Build Your Second Brain: Organize Your Digital Mind Without Overwhelm

Michele Hall Lockrey is a productivity strategist and personal knowledge management coach who has spent over a decade helping individuals and organizations move from information overwhelm to clarity and action. Her work sits at the intersection of cognitive science, digital tooling, and practical habit design—translating research on how the brain processes and retrieves information into systems that work for real people with full calendars.

Michele began her career as a technical writer and instructional designer, where she first confronted the challenge of managing large volumes of information across distributed teams. This experience led her to develop the streamlined approach to personal knowledge management that forms the foundation of this book. She has since worked with executives, entrepreneurs, academics, and creative professionals to design second brain systems tailored to their specific workflows and cognitive styles.

She is the founder of The Clear Mind Lab, a coaching practice dedicated to helping knowledge workers build sustainable organizational systems without the guilt and perfectionism that so often derail productivity efforts. Through one-on-one coaching, group workshops, and her popular newsletter *The Weekly Capture*, Michele has helped thousands of readers reclaim mental bandwidth and produce work they're proud of.

Michele lives in Portland, Oregon, where she can be found hiking the Columbia River Gorge with her dog, experimenting with analog-digital hybrid note-taking systems, and slowly perfecting her sourdough starter. She believes that the best productivity system is the one you actually enjoy using, and that clarity is not a destination but a daily practice.