How I use Bear As My Second Brain With the Help of Alfred - Ideas on Smart Note-Taking
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 พ.ค. 2024
- 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 :)
www.buymeacoffee.com/afadingt...
CHECK MY BEAR & ALFRED WORKFLOW
• Bear and Alfred - The ...
Here is Alfred's workflow I use for searching Bear notes quickly:
github.com/drgrib/alfred-bear
Here's Tiago Forte's article on Progressive Summarization:
fortelabs.co/blog/progressive...
A LOT of free information on Building a Second Brain on Tiago's blog:
fortelabs.co/start-here/
The BASB book... probably the BEST way to learn on this. This is NOT an affiliate link:
www.amazon.com/Building-Secon...
LEARN CURSIVE WITH ME:
skl.sh/3Rj73CO
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
Twitter - / robertjpoberg
Personal IG - / robertjpoberg
Weddings IG - / robert.oberg
My Music on Spotify - sptfy.com/rjpo
Wedding Photography & Films - robertoberg.com
Perfect video. You managed to distill PARA, CODE, and a Zettelkasten in one system and have it work so seamlessly and straightforwardly
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.
Beautiful showcase! Thank you!
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.
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.
Hi thanks for your words! I think that Bear is a beautiful tool that truly represents all of these ideas of minimalism and knowledge management in a perfect way (for me, at least). Haven't found anything that can replace it. I don't need more, actually. Glad you liked the video and thanks for commenting!
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.
I've been using Bear as my Second Brain for more than a year now and I think it really has all I need. It's simple enough, beautiful interface, and after learning more about shortcuts and how their x-callback-url works I really have customized my workflow so much that it really is perfect, I've no need to look for anything else. Thanks for watching and glad it was helpful!
Wow!!
This vid has proven very helpful to me!
This was very helpful and inspiring, keep doing this work!
Thank you! I do hope to share more in the future.
Thank you for the video.
thank you this beautiful video. i'm a lover of Alfred and just starting to use Bear.
Thanks for watching! Hope it gave you some ideas. I also love Alfred and Bear. I think they're a perfect match. Bear 2 is just around the corner so it will all be even better.
Great video, thank you!
Thanks for sharing! I haven't considered using Alfred for quick capture and research but definitely taking the friction out of the process!
Glad you found it useful! In case you want to know more I wrote about it here: afadingthought.substack.com/p/note-taking-with-bear-and-alfred
@@afadingthought added to my reading list - cheers! 😊
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.
Thank you for the kind words Melvin! I love Bear's minimalism and I definitely don't find it lacking any features. Bear is simple and on the surface may appear limiting, but there is a LOT you can do if you start to dive deeper, especially doing stuff with their x-callback-url scheme and another app like Alfred. I know this is not for everyone, but if you are willing to learn a bit on how to use that it really opens a HUGE amount of possibilities. Glad you find the video helpful!
@@afadingthought Thanks to you, I'm going to pick up Alred. If you have an affiliate link, please let me know so that I can use that to buy. Once again, thank you so much for your effort.
@@47melvin No worries. As far as I know Alfred doesn't have a referral or affiliate program. You can go ahead and get it, it truly is an incredible app if you put some time to figure it out :)
Could you share how to use Afred with Bear? Thanks for this video
Hi Robert. Thanks so much for this content - Its amazing! I'm wondering if you can share the Alfred Workflows please. I'm really interested the workflow you used to clip text from a webpage and add it to a new note. I have no coding (or workflow building) experience so using your workflows as a start point would be very helpful if you are happy to share. Thanks!
Hey Jason! I did another video explaining how to create the basic Shortcut that I run with Alfred. Here: th-cam.com/video/pN61eSmzwzU/w-d-xo.html . I suggest you watch that and here is the Shortcut that I use to capture stuff from Chrome or Safari: www.icloud.com/shortcuts/3c8ad57043bf4bcf841cce7ecb8358ee
It's a mac Shortcut, but it only works correctly if you run it with Alfred (which I explain in the video) and it only works with Safari or Chrome browsers. Hope to do an updated video where I share and go in detail into all the shortcuts I'm using with Bear, or I may do a series, but probably won't be until next year because right now is a crazy busy season.
Hi do you know if you can save local storage of Bear on an external hard drive and when the app opens, it references that external drive location? Thank you!
Very good video. It would be fantastic if you could make a guide on "how to" incorporate some basic Alfred features.
Thanks for the suggestion! Alfred is HUGE and has so much functionality, especially with the power pack and workflows. Is there anything specific you’d like to listen about it? I have even considered making a series on this app since there’s so much to cover.
@@afadingthought I guess you could demonstrate your very first integration between Alfred and Bear. I've personally used Alfred's free version, but it didn't replace anything that Spotlight couldn't do for me. Maybe one video about the key differences and advantages of Alfred over Spotlight would also be great, IMHO.
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.
I don’t think Bear is an all-in-one solution but I find it integrates very well with other apps and workflow. For my needs Bear with Readwise, a read-it-later app (Raindrop, used to be Pocket), and Bear’s shortcuts capabilities is more than enough… but I’m sure it’s not enough for everyone. I’ve also seen many people use it with Hook.
you need to teach us all of the shortcuts that you used 🙌🙌🙌 you’re so advanced
Hey Lisa! I do hope to make at least one more video sharing all my favorite Shortcuts I’ve done in Bear, but it will still be a while. It’s a crazy busy season now. But a good start for understanding how my shortcuts work is this video. th-cam.com/video/pN61eSmzwzU/w-d-xo.html
How did you make an inbox "folder" so that any new note goes there? Also would be great to see how you organized other folders (I'm new to Bear but love PARA and fed up with Evernote).
