I Gave My Second Brain a Voice Inbox — Now It Organises Itself

Every second brain I’ve ever built has died the same way.

Eventually, I became responsible for keeping it organised.

And that works brilliantly when I’m having a good day. I carefully tag things. I connect notes to the right projects. I turn random thoughts into tasks.

But when I’m busy, tired or just feeling lazy?

Everything goes into an inbox graveyard, never to be seen again.

So I’ve stopped organising my second brain altogether.

Now I just talk.

I record voice notes throughout the day and throw everything in there — tasks I need to remember, issues with projects, half-baked content ideas, things I’ve noticed, improvements I want to make.

AI works out what each messy voice note is and connects it to the right part of my knowledge base and turns it into something useful.

I capture → AI organises.

And for the first time, my second brain doesn’t fall apart the moment I stop maintaining it.

Watch the full system here

And the actual setup is simpler than you think. And once you see how good AI is at organising your thoughts for you… you will not go back to the old way.

The system has five moving parts.

1. One ridiculously easy way to capture

The first thing you need is somewhere to record voice notes.

There are a bunch of really good voice note apps out there. If you happen to be using Tana, they have a built in voice notes feature which is fantastic. But you could also use Obsidian with a custom voice capture plugin. Or if you want to stay away from your phone completely, something like Plaud would work really well.

The app doesn’t matter as much as having one place where you can capture all your thoughts… that can connect to your favourite AI tool.

2. A raw inbox where everything lands

Every voice note needs to land somewhere AI can access.

• In Tana I suggest some kind of supertag like #voice-note.
• If you’re using Obsidian create a folder called voice notes and connect whatever plugin you choose to the folder, so they land there.

This inbox doesn’t need to be organised. In fact, that would defeat the whole point.

It’s simply the handover point between you and your agent.

You externalise the messy thought.

Your agent picks it up from there.

3. A map that teaches AI how your second brain works

This is the most important part of the whole setup.

Before AI can organise your second brain, it needs to understand how your second brain works. For this I use something simple called a schema doc - one source of truth for how to interact with my second brain.

But it’s not a giant recipe book filled with a rule for every possible situation.

I’ve tried building AI systems that way. The moment something slightly unexpected happens, they fall apart.

Instead, the schema gives my agent enough context to use its own judgement when organising for me.

It explains:

• The role my agent is playing
• The main hubs everything connects to
• The different types of information in my system
• How those types relate to each other
• What “organised” actually means in my world
• Any important distinctions it has learned from my feedback

By the way, I didn’t write this schema at all. I just explained to Claude how it all worked and it wrote the schema itself.

I also created a simple Map Your Second Brain prompt that trains your agent on how to write your own schema doc. You can download it here: pages.evchapman.com/schema-mapper

4. A small skill that does the routing

Once you have a schema doc, then you need a skill that Claude or any other AI can run whenever a raw note hits your inbox.

Mine essentially tells the agent to:

1. Read the raw capture.
2. Understand what I’m actually saying.
3. Check whether it relates to something that already exists.
4. Decide whether to create something new or update an existing note.
5. Connect it to the right projects, people or areas.
6. Ask when it genuinely can’t make the call.

So if I say:

“Multiple tool calls aren’t working in the mobile app.”

AI doesn’t simply file that transcript.

It turns it into an open issue, connects it to the right product and keeps the context I’ll need when I come back to fix it.

If I talk through a longer idea on a walk, it might find several different things inside the same voice note — a task, a project, an insight and a new piece of content.

And it routes each one separately.

5. A trigger that makes it run without you

The final piece is putting the skill on a schedule so it runs automatically.

Depending on how many voice notes you capture throughout the day you could have it run once overnight. If you capture a lot you might want to run it every hour.

If you’re using Claude Code just ask Claude to setup a cron job that runs every hour or overnight. Or if you are in Cowork you can use the schedule feature.

Your second brain shouldn’t become your second job

For years, the promise of a second brain was that we could get everything out of our heads and into a system we could trust.

But most of us ended up building systems that needed constant care just to stay useful.

More tagging. More sorting. More weekly reviews. More maintenance.

And eventually we stopped using them because the system that was supposed to reduce our cognitive load became another source of it.

AI changes that.

Your job can be to notice, think and externalise.

Your agent can take responsibility for keeping that thinking connected, organised and findable.

And you get what you’ve always wanted - a shared knowledge base where your agent can turn up to every conversation already understanding your projects, your ideas and the work you’re trying to do.

And all you had to do was talk.

— Ev

PS. Whenever you’re ready to build a second brain that runs itself, here are three ways I can help:

1. If you want your own second brain that organises itself then check out my AI Second Brain Toolkit. Turn all your emails, notes, meetings, conversations and more into an organised second brain managed by AI.
2. Go all in on building an personal agent for your business with the AI Chief of Staff Course. Create your agent, connect your second brain and install the 9 core skills that your CoS needs to operate with you.
3. Or go all in with my membership - The College of Knowledge. Where we build your full agent operating system stack. Get ongoing support, office hours, more toolkits and a community of other solo operators to do it with.