on building a second brain with Obsidian
a little electronic help pt. 2/4
Last time, I discussed how most of the information we consume is lost over time.
One way to retain more of this information is to memorize more things and keep these things memorized. I discussed how one might use spaced repetition flash cards to accomplish this:
However, a lot of information cannot be distilled into bivalent flash card form. Flash cards are excellent for learning the capitals of countries, where there are two concepts and a clear connection between them, but they are not so great at capturing the essence of a novel, where there are a multitude of ideas connected in complicated ways.
Further, there is a lot of information that we don't want to memorize, but we'd still like to capture somehow. Examples include "a list of movies we want to watch someday" or "a log of running workouts completed."
Such things are better captured in notes.
The question is, what form should these notes take?
We might consider a classic paper notebook, turning to a new page for each new note. The problem is, these notes quickly become lost in the pages of the notebook and are hard to find. They aren't accessible.
We could add a table of contents, which makes it easier to find a note. This is better, but only helpful in scenarios where we have a specific motivation go back and find a certain note. It is tricky, because notes are inherently pieces of information that we are not storing in our brains. Thus, we don't actually know the information in the note. In fact, in most cases, we don't actually know that we have the note at all, or at the very least don't actively remember it.
If we don't remember that we have a certain note, then we will never look for it, and the note will fade into obscurity, table of contents or not.
What we'd really prefer is a note structure that allows us to stumble upon our notes at an opportune time, the same way our brain can pull helpful memories in times of need. Most of our memories lie quiescent until a certain sight, smell, or situation triggers it. Ideally we could organize our notes similarly, such that even if we forget the existence of certain notes, we find the note when needed.
To accomplish this, we could try grouping similar notes together, like putting all of your chemistry notes in one place. This way, when you are studying chemistry, you may happen upon a useful old note on chemistry that you wouldn't have thought to find, even with a table of contents. To this end, you might consider a folder system, physical or digital, to group your notes hierarchically. Perhaps you'll have a folder for science; under which you'll have folders for physics, chemistry, and biology; under which you'll keep each note.
However, some notes might belong in multiple folders. Take a note that contains material on biochemistry, living between biology and chemistry. On top of that, perhaps the note has relevance to exercise science, and you'd like to group it with other material regarding your cycling hobby. Finally, maybe it came from notes from a specific book, and you'd like to group this notes with other notes from that book.
A hierarchical folder structure is too rigid to organize ideas like this. Your brain doesn't use a strict hierarchichal structure. Instead, ideas in your brain are deeply interconnected, with each idea connecting to many others, which are themselves connected to more still. We can mimic this structure by using hyperlinks as a flexible relation between notes, instead of folder hierarchy (think Wikipedia-style linking between articles).
If in each note, we can link an arbitrary number of other notes, we can develop a web of ideas over time. This will help us achieve the goal of being able to find a note whenever it is relevant to a particular situation, as there will be pathways to find each note from various related topics. Over time, a hyperlinked notes system develops into a network of ideas; a second brain.
in practice
How can we create this practically?
First, we must have a software that allows use to hyperlink between notes.
Second, we need a structure for our notes to live in.
Third, we need a system to collect information and create notes.
Finally, we need a system to process these notes into an intelligible network of ideas.
Let's start with the first point: our software.
1. the software: Obsidian
I use Obsidian.
Obsidian is an extremely flexible program, with a broad array of tools, plugins, and themes to make your notes do whatever you'd like and look however you want.
While these images are pretty, and meant to illustrate some of the varied capabilities of Obsidian, let's start by forgetting most of the bells and whistles. All you need to know is how to make a link:
Make a link by enclosing the title of a different note in double brackets:
[[name-of-other-note]]
You will then be able to click this link, jumping to a different note of your choosing. With this alone, you can develop a web of interconnected notes. Obsidian has an awesome built-in graph view/animation where lines are drawn between notes that are linked together, with larger nodes representing notes with more hyperlinks. Here is someone’s example:
While more for show than anything else, I’ve always found the graph view a motivating visual of how your network of notes can grow over time.
Being able to hyperlink is all you need, but there are many more ways to use the Obsidian platform. There are plenty of awesome keyboard shortcuts and community add-ons. Things can get overwhelming fast, and you should find what works for you. That being said, if you are interested, I’ll proceed to share my approach.
2. the structure, or lack thereof
After your software, the second thing you need is a structure for your notes to live in. Here, my general approach is to minimize folders (maybe even one big folder for all notes!), and let hyperlinking be the main form of structure.
