15 ms·

I deleted my second brain

• precompute 1y ago
  Sounds like the author never really had any use for it, and was undergoing informational bankruptcy. Most people don't delete theirs, though, they just keep it apart and never re-arrange it.
• nivertech 1y ago
  Backlog != Second Brain +1 for no system, or lightweight system In the past for every subject I researched I created a slide deck, and after some time I started noticing common patterns across different even remote disciplines. Interlinking slides is hard, so Obsidian is ideal for this. The important part is not to be religious or too pedantic about it, or else it will become a Second Job instead of a Second Brain;) Dump/capture what you can, if it’s really important - it will resurface later. Lastly, with GenAI the value of these tools as a Knowledge Management goes down, but they’re more like a Workspace with the work logs and pointers/references to the actual knowledge in GenAI tools.
• r_i_m_b_a_u_d 1y ago
  I have every bill and key documents like my Will stored in Evernote. It would be insane to delete these.
• spencerflem 1y ago
  Don't mean at all to discredit what the author's done - it's their life and seems to have been helpful to them and for that I'm very glad. But this would make me so sad - Its not that the notes are useful but every few months I love nostalgia tripping on old notes. Like looking at old photos but instead of places and people its thoughts. Like, "oh yeah, I did care about that back then!"
  • system2 1y ago
    That's what I feel after finding "Desktop" backup folders from years ago after refreshing my Windows installations. Each computer had their unique desktop and documents folder with bunch of software, games, half written plugins / codes.
  • kstrauser 1y ago
    That’s very nicely put and I’d feel the same way. I like seeing what mattered to me a while back.
  • socalgal2 1y ago
    I know what you mean. It's not just notes. I had shelves full of trinkets and books that I never looked at. I threw them all way to "unclutter my life". I realize now, even though I never picked them up or read the books they triggered memories. When I bought them, what I was into at the time, things like that. I don't know how much I wish I still had them all. I'm going though something kind of similar now in that there are several boxes of stuff of mine in my parent's storage. I haven't looked in them in 20+ years. I basically told them to just chuck them in the trash. I haven't seen them, I don't want to see them. If I see them I'll just end up keeping them for another 20+ years without looking at them. Yes, they will trigger memories. Things I made in high school, elementary school, college, etc.... There's at least 3 journals. But, do I really care? If they had just thrown them away with out telling me or if the storage and burnt down I'd have no idea what was in them and I certainly don't miss the contents or even think about them except when my parents mention, "you know, we still have your boxes in our storage" I don't know how to choose between keeping them and getting rid of a pile of trash haha. I'm choosing to throw them away. I'd prefer not to know what's in them so I don't know what I don't know. I guess partly I just want to detach from the past. Others certainly make different choices.
  • imhoguy 1y ago
    This. IANAD but I think there maybe something deeper the author might be fighting, some hoarding and OCD. Balanced amount of personal and family archive is nice when revisited.
  • latexr 1y ago
    > Like looking at old photos Many years ago I realised I never do that. I find no enjoyment in going through old photos, so I stopped taking and storing them. But like you, I don’t discredit the people who do it. More power to you if it makes you happy.
• k310 1y ago
  I always used and use paper notes. Computer files are mostly downloads, and saved articles for better search (ahem) than DDG or Google because their results are almost entirely name matches with movies or shit to buy. And stuff disappears. Hopefully saved at IA, but not always. That said, I have all my old note books with great ideas :-) whose time may come yet, etc. The only notes I tossed were from years just prior to a divorce. Nothing useful, just griping. The other ideas are still interesting to review. For example, lists of questions for games, and unusual names, such as Ebenezer and Florence, aka Ebb and Flo. Photos are always saved, including ones I scanned from parents' prints and daughter's growing up prints. (Film days) A few old slides have been scanned, but I keep the originals. One more adapter ring, and those will also be scanned. My brother and I have Dad's original paintings and good quality photos (from the digital camera age) for showing off.
