A second brain for references, not notes
Most second brain setups are for notes. If you collect ads, pages, screenshots and PDFs, you need a different one. Where Notion and Obsidian win.
TLDR
- “Second brain” usually means a note-taking system: Notion, Obsidian, a Zettelkasten.
- That’s great if your output is writing. If your output is ads, pages and designs, most of what you collect isn’t notes. It’s references.
- References need different things: the thing itself, a snapshot, search inside images and PDFs, and a way to look at 40 of them at once.
- Keep your notes where they are. Put your references somewhere built for them.
What people mean by a second brain
The idea, popularised by Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain, is that you capture what you learn outside your head so you can find it and use it later. Most setups are text: notes, highlights, links between ideas. Obsidian is brilliant at that. Notion is brilliant at that plus tasks and docs.
And if you write for a living (essays, research, strategy docs), that’s probably the right system. No notes here.
Where it falls apart for people who make things
If you’re a marketer or a designer, look at what you actually save in a week:
That’s an ad, a pricing page, an email and a screenshot. You didn’t save them to think about them. You saved them to look at them again when you’re making your own.
A note app handles those badly:
- It keeps the link, not the thing. The pricing page gets redesigned and your note points at the new one.
- It can’t search inside the picture. The screenshot with “SSO add-on” in it is just
image.png. - It’s built for reading one thing. You want to see 40 landing pages side by side and pick three. That’s a grid, not a document.
A setup for references
- Keep notes in your note app. Obsidian, Notion, Apple Notes, whatever. Don’t move them.
- Keep references in a library. Somewhere that saves the thing itself, snapshots pages, reads text in screenshots, and shows everything as a visual grid.
- Link from one to the other. A strategy doc in Notion links to a public folder of the references behind it.
That library is what we built Savepad to be. It saves 17 kinds of thing, keeps a full-page snapshot of every link, reads screenshots with OCR, and has no AI anywhere in it, so nothing gets “summarised” into mush. The Notion comparison is honest about where Notion is the better pick.
If your “second brain” is really a pile of examples, what you have is a swipe file. Call it that and organise it like one.