There are times when note hierarchy is desired, so we’d like a way to implement this, even without folders. For example, in planning my upcoming US road trip, I’d like to group all of my road trip notes under the category “cross country road trip 2025.” I implement hierarchy by adding
parent::
to the top of all of my notes. (This is auto-generated for me because I use the Templater plugin, but you can also write it in each time.) Following the double colon, I add a link to one or more parent topics of this note with double brackets separated by colons like
parent:: [[cross country road trip 2025]], [[<travel>]]
The double colon allows my dataview plugin to find the parent tag, such that, in a note titled “cross country road trip 2025,” I can write the short script:
```dataview
table
dateformat(file.cday, "MM-dd-yyyy") as "date"
WHERE contains(parent, [[cross country road trip 2025]])
SORT file.ctime desc
```This finds all the child notes that have [[cross country road trip]] listed after parent:: and lists them nicely:
(Going forward, I’ll include more dataview snippets. Just know that each one is converted in-app to a nice table view like the above example)
With this child note setup, you can have a hierarchical system that lives inside a more powerful hyperlinking network. Since you can add multiple links after the parent:: tag, each note can be the “child” of many different “parent” notes, leading to a flexible hierarchy system. By using dataview tables instead of folders, hyperlinks remain the main form of connection, but hierarchy can easily be implemented when desired.
3. system to create notes
Now that we have a structure of notes, we need a system to continually add new notes.
I take notes differently depending on how they occur.
fleeting notes
Sometimes I am struck with random thoughts from the void that I would like to jot down. In this case, I use a "fleeting" tag to jot down the idea in whatever note I'm currently typing in.
fleeting:: “random thought here”
Again, the double colon allows my dataview plugin to find all instances of this tag, wherever they may be, and I compile them as a list in a note I title “fleeting:"
```dataview
table
dateformat(file.cday, "MM-dd-yyyy") as "date", fleeting
where contains(fleeting, "")
sort file.name desc
```handwritten notes
The next category of note would be handwritten notes, which I like to take for technical subjects (where I like sketching diagrams) or in response to live talks or lectures. These I take on my iPad in Goodnotes, which are uploaded automatically to Obsidian using symlink.
They show up in my Obsidian as pdfs, and I can link to them like any other note. I can even search my handwritten notes with text recognition using the Text Extractor and Omnisearch plugins.
literature notes
Many times, I am taking notes in response to something that I am consuming, whether it be an article, book, movie, etc. In this case, I make a new so-called "literature note", which my Templater automatically tags with the
genre::
field for me to fill. I mark the note as movie, book, tv, etc. Then, in a separate note titled “movies,” I can collect all notes with genre:: movie, for example, and make a table of all the movies I’ve watched:
```dataview
table
creator, link
WHERE contains(genre, "movie")
sort file.ctime desc
```I have hub notes for all other forms of media as well, and in this way, I can keep track of books I’ve read, podcasts I’ve listened to, etc.
I also use tags like movieToWatch:: or bookToRead:: which I use whenever I hear of something I’d like to consume later. I then generate a table that collects all of these. For example:
```dataview
table
movieToWatch as "Movie"
where contains(movieToWatch, "")
sort file.ctime desc
```In this way, I have developed robust lists of shows, books, articles, etc. that I’m excited to get through.
4. processing notes effectively
While it's nice to have an archive of fleeting, handwritten, and literature notes; the most important part is to process them into something that will be valuable in the long run. This brings us to the most important type of note, the Zettelkasten note.
Since fleeting, handwritten, and literature notes are usually full of gibberish that I jot down quickly, they often make no sense months later. This is a problem that is solved by Zettelkasten notes, which are notes designed to be comprehensible without context and which capture the essence of single idea such that you can connect it to other atomic ideas and develop it into the future.
I make Zettelkasten notes by taking some source material, like a completed literature note, and distilling a singular idea or question into a paragraph that can be perpetually understood, even as the details of the literature note fade from memory. For every literature note I complete (i.e. every book/movie/podcast I read/watch/listen), I make at least one, but occasionally multiple, Zettelkasten notes. This way, I capture the central ideas of each thing I consume.
Importantly, I make sure each Zettelkasten links to at least one other Zettelkasten note. Then, instead of having a bunch of atomic ideas distilled from various sources, I intentionally build an interconnected web of notes. The Zettelkasten notes should also connect back to their source literature note. Building a network of these Zettelkasten notes has been satisfying and useful for connecting disparate ideas over time.
looking forward
The last major type of note to cover are personal journal notes. This category deserves a post of its own and will be discussed in the next and final article on obsidian:
The fourth and final installment will address to-do lists in Todoist:
((finding something to do with todoist)) - TBD
Refer to the first article in the series here if you missed it: