13 ms·

Hypothesis: people who use these “second brain” knowledge systems spend more time writing about using them, then actually using them. Disclaimer: I use obsidia

Hypothesis: people who use these “second brain” knowledge systems spend more time writing about using them, then actually using them. Disclaimer: I use obsidian myself

EliasWatson 4y ago
I disagree personally, but I don't use Obsidian like most people. The majority of my notes just have a couple sentences. I mainly make notes about new project ideas, cool things I find online (eg. a note for each new programming language I discover), and cheatsheets (eg. a bash scripting cheatsheet). I probably spend 15 minutes total writing in Obsidian each week. I'm not writing down things that I don't have difficulty remembering or things that are very easy to search for online. Obsidian is a place for me to store info that I might want later but would have difficulty finding/remembering again.
psychomugs 4y ago
This is the note-taking version of Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS) in practically any hobby, e.g. camera bodies and lenses for photography, instruments and software for music. After the initial honeymoon phase, you realize that achieving that idyllic lifestyle advertised by the new gear actually requires work instead of purchase or download. The only antidote is to actually start using the damn thing.
j7ake 4y ago
Apple notes is good enough for me. Can Obsidian users defend why not simply use Apple notes ? Learning curve and friction way lower
- steveklabnik 4y ago
  I don't use a Mac, so Apple Notes is not available to me.
seanosaur 4y ago
I've dubbed this "theoretical productivity"[1] and also fall into this trap. I keep thinking that just moving to a different app/system with X feature will make this 100x better for me. That goldilocks app/system doesn't exist and is always a moving target. Spending time on solving these problems mean I'm not thinking/writing/completing the things I really want to, hence the "theoretical" nature. 1: There's a good chance this is already a term with a different meaning. If that's the case I don't mean to rip it off, it's just what sounded good at the time.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  I think I historically suffered from a form of this: I loooooved setting up for a project but didn’t really like doing the project. Whether it was downloading the resources and setting up a workspace for a code project or setting up a physical work area for some electronics work.
  - afturner 4y ago
    Same! And that's why I'm now a DevOps engineer. In my role, DevOps primarily means automation and pipeline creation, working with teams to build and release their apps reliably and effectively. For me, it really scratches the itch of "setting things up".
    - Waterluvian 4y ago
      Gosh I love dev ops. Smaller company so I have many hats. I saved a whole week of “clean up CI/CD and make the integration tests 3x faster” as a “treat” for the last week before vacation this year.
      - Quikinterp 4y ago
        People like you are heroes in the workplace to me. I hate anything devops related because I feel like it takes time away from the stuff I'm trying to do, so I appreciate anyone who does it!
      - 4y ago
Spooky23 4y ago
Anyone organized enough to leverage such a system doesn’t need it!
nl 4y ago
I think there is an ultimate unproductive productivity local minima there somewhere. I suspect if someone kept a knowledge base of productivity hacks it would tend towards recursive collapse.
stranger555 4y ago
People should start using these apps as simple note-taking apps and extend/adapt them based on their needs, rather than diving head-first into these complicated methods/systems to form a "second brain". If you go straight into OPs system you'll spend way more time trying to figure out how it works (and it might not even work for you) rather than getting actual work done Start simple. Write a few notes. Maybe you need to draw things: add Excalidraw. Maybe some note structures are similar: consider Templater.
- deafpolygon 4y ago
  This is the same advice any greybeard gives newcomers to Emacs. Just start small.
- kaveet 4y ago
  “Let structure emerge” is my rule of thumb any time I pitch Obsidian.
- rarecoil 4y ago
  > People should start using these apps as simple note-taking apps and extend/adapt them based on their needs This. I'm a hardcore Obsidian user both at work and at home, and I started both vaults from absolutely nothing - no user scripts, no organisation, literally no plan at all. Since then, they've evolved and optimized in radically different ways. Taking someone else's "system" is just a way to fool yourself into thinking you can be more productive than you are; you have to find that for yourself and what works specifically for you. My personal vault is geared much more toward organizing creativity, with a little bit of task-oriented stuff and technical documentation, while my corporate vault is heavily schedule based and contains mostly tactical information, meeting notes and thoughts, etc. For it to be a "second brain", you need it to model your brain - and I work very modally. I have a "work mode" and a "non-work mode" that order things pretty differently, and it shows in the hierarchies and organization of both vaults.
