How I use Bear As My Second Brain With the Help of Alfred - Ideas on Smart Note-Taking

In this video I talk about how I use Bear, an amazing note-taking app as my second brain. I touch on some of the concepts of Building a Second Brain and explain its application to my learning. I share some ideas on how I use two Alfred Workflows together with Bear to capture ideas, gather text or notes from the internet or different sources, and at the same time how I use Alfred to easily search for it all.

Was this useful to you? I hope you consider buying me a coffee :)

CHECK MY BEAR & ALFRED WORKFLOW

Here is Alfred's workflow I use for searching Bear notes quickly:

Here's Tiago Forte's article on Progressive Summarization:

A LOT of free information on Building a Second Brain on Tiago's blog:

The BASB book... probably the BEST way to learn on this. This is NOT an affiliate link:

LEARN CURSIVE WITH ME:

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 The idea of Building a Second Brain
00:59 The main features of Bear
03:26 The BASB framework
04:54 Capturing into Bear with Alfred
08:35 PARA Organization in Bear
09:41 Progressive Summarization
10:48 Using extra tags for discoverability
12:02 The importance of sharing

LINKS

[stevemarkperry]

Great video. I love Bear, it’s a great app. An alternative to Alfred is Raycast, which has a plugin for quick Bear actions such as these. Might save on setup for those interested.

[lizt.]

Thank you for this video and for this: “We live in a world where there's so much information, and so many pieces of knowledge in the Internet or online, and a lot of it goes to waste and I just don't want to be part of that. I prefer to do something productive with whatever I gather and also, by sharing, I make all of this knowledge a deeper part of me.” It really resonates with me and evokes desires for simplification, depth and elegance in the way we live and the way we interact with others. And those qualities (simple, elegant, depth of use) are what draw me to Bear, so I really appreciate your thoughts on how to use the app.

[gtosorios]

I finished reading BASB a few days ago and really liked it. I do a lot of note taking across different apps but couldn’t decide on one to use as my central hub. Your video helped me a lot, thank you for sharing.

[JaneSmith-coev]

Perfect video. You managed to distill PARA, CODE, and a Zettelkasten in one system and have it work so seamlessly and straightforwardly

[timmandre]

Man, what a great content. I'm in the middle of Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain book and started to use Bear a few weeks ago. Before I was using Ulysses for some years. Bear is so much better. Thanks for sharing your usage.

[hugocastellanos]

Very glad I found your channel. Thank you for sharing your workflow!

[Kanal_Tekno_AI]

In the process of adoption to Bear after being left over by Evernote, trying to adopt Obsidian. Your guides are just enlightening Robert. Thanks a lot.

[elusivefreedom]

thank you this beautiful video. i'm a lover of Alfred and just starting to use Bear.

[melvin]

Hi, Robert.

Thank you so much for this video. I love the Bear app purely for its gorgeous and minimalist interface, but somehow I find it limiting to use as a note app for building a second brain. But your video has changed my mind. I shall persevere with the Bear app. 😁

I'm not if anyone has told you that your production is top-notch, especially the sound quality.

I've just subscribed to your channel. You deserve much more subscribers. Here's wishing you all the best to your channel.

[ghosnada]

Interesting, I still use Bear to write but I’m been using Lazy for capturing notes.

This is a great solution.

[divyamm]

Wow!!
This vid has proven very helpful to me!

[viktorfromsales]

Thanks for sharing! I haven't considered using Alfred for quick capture and research but definitely taking the friction out of the process!

[Neo--X]

Very good video. It would be fantastic if you could make a guide on "how to" incorporate some basic Alfred features.

[dtzortzis]

This was very helpful and inspiring, keep doing this work!

[sapham]

Could you share how to use Afred with Bear? Thanks for this video

[lisama]

you need to teach us all of the shortcuts that you used 🙌🙌🙌 you’re so advanced

[GlenCote]

Bear is an app that I wish I could love. When I'm working on my newsletter, I want to be able to clip articles from the web and dump them into my note taking app so that I can reference and quote them later as I'm writing. Bear's web clipper isn't as good as Notion's - it misses text that Notion can get easily. Notion's web clipper is great, but I don't like how you have to be online all the time for Notion in general, and there are all these bells and whistles in the app that distract me from what I want my note taking app to primarily be about - writing. Bear is designed for writing, which I love, but I really just need a better web clipper before I can use it.

[GeniusUnleashed]

Great video! I've been overwhelmed with Bear lately and having too many tags and I've been experimenting with Obsidian. I'll give your shortcuts a try to see if that helps streamline my gigantic list of notes.

[skygarden]

Thanks for this! Not sure what you're talking about re automating with alphared, but it sounds amazing. Can't really tell what you're doing when you go to a website and somehow tell it to send something to bear - can you explain that like I'm five? Can you show for dummies? I'm not at the point where I can "send" things to the app, I have to go find it, open it, and by then I've forgotten why I was going to u it, so there's friction and I have massive massive ADHD, so if I can't see everything all at once in one step, it disappears forever.
I'll check your recent vids but it it would be awesome if you could explain that like I'm five years old so it becomes intuitive and can just happen as we sing along - otherwise it becomes too opaque and confusing and will never happen.
Still looking for a low-friction, low-opacity app with no nested folders to devour ideas forever. thanks!

[leshall]

Robert - it's rare that I sit and watch a video all the way thru and then subscribe. But I did with yours. You have a certain 'je ne sais quoi', which makes you very watchable. Probably because I sense you really do want to help and educate, rather than just make dough ;)
So keep it up and I am now going to check the Alfred thing. Are you using 5.0?