes, the goal of this Notion system is to give you a second brain for online content. With contextualized properties, rational categorization of your tools, and a hub for unfinished reads, this issue is meant to supercharge your online web surfing experience.
No more fishing for “that green icon site” from three years ago. No more fishing for “that orange dog meme” from last month. With Notion Supercharger tips, a few clicks and you’re there.
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