Folders are dead: Inside Anne-Laure’s Second Brain

A generation raised on Google is moving away from folders—and that shift is pushing knowledge workers to rethink how they capture and organize information. Anne-Laure Lecompte, a neuroscience PhD and founder of Nest Labs, built a “second brain” designed to reduce the mental overhead of filing and retrieving notes, so more energy goes toward turning raw reading into original writing.

Lecompte contrasts two note-taking worlds. Rome (a folder-free system) is built for people who connect ideas as they go, using tags that automatically assemble related content. Google Keep and Google Docs, by her account, excel at quick capture and writing inside the Google ecosystem, but they don’t provide the same note-to-note linking structure for transforming research into reusable thinking. She also describes a personal friction point: she loves paper books and highlights with a pen, then later types notes from pages she reviewed—an intentionally tedious step that acts as a filter. In her view, some friction is helpful because it prevents information overload and forces decisions about what deserves a place in the system.

The core mechanism in Rome is tagging. Instead of deciding where a note belongs in a rigid folder tree, she adds tags that function like “hubs.” For example, when she reads or takes notes related to EEG, she tags those notes with “EEG.” Rome then automatically pulls them into a dedicated EEG page, which behaves like a living index of her research trail—no manual page maintenance required. The same logic applies to reading lists: she uses a custom web clipper that saves links with a “to read” tag, then filters by additional tags to batch-process references by topic. This approach replaces step-by-step drilling through subfolders with a more flexible, associative workflow.

That structure matters because the real bottleneck isn’t collecting information—it’s prioritizing and composing. Lecompte frames idea creation as combinational creativity: taking existing ideas and connecting them in novel ways. In a concrete example, she traces how an article on weak arguments emerged. She noticed two relevant sources repeating across her reading: a blog post listing ways people build weak arguments that appear strong, and philosopher Daniel Danette’s discussion of weak arguments signaled by operators like “surely.” She then builds an outline directly inside the EEG-style hub page, where key sections are automatically pulled from the references. When writing begins, she adds missing material on the spot—treating the outline as a scaffold rather than a script.

After drafting, she moves the work into Google Docs for final writing and then publishes to WordPress via copy-paste, keeping the publication step “frictionless.” The broader takeaway is cultural as much as technical: instead of chasing a perfect, finished legacy piece, she treats publishing as co-creation—bringing an unfinished idea into a shared space to invite feedback and collaboration, while the second brain handles the heavy lifting of organizing research into usable connections.