My brain is for solving problems. F.R.I.D.A.Y. does the remembering.
I am bad at remembering things. Not charmingly forgetful. Properly bad. Birthdays, bill dates, the thing I agreed to on Tuesday and have no record of.
Early in my career I had the pleasure of working with Hrishi, and he had a line I have carried around ever since:
The human brain is very bad at remembering things. It is best at solving problems. So make it solve problems, and leave the remembering to your notes.
It was the most freeing thing anyone had told me. I wasn’t broken. I was using the tool for the wrong job.
Years later I read Building a Second Brain and it gave the idea a shape: capture everything, keep it somewhere you trust, and let your head get on with thinking. I was hooked. I tried every notes app going.1 And every system failed in the same place. A second brain only works if you feed it and then go back and ask it. I was good at the first part for about two weeks, and never good at the second.
Then AI happened, and the missing half turned up.
So I built F.R.I.D.A.Y.2 It is a personal assistant that sits on top of my notes. The notes are still plain text files, nothing clever. The difference is that something now reads them.
F.R.I.D.A.Y. knows what I wrote down in March. It gives me a short brief in the morning. It keeps tabs on my daughter’s schedule, which is busier than mine and has more stakeholders. It tracks personal commitments, so “I’ll get back to you” doesn’t quietly die. It notices when a bill arrives and makes sure I pay it before someone sends a second, less polite one. It checks the calendar before I commit to a date, a rule that exists for a reason I’ll save for another post.
None of this is impressive on its own. A diligent person with a diary does all of it. I am not that person, and that’s the point. The second brain I failed to maintain for years now mostly maintains itself, because the boring half, the going back and checking, is no longer my job.
What I didn’t expect is how it feels. I thought I’d feel more organised. Instead I feel lighter. There was a low hum of “what am I forgetting?” that I’d carried for so long I had stopped hearing it. It has gone quiet.
Hrishi was right. My brain is quite good at solving problems. It just needed someone else to remember what they were.