Building a Second Brain for Engineering Management

Your brain isn't meant to remember everything your seven direct reports said three weeks ago.

But somehow, that's what we expect from ourselves. We try to keep track of Sarah's career goals, the context behind Rohan's performance issue, what we promised to follow up on with the team, and that thing Alex mentioned in passing that seemed important.

Then performance review season hits and you're frantically scrolling through Slack DMs at 11 PM.

The Problem With Memory-Based Management

Most engineering managers operate like this:

Notes scattered across Notion, Apple Notes, Slack, and random text files
Important conversations that only exist in your head
Action items that vanish into the void
Searching "performance" in Slack and getting 847 results

You're not disorganized. You're just trying to use your brain as a filing cabinet.

What Is a Second Brain?

A second brain is an external system for capturing and organizing information. Not for reference. For actual use.

The idea is simple: your brain should be for thinking, not storage. When you offload the remembering to a trusted system, you free up mental space for the work that actually matters.

For engineering managers, this means:

Capturing conversations as they happen
Organizing notes by person and team
Surfacing the right context when you need it
Actually following up on what you said you'd do

How to Build It

Start with capture.

When someone tells you something important, write it down immediately. In your 1:1, after a hallway conversation, during team meetings. Don't trust yourself to remember it later.

The key is making this effortless. If your system requires five clicks and picking the right tags, you won't use it.

Organize by people, not projects.

Most tools want you to organize by project or date. But as a manager, you think in terms of people.

When you're preparing for a 1:1 with Jordan, you don't want to search through project notes. You want everything about Jordan in one place. Their goals, recent wins, ongoing challenges, the feedback you gave them last month.

Make it searchable.

You should be able to find anything in under 10 seconds. If you can't, your system is broken.

This means:

Clear naming conventions
Consistent structure
Fast search that actually works

Review regularly.

A second brain isn't a write-only system. You need to actually read your notes.

Before every 1:1, spend 2 minutes reviewing. Before performance reviews, read through the last quarter. Before planning, look at what your team has been saying.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Let's say you manage 7 people. Here's your system:

Daily: Quick captures after conversations. 30 seconds per note.

Weekly: 5-minute review before each 1:1. You walk in knowing exactly what you talked about last time and what you need to follow up on.

Monthly: 15-minute scan of your team's notes. Patterns emerge. You notice Sarah has mentioned wanting to work on infrastructure three times. You see that Rohan's performance issue is actually a workload problem.

Quarterly: Performance reviews write themselves because you've been tracking wins and feedback all along.

The Real Benefit

It's not about having perfect notes. It's about showing up to conversations prepared.

When someone mentions something in passing and you bring it up three weeks later, that's when trust builds. When you remember the context of their career goals without them having to repeat themselves, that's when you become a better manager.

Your brain is terrible at storage. It's amazing at connecting ideas, making decisions, and actually listening to people.

Let your second brain handle the remembering. Use your actual brain for managing.

Getting Started

Pick one person. Start capturing notes about them for two weeks. Before your next 1:1, read through what you've written.

That's it.

Don't build the perfect system. Don't migrate all your old notes. Don't spend three hours setting up Notion templates.

Just start capturing. The system will evolve as you use it.

If you want a system built specifically for this, we made EliuAI to solve exactly this problem. It's organized by team and person, makes capturing effortless, and surfaces the right context when you need it. No setup, no tags, no friction.

Because the goal isn't a perfect archive of everything. It's walking into every conversation with the context you need to be helpful.

Your team deserves a manager who remembers. Your brain deserves to focus on thinking, not storage.

Build the system that lets you do both. Or let EliuAI build it for you.