  - auggierose 4y ago
    Interesting that you have so few vaults. I have dozens of them, each for a different project, or for different aspects of the same project. The way folders work in Obsidian is quite bad, when I am creating a new note it insists in putting it into the top folder instead of in the folder where I am currently in, so I prefer to keep it flat. I am just using the default setup and cannot be bothered much with plugins. There is no proper API documentation either.
Brajeshwar 4y ago
Hmmm! Please don't discourage them. I actually feel I should write a lot and just put it out. What I have learnt the most are from other people, comparing them, "stealing" from them and modifying them. There should be more opinions, and ideas. I like it when people feel good about what they do, spend a few minutes each weekend and then in months or even years, they publish it. Or just publish as you go on. I also like "work-in-progress" in the wild.
ParetoOptimal 4y ago
> people who use these “second brain” knowledge systems spend more time writing about using them, then actually using them. All people is far too strong of a claim I think, though if you'd said (or in fact mean) many I might agree. Is systems attract people who feel they need a better system surprising though? Or is it surprising we hear most from those who go on to spend much of their time talking about systems? I think there are many who have and use a second brain effectively, but perhaps most don't know that term.
thenoblesunfish 4y ago
I disagree in terms of my own actual usage, after the initial excitement, but that is a real danger. That said, the most beneficial usage of my notes system has been the flat "tech notes" directory of tagged files on how to do various twiddly computer things (steps and commands to "get X to work"). I used Obsidian briefly but find abandoned it for just the markdown, vim, and a helper python script to search tags.
- jimmySixDOF 4y ago
  Thats funny to me because my main gripe with Obsidian et al is this Reductio ad absurdum down to unformatted text as the central organizing principle of modern knowledge. Rich text, screenshots, video snips, audio, etc are shoehorned in and don't quite fit. Give me a better organized system of Infinate canvases of whatever I want to throw in there over a souped up html file any day.
  - thenoblesunfish 4y ago
    I get by with links - either URLs or just file paths (and I have a vim short cut which passes the file name to "open" on OS X). Not great for everything - inline math for example. I just write raw LaTeX and pretend some tool will eventually come along and render things nicely if I want.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    So, a file system?
    - jimmySixDOF 4y ago
      If all the files are open at the same time in the same canvas with multilayer deep linking , easy search, great graph summary and diagnostics and tools like local OCR and speech to text etc then sure yes a file system sounds fine.
princevegeta89 4y ago
I agree with you. I take a hell lot of notes and I still don't fully understand what the OP's post is really about. I don't understand the second brain philosophy at all.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
I've really only dipped my toe into what Obsidian is capable of (very few plugins), but I took it up a month or two ago as a sort of minimal-resistance place to do simple but interlinked text mind dumps, and for that use case I've come to enjoy it more than I thought I would. Thoughts that were dissipating into the ether now increasingly get written down there, which frees up mental bandwidth for other things, which has translated in increased motivation to actually do the things I'm writing about. I'd tried doing similar things with Apple Notes and Bear in the past, but it never stuck very well and I didn't find myself revisiting notes too often. Something about Obsidian has worked better so for though and I'm not sure what it is. That said, I could see easily getting lost in the weeds and "overmanaging".
1123581321 4y ago
Some people are several times better at configuring these things in the same amount of time.
_8j50 4y ago
I use it, I don't write stuff outside hn comments lol. Obsidian is very cool, like onenote but more siliconvalley-ish and smarter. I hate that I needed to install flatpack for it but that is literally my only complaint. Sadly, it can't replace a text/code editor lime sublime which is where I dumped a lot of non-note knowledge. If only sublimetext copied some of this stuff for markdown. In school,I never, ever took notes unless threatened. I mention that to show you how even someone like me liked Obsidian.
scambier 4y ago
That's definitely a bias. Lots of people use Obsidian or other solutions, and most of those people don't write about it.
sureglymop 4y ago
I am inclined to agree. I have switched to simple journaling, and so far it's been better. Basically I just journal every day with one file for every day, no branching out into other files. Then I have a "timeline view" which let's me quickly see what I journaled in the past. This helps me focus on actually writing something down instead of thinking about naming things etc. So far it's great. And I can still use ripgrep to find all notes/occurrences with e.g. some specific word quickly.
- afarviral 4y ago
  It's almost the Noguchi filing system, in a way. Since you typically need to access things closer to the top/front which will be the most recent.
  - sureglymop 4y ago
    Exactly! It actually has helped me because I've quickly seen things I wanted to do e.g. last week but somehow forgot. But I still can rest knowing that everything is archived.
culi 4y ago
Nothing wrong with that imo. Lots of great skills are picked up from trying to organize thoughts like this. Hypothesis: people who've obsessed over "knowledge gardens" tend to be great at sustaining documentation
VoodooJuJu 4y ago
After using several of these "second brain" apps & systems and ultimately creating my own "second brain" app, I agree with this, and the general sentiment behind it. This space is just a rebranded subset of self-help. It's the productivity porn market. Roam Research was the first to realize the cash gains to be made in this space. Their marketing hook took off, they got their VC handout, and they haven't been heard from since. People who use these things are fooling themselves. I used to fool myself. We're not really achieving or producing and we're certainly not "assimilating knowledge." What we're doing is procrastinating. We're wasting time. We're struggling at our current, real endeavors, and we turn to a scapegoat: "oh darn, it's my knowledge management system that needs work; oh, it's just my productivity system that's just not efficient enough". So we find a nice game, a tool game [1], to: (1) distract ourselves (2) give us the feeling of accomplishment - "I'm taking second brain notes in a fun new app - I'm learning!". For me, the first step to actually getting things done wasn't to optimize my productivity workflow, it wasn't to find the perfect knowledge management app/system, it was to...get things done. When I became dissatisfied with my work, when I hit a difficult obstacle with my projects, I felt pain, and procrastinated to avoid that pain. There was no secret cure. I just needed to realize that playing with these tools and systems is not getting things done - it's just procrastination. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33135227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33135227
- diffeomorphism 4y ago
  That seems like a bit of an overreaction. Sure, tools are not magic and you should not use tools for the tools' sake but because they are useful. Same with, say, ring binders: Having some is probably better than none, but if you have one hundred you have other problems. Same for hammers, pans,.... Buying them won't magically teach you skills, but if you want to learn skills tools will help you.
- CrypticShift 4y ago
  > (1) distract ourselves (2) give us the feeling of accomplishment I agree. A lot of personal systems like this are indeed unconsciously used to (1) and (2). This is especially the case when you try to implement a very complex+generic one like this vault. I can guarantee 90-99% failure, albeit you may learn something along the way ! Also, it is not a "BRAIN". It is worth stressing that because It is a bad and misleading name (almost as bad as PKM) But you are generalizing too much. The problem is the "just" in your "it's just procrastination." The thread is pointing to many benefits. For ME, it is not even about productivity anymore. It is about "healthier" work environment (in research-intensive activities). More than that, It is not even about "ME" anymore. It about creating better tools and systems in the long term. Obsession and Fooling-ourselves (at the "MICRO" level) is exactly what feeds that larger MACRO evolutionary dynamics. > We're not really achieving or producing Speaking of fooling-ourselves, I feel that getting things done itself (at any cost) is also sometimes just a way to distract ourselves and give us the feeling of accomplishment, and also to "avoid that pain" (all three you cited). We may also be fooling ourselves at occasions here too in our rush to “producing” and "“producing” stuff. just saying…
ramblerman 4y ago
This happens a lot :) - Look at the endless threads in /r/fitness discussing the 0.01% gain of getting the exact rep range right vs likely just going to the gym. - you can browse /r/language for days and prepare yourself fully for the day you actually begin ... learning a language It's a type of productivity illusion, I think there is just a greater overlap of this community with HN. That being said, I highly recommend obsidian to anyone, it's a great place to journal, and capture ideas. But just start typing, and don't worry too much about organization (ironically this is the biggest benefit of the tool).

Hypothesis: people who use these “second brain” knowledge systems spend more time writing about using them, then actually using them. Disclaimer: I use obsidian myself

EliasWatson 4y ago

I disagree personally, but I don't use Obsidian like most people. The majority of my notes just have a couple sentences. I mainly make notes about new project ideas, cool things I find online (eg. a note for each new programming language I discover), and cheatsheets (eg. a bash scripting cheatsheet). I probably spend 15 minutes total writing in Obsidian each week. I'm not writing down things that I don't have difficulty remembering or things that are very easy to search for online. Obsidian is a place for me to store info that I might want later but would have difficulty finding/remembering again.

psychomugs 4y ago

This is the note-taking version of Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS) in practically any hobby, e.g. camera bodies and lenses for photography, instruments and software for music. After the initial honeymoon phase, you realize that achieving that idyllic lifestyle advertised by the new gear actually requires work instead of purchase or download. The only antidote is to actually start using the damn thing.

j7ake 4y ago

Apple notes is good enough for me. Can Obsidian users defend why not simply use Apple notes ? Learning curve and friction way lower

steveklabnik 4y ago
I don't use a Mac, so Apple Notes is not available to me.

seanosaur 4y ago

I've dubbed this "theoretical productivity"[1] and also fall into this trap. I keep thinking that just moving to a different app/system with X feature will make this 100x better for me. That goldilocks app/system doesn't exist and is always a moving target. Spending time on solving these problems mean I'm not thinking/writing/completing the things I really want to, hence the "theoretical" nature. 1: There's a good chance this is already a term with a different meaning. If that's the case I don't mean to rip it off, it's just what sounded good at the time.

Waterluvian 4y ago
I think I historically suffered from a form of this: I loooooved setting up for a project but didn’t really like doing the project. Whether it was downloading the resources and setting up a workspace for a code project or setting up a physical work area for some electronics work.
- afturner 4y ago
  Same! And that's why I'm now a DevOps engineer. In my role, DevOps primarily means automation and pipeline creation, working with teams to build and release their apps reliably and effectively. For me, it really scratches the itch of "setting things up".
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    Gosh I love dev ops. Smaller company so I have many hats. I saved a whole week of “clean up CI/CD and make the integration tests 3x faster” as a “treat” for the last week before vacation this year.
    - Quikinterp 4y ago
      People like you are heroes in the workplace to me. I hate anything devops related because I feel like it takes time away from the stuff I'm trying to do, so I appreciate anyone who does it!
    - 4y ago

Spooky23 4y ago

Anyone organized enough to leverage such a system doesn’t need it!

nl 4y ago

I think there is an ultimate unproductive productivity local minima there somewhere. I suspect if someone kept a knowledge base of productivity hacks it would tend towards recursive collapse.

stranger555 4y ago

People should start using these apps as simple note-taking apps and extend/adapt them based on their needs, rather than diving head-first into these complicated methods/systems to form a "second brain". If you go straight into OPs system you'll spend way more time trying to figure out how it works (and it might not even work for you) rather than getting actual work done Start simple. Write a few notes. Maybe you need to draw things: add Excalidraw. Maybe some note structures are similar: consider Templater.

deafpolygon 4y ago
This is the same advice any greybeard gives newcomers to Emacs. Just start small.
kaveet 4y ago
“Let structure emerge” is my rule of thumb any time I pitch Obsidian.
rarecoil 4y ago
> People should start using these apps as simple note-taking apps and extend/adapt them based on their needs This. I'm a hardcore Obsidian user both at work and at home, and I started both vaults from absolutely nothing - no user scripts, no organisation, literally no plan at all. Since then, they've evolved and optimized in radically different ways. Taking someone else's "system" is just a way to fool yourself into thinking you can be more productive than you are; you have to find that for yourself and what works specifically for you. My personal vault is geared much more toward organizing creativity, with a little bit of task-oriented stuff and technical documentation, while my corporate vault is heavily schedule based and contains mostly tactical information, meeting notes and thoughts, etc. For it to be a "second brain", you need it to model your brain - and I work very modally. I have a "work mode" and a "non-work mode" that order things pretty differently, and it shows in the hierarchies and organization of both vaults.
- auggierose 4y ago
  Interesting that you have so few vaults. I have dozens of them, each for a different project, or for different aspects of the same project. The way folders work in Obsidian is quite bad, when I am creating a new note it insists in putting it into the top folder instead of in the folder where I am currently in, so I prefer to keep it flat. I am just using the default setup and cannot be bothered much with plugins. There is no proper API documentation either.

Brajeshwar 4y ago

Hmmm! Please don't discourage them. I actually feel I should write a lot and just put it out. What I have learnt the most are from other people, comparing them, "stealing" from them and modifying them. There should be more opinions, and ideas. I like it when people feel good about what they do, spend a few minutes each weekend and then in months or even years, they publish it. Or just publish as you go on. I also like "work-in-progress" in the wild.

ParetoOptimal 4y ago

> people who use these “second brain” knowledge systems spend more time writing about using them, then actually using them. All people is far too strong of a claim I think, though if you'd said (or in fact mean) many I might agree. Is systems attract people who feel they need a better system surprising though? Or is it surprising we hear most from those who go on to spend much of their time talking about systems? I think there are many who have and use a second brain effectively, but perhaps most don't know that term.

thenoblesunfish 4y ago

I disagree in terms of my own actual usage, after the initial excitement, but that is a real danger. That said, the most beneficial usage of my notes system has been the flat "tech notes" directory of tagged files on how to do various twiddly computer things (steps and commands to "get X to work"). I used Obsidian briefly but find abandoned it for just the markdown, vim, and a helper python script to search tags.

jimmySixDOF 4y ago
Thats funny to me because my main gripe with Obsidian et al is this Reductio ad absurdum down to unformatted text as the central organizing principle of modern knowledge. Rich text, screenshots, video snips, audio, etc are shoehorned in and don't quite fit. Give me a better organized system of Infinate canvases of whatever I want to throw in there over a souped up html file any day.
- thenoblesunfish 4y ago
  I get by with links - either URLs or just file paths (and I have a vim short cut which passes the file name to "open" on OS X). Not great for everything - inline math for example. I just write raw LaTeX and pretend some tool will eventually come along and render things nicely if I want.
- TylerE 4y ago
  So, a file system?
  - jimmySixDOF 4y ago
    If all the files are open at the same time in the same canvas with multilayer deep linking , easy search, great graph summary and diagnostics and tools like local OCR and speech to text etc then sure yes a file system sounds fine.

princevegeta89 4y ago

I agree with you. I take a hell lot of notes and I still don't fully understand what the OP's post is really about. I don't understand the second brain philosophy at all.

kitsunesoba 4y ago

I've really only dipped my toe into what Obsidian is capable of (very few plugins), but I took it up a month or two ago as a sort of minimal-resistance place to do simple but interlinked text mind dumps, and for that use case I've come to enjoy it more than I thought I would. Thoughts that were dissipating into the ether now increasingly get written down there, which frees up mental bandwidth for other things, which has translated in increased motivation to actually do the things I'm writing about. I'd tried doing similar things with Apple Notes and Bear in the past, but it never stuck very well and I didn't find myself revisiting notes too often. Something about Obsidian has worked better so for though and I'm not sure what it is. That said, I could see easily getting lost in the weeds and "overmanaging".

1123581321 4y ago

Some people are several times better at configuring these things in the same amount of time.

_8j50 4y ago

I use it, I don't write stuff outside hn comments lol. Obsidian is very cool, like onenote but more siliconvalley-ish and smarter. I hate that I needed to install flatpack for it but that is literally my only complaint. Sadly, it can't replace a text/code editor lime sublime which is where I dumped a lot of non-note knowledge. If only sublimetext copied some of this stuff for markdown. In school,I never, ever took notes unless threatened. I mention that to show you how even someone like me liked Obsidian.

scambier 4y ago

That's definitely a bias. Lots of people use Obsidian or other solutions, and most of those people don't write about it.

sureglymop 4y ago

I am inclined to agree. I have switched to simple journaling, and so far it's been better. Basically I just journal every day with one file for every day, no branching out into other files. Then I have a "timeline view" which let's me quickly see what I journaled in the past. This helps me focus on actually writing something down instead of thinking about naming things etc. So far it's great. And I can still use ripgrep to find all notes/occurrences with e.g. some specific word quickly.

afarviral 4y ago
It's almost the Noguchi filing system, in a way. Since you typically need to access things closer to the top/front which will be the most recent.
- sureglymop 4y ago
  Exactly! It actually has helped me because I've quickly seen things I wanted to do e.g. last week but somehow forgot. But I still can rest knowing that everything is archived.

culi 4y ago

Nothing wrong with that imo. Lots of great skills are picked up from trying to organize thoughts like this. Hypothesis: people who've obsessed over "knowledge gardens" tend to be great at sustaining documentation

VoodooJuJu 4y ago

After using several of these "second brain" apps & systems and ultimately creating my own "second brain" app, I agree with this, and the general sentiment behind it. This space is just a rebranded subset of self-help. It's the productivity porn market. Roam Research was the first to realize the cash gains to be made in this space. Their marketing hook took off, they got their VC handout, and they haven't been heard from since. People who use these things are fooling themselves. I used to fool myself. We're not really achieving or producing and we're certainly not "assimilating knowledge." What we're doing is procrastinating. We're wasting time. We're struggling at our current, real endeavors, and we turn to a scapegoat: "oh darn, it's my knowledge management system that needs work; oh, it's just my productivity system that's just not efficient enough". So we find a nice game, a tool game [1], to: (1) distract ourselves (2) give us the feeling of accomplishment - "I'm taking second brain notes in a fun new app - I'm learning!". For me, the first step to actually getting things done wasn't to optimize my productivity workflow, it wasn't to find the perfect knowledge management app/system, it was to...get things done. When I became dissatisfied with my work, when I hit a difficult obstacle with my projects, I felt pain, and procrastinated to avoid that pain. There was no secret cure. I just needed to realize that playing with these tools and systems is not getting things done - it's just procrastination. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33135227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33135227

diffeomorphism 4y ago
That seems like a bit of an overreaction. Sure, tools are not magic and you should not use tools for the tools' sake but because they are useful. Same with, say, ring binders: Having some is probably better than none, but if you have one hundred you have other problems. Same for hammers, pans,.... Buying them won't magically teach you skills, but if you want to learn skills tools will help you.
CrypticShift 4y ago
> (1) distract ourselves (2) give us the feeling of accomplishment I agree. A lot of personal systems like this are indeed unconsciously used to (1) and (2). This is especially the case when you try to implement a very complex+generic one like this vault. I can guarantee 90-99% failure, albeit you may learn something along the way ! Also, it is not a "BRAIN". It is worth stressing that because It is a bad and misleading name (almost as bad as PKM) But you are generalizing too much. The problem is the "just" in your "it's just procrastination." The thread is pointing to many benefits. For ME, it is not even about productivity anymore. It is about "healthier" work environment (in research-intensive activities). More than that, It is not even about "ME" anymore. It about creating better tools and systems in the long term. Obsession and Fooling-ourselves (at the "MICRO" level) is exactly what feeds that larger MACRO evolutionary dynamics. > We're not really achieving or producing Speaking of fooling-ourselves, I feel that getting things done itself (at any cost) is also sometimes just a way to distract ourselves and give us the feeling of accomplishment, and also to "avoid that pain" (all three you cited). We may also be fooling ourselves at occasions here too in our rush to “producing” and "“producing” stuff. just saying…

ramblerman 4y ago

This happens a lot :) - Look at the endless threads in /r/fitness discussing the 0.01% gain of getting the exact rep range right vs likely just going to the gym. - you can browse /r/language for days and prepare yourself fully for the day you actually begin ... learning a language It's a type of productivity illusion, I think there is just a greater overlap of this community with HN. That being said, I highly recommend obsidian to anyone, it's a great place to journal, and capture ideas. But just start typing, and don't worry too much about organization (ironically this is the biggest benefit of the tool).