Bear uses tags for its organization, so all I needed to do was assign the inbox tag to a note with the INBOX title. The thing here is the shortcuts that I made for capturing things directly into the inbox note. That doesn’t happen by itself. This other video gives a good explanation of how it all works th-cam.com/video/pN61eSmzwzU/w-d-xo.html . I don’t plan to make this entire channel about note taking but at least one more video on Bear, my favorite shortcuts for it, and my organization will come up soon.
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.
I get you, tags can get overwhelming, especially if you start tagging every note like we are used to do it on social media. I use the PARA organization method which is super helpful (you can look it up!) and mostly use tags as if they were folders. But I keep it simple. Bear has a very solid search so I rely on that for finding content.
@@afadingthought yeah, I'm using PARA with Obsidian and was going to try it with Bear. What I'm realizing now is my main issue with Bear is I really dislike the middle column. That's the part that makes the app feels so cluttered to me.
@@afadingthought P.S. Did you create the Bartender stuff yourself? I'd love to try to get that same functionality with Raycast and hoping someone will figure it out soon.
@@GeniusUnleashed oh you mean Alfred? There’s a workflow for searching tags that I downloaded from GitHub, but all the others to capture quickly I created in the Shortcuts app (I only use Alfred to trigger them). I don’t have Raycast but if you can use it to trigger AppleScript or Shortcuts then you could probably make it work if you spend some time on it. I have a video explaining how it works -> th-cam.com/video/pN61eSmzwzU/w-d-xo.html
@@GeniusUnleashed For the most part I’m using Bear with the columns closed or only the first one opened. I open the notes with the Alfred workflow so I don’t have to really dive into the columns. Oh and I also don’t go more than one level deep with nested tags or it can get messy.
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?
Thanks for the kind words! I have just moved up to Alfred 5 a few days ago, haven't really played with any of the new things but glad all my previous workflows continue working. Was on 4 when I did this and the shortcut video.
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!
Hi! There's this application "Alfred" which allows for a LOT of automation around macs. You do need to purchase their "powerpack," to have the most functionality, but after that it's just a matter of getting familiar with it (there's a lot of video tutorials, and lots of users share their most useful 'workflows'). Workflows are like small apps, or a series of commands that tell Alfred whatever you want to do. Basically I created a "workflow" that works together with Bear and the "Shortcuts App" to capture stuff around my system directly to Bear. I made a video where I go more into detail on the setup (th-cam.com/video/0HYgtd2ojIg/w-d-xo.html) and I also wrote about it (afadingthought.substack.com/p/note-taking-with-bear-and-alfred)- but the very least you have to be a bit familiar with the interface of Alfred or how to use its basic functions.
Hi, nice video, thank you. I did something similar to capture selected text from a webpage using Mac Shortcuts instead of Alfred App. But I am unable to get che url from which I am coping my text. Does anybody know how to "retrieve" the page url and add it to my Bear note? Thank you!
Hi Francesco, I also use the Shortcuts app. Shortcuts support applescript, and that's how I get the page URL. I actually made a video and in the comments I share both my shortcut and alfred workflow, you could download the shortcut and check in there how I use applescript: th-cam.com/video/0HYgtd2ojIg/w-d-xo.html
hey this is pretty good! im also looking for script to do quickly add new notes on top of on the go quickly @5:40 . That would be game changer for me
I'm planning a video in that because it's been requested a few times 👍
@@afadingthought Please do that Robert. Thanks
OK I see below.
how to add content to bear by Alfred? I could not quite get what you said, it was a bit too fast for me
I did a step by step video where I explain the process of creation of the Alfred Workflow for Bear Capture (now Shortcut). Here it is th-cam.com/video/pN61eSmzwzU/w-d-xo.html
Hey guys! I keep receiving emails and messages asking about the Alfred Workflow I show in the video: here is all you need to know about it th-cam.com/video/0HYgtd2ojIg/w-d-xo.html
Can you do something setting up the workflow in Alfred to control Bear as you have in this video, please? You sort of skipped over that. Thanks
There's this other video where I go more into detail on the Alfred workflow: th-cam.com/video/0HYgtd2ojIg/w-d-xo.htmlsi=OF0RHSYV_4-8l1BZ
@@afadingthought Thanks, I will check it out later on today.
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Did you use Alfred to save things to Bear?
Yes
Dive deeper
Thanks! Will do.
I have no money to feed a giant pet or hire a Butler. This is silly.
I liked Bear, but they have fallen so far behind and become so limited by keeping it Mac iOS only. They went to a subscription model a long time ago in an attempt to improve the app, but they took the money and ran. Their app received very little updates. They still don't have a web app and they claim they can't make a Windows or Android app because they are too small. Well, plenty of small companies have since made better os agnostic note-taking apps for FREE. So really the company has showed themselves to be nothing but Apple snobs.
They are working on their total revamp currently for the apps. The release will also come with a web based version.