• aryehof 1y ago
  It’s surely a question of perspective. View entries as (perhaps) things to do, or just as historical record. The former is likely a mental burden, the latter not?
• wiseowise 1y ago
  Is that a hipster thing? Like the same person would write completely opposite in the same style ten years ago, but now that PKM are all the rage they need to reassert themselves as “not-like-the-other” by burning everything to the ground?
  • bravesoul2 1y ago
    I'd think so but then the mention of sobriety makes me think there are other reasons behind the note taking.
    • sandspar 1y ago
      And instead of just logging off, the dramatic deletion. He frames this as the end of a phase but I suspect he's still in the middle of something. I wish him luck and strength.
      • MrVandemar 1y ago
        Wrong pronoun. Joan Westenberg so "she".
        • grugagag 1y ago
          It’s both https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_(given_name) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_(given_name)
  • robertlutece 1y ago
    people change, people grow I myself threw out about 3000 notes last year
    • wiseowise 1y ago
      Throwing notes away is not growing. Growing is understanding that inanimate things don't have control over your life. This whole "philosophical" article that basically says "I've removed my notes because they were giving me anxiety" is a confirmation that this is just yet another phase in author's life.
• exitnode 1y ago
  I don't take long-term notes at all, only quick notes on paper of thing I need to do. I tried to collect all thoughts, notes etc. but I would never read them again. Most of it would be outdated anyways. So I understand that these kind of notes might feel like ballast and might be a reason to not be able to close with things. Everything that is worth keeping is on my website as properliy written posts which I enjoy to re-read from time to time. You could also look at it this way: anything that doesn't make it onto the website - i.e. is published - isn't worth saving either.
• ErrorNoBrain 1y ago
  the thing with such a system is keeping it up to date you have to spend SO MUCH time writing notes... and since you might put in everything you've thought to do, in there, you also have to go back and read it again, to find it? seems like a very time consuming process i personally write down details for a few topics, in my notes, and then i tend to forget the small details, and use my brain to remember the big scope(s). then i can return to my notes for tiny details later, if needed. most of the time though, i tend to never return. and so i ended up just not writing notes anymore. it ends up being too much to look through, or too much to be worth the time. gotta find that sweet spot i guess, but thats not easy either.
• runjake 1y ago
  I can’t count the number of times my notes have saved me or my team some serious grief. I don’t have to keep everything in my head. I can offload my brain into notes. Godspeed, but there’s no way I’d give any of that up.
  • thom 1y ago
    Why do you keep what is clearly critical project documentation in your personal notes though?
    • mrweasel 1y ago
      Possibly because a large number of organisations don't really have a good system for capturing somethings as "messy" as notes. I'm not big on note taking myself, but when I do, the things I capture is very different from the version I put into the official documentation. There is a good article: A rational design process, how and why to fake it.[1] Basically how we reach our goal and how we present them are two different things. The personal notes have the details on failures, wrong turns and alternative ideas, the official documentation won't have that. 1) https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/david-parnas/fake-it.pdf https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/david-parnas/fake...
      • motorest 1y ago
        > Possibly because a large number of organisations don't really have a good system for capturing somethings as "messy" as notes. To build upon this point, there's a problem that writing docs is a thankless job: those who benefit from it do so silently, whereas those who selflessly shared notes later can find themselves involved in issues they have no involvement. It's a lose-lose situation.
      • XorNot 1y ago
        I'd posit a simpler explanation: most large orgs buy Confluence, and you cannot find anything in Confluence.
        • 1y ago
• tetris11 1y ago
  I use org-roam for looking up a topic, adding a note, and then forgetting about it. Yeah I might link one topic to another, but it's so seldom used because if I did it properly I'd have to link everything to everything else or create some maddening time-consuming thought hierarchy, like I believe the poster did. I also dont use my notes to think... they just exist to roughly categorize my updates on a project or topic, and once that project is over I seldom look at it again, or, I simply archive it. Having this virtual briefcase full of hastily tagged and indexed notes sounds chaotic, but it is immensely useful in unburdening my brain and uncluttering my desktop (firefox has maybe 5 tabs open). I dont understand the need for thorough organization and consistent structure. Nor do I understand cradling every thought or whim like it's untapped genius. Life is seldom like this, and an impossible ideal to enact. Linnaeus himself must have questioned his sanity when he saw a Platypus.
  • VariousPrograms 1y ago
    Linking notes enables note-taking to become a full-time hobby. It’s effortless to waste hours in Notion, Obsidian, Vimwiki, etc. creating MOCs, unused links, nice little home pages, and creating and recreating structures and systems. I switched to a directory of unlinked, tagged notes and I’ve yet to have an issue just searching for a specific note. I spend a fraction of the time I used to thinking about notes at all. Everyone has different needs and things that work for them, but some of these productivity gurus have 100,000s atomic notes, each note being like a single quote from a book, and you realize that taking and organizing notes is the only thing they do.
    • nchmy 1y ago
      I was elated when obsidian came out, because it brought to reality exactly what I thought I had wanted for a few years prior - ability to link, especially graphically, all of my notes. But I quickly realised what you described - it's a futile effort to maintain such a thing, and that the only people who do it are absolute slaves to the systems they've created. Worse, they surely don't really generate truly unique insights from it all because the insights don't really come from addition and interconnection, but instead from subtraction and refinement. The cultivation of wisdom, in other words - which is the opposite of accumulation. I've seen various versions of this chart and I think it summarizes the situation well - though I'd go further and be culling the noise from it all. https://magniapartners.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Magnia-DIKW-Process-Diagram@2x.png https://magniapartners.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Magnia... I still use obisidan, as it's just great software. And mybnotes could absolutely benefit from better structure and discipline in filing them - I do almost none of what I mentioned above. Though, perhaps I'm just mentally doing the culling and just focusing on what actually matters. Full text search usually finds me what I need quickly enough.
• timeonecom 1y ago
  I would have zipped it and put it into long term storage. Now that I can run llms locally and train them with my notes, I’d never have to organize or revisit old notes and could still get value out of them.
• Pursuit1782 1y ago
  Great post, it captures a lot of feelings that I myself share about “PKM”!
• tonijn 1y ago
  Reminds me of stories people tell after they lost all their belongings in a fire. Pain but also relieve
• tolerance 1y ago
  If it wasn't for the compulsive authoring, storing, organizing, accessing, discarding, archiving, indexing and retrieving of notes and related data I wouldn't know what a computer was good for. But the whole "second brain" trend always made my stomach turn and the surrounding culture of productivity/personal knowledge management is a tarpit.
  • vasco 1y ago
    For porn.
• imhoguy 1y ago
  I keep mine but archived as git history. I don't return to it but in critical moment I can come back to some obscure information I recorded years ago - useful for legal or insurance. And my "second brain" is just handful list of current stuff, some home technical or financial details my family would need in case I am in coma, etc. I would call it Snapshot of Presence notes.
• ricksunny 1y ago
  > Markdown files in nested folders. I’m debating whether nested folders should be used at all in my PKMs. I’m starting to think everything should be in the root folder. Less likely to render searchability incomplete due to some function or widget breaking.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • sea-gold 1y ago
    If you do want to try (or at least read more about) nested folders, you should investigate the Johnny.Decimal[1] organization system. [1] https://johnnydecimal.com/ https://johnnydecimal.com/
• raincole 1y ago
  > I started reading to extract. Listening to summarize I resonate with this a lot. But in the opposite way of what the author implies here. Since I've start 'reading to extract', my attention span improved a lot. I feel my reading pattern is like that of the pre-social-media self again. Simply knowing that I'm going to write some notes down makes reading a much more engaging experience for me. By the way, this is what I wrote into Obsidian after reading this article: > [url]: The author deleted their Obsidian database of 10,000 notes. I do not agree on this approach, but they raised some interesting issues. Quote: > > The more my system grew, the more I deferred the work of thought to some future self who would sort, tag, distill, and extract the gold. > > That self never arrived. > I am probably making the same mistake, and should be reviewing my notes more often. Perhaps I can delete some outdated ones every once in a while, instead of deleting the whole database like the author did?
• fjfaase 1y ago
  My personal website acts as my second brain in the sense that it helps me remember important events in my life and tracks my personal projects. I started it around 1995.
  • yard2010 1y ago
    https://www.iwriteiam.nl https://www.iwriteiam.nl
  • MrGilbert 1y ago
    That is pretty impressive. I skimmed through the site, and was wondering what your thought process was when putting your life in the open vs. keeping it on a local disk?
    • fjfaase 1y ago
      Good question. Through the years, I have become more restrictive about what I write especially with respect to others. I am aware of the fact that I am more open to share about my personal life than many people around me. Maybe it is related to fact that I want to have some, hopefully positive, effect on the world. (Maybe one day in the future it might become material for some historic research.) There is also a lot, I do not share. I keep a personal diary and since 2010, I am recording my daily activities in Moleskin daily planners (the only planners I have found that have the same space for Saturdays and Sundays as for working days).
• mtts 1y ago
  Of course if you store “7000 notes” in a PKM you should expect most of them to be useless, unless you’re doing science and most of them are literature notes or something (remember the guy who “invented” zettelkasten worked as a researcher). Ordinary mortals can get by with a lot less. I have maybe a few hundred notes on the handful of topics that matter to me and that’s it.
• winkelwagen 1y ago
  This resonates with me, I’ve never considered knowledge as something you can live. But comparing it with photography, it influences how you experience the world. Sometimes it makes you feel like an outsider documenting instead of being in the moment. I always cringe a bit when people take endless videos of fireworks or concerts. There is a fine line between wanting te remember a feeling or moment and just brainlessly recording. I’m wouldn’t be surprised if this second brain movement is similarly lacking its connection with “reality” and when lacking clear intention.
• bongodongobob 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • dang 1y ago
    Please don't do this here.
• ZYZ64738 1y ago
  I used Obsidian 2 yrs. ago for almost 2 weeks and I quit. I did not know why - until this post. I felt missing s.th. or left myself behind by not using s PKMs. Now I feel calm after reading this post. It seems that my subconsciousness alredy knew, that (to me) a PKM would never reach a break even point...
• barrkel 1y ago
  I understand what the author deleted and why. I would never delete my own archive of notes, because it contains a different kind of information: howtos for things I do infrequently, current state for personal projects I rotate in and out of over years, maintenance logs for my vehicles, identification details for every important account (account numbers, insurance expiry details etc). When I'm doing something complex, I narrate what I'm doing in my notes. Most of these logs are write only. They can help as a kind of written rubber duck. And about 1 in 100 turn out to be extremely useful when I want to remember how I did something 10 years ago. I use the same app (of my own design) with a different storage at work, and there I use it to remind myself what I did for performance reviews. Every edit is logged with a timestamp and I have a different tool which puts all the edits into chronological order. For the author, their system served as a way of dealing with anxiety over self-improvement, it seems. But it turned into an anxiety of its own when the weight of unexplored ambition became manifest. It wasn't really a second brain IMO.
  • tommica 1y ago
    I'd hate to lose the ability of just going back 20 years later and read my own thoughts and ideas, to meet the person I was at that point. I have a project/idea journal that I've had for over 10 years, and going through it sometimes is really fun. I remember being so proud about my code-generation tool that allowed me to quickly start a new html+css project that I was doing that work as a freelancer. Seeing that page in my journal brings up a smile.
    • diggan 1y ago
      > I'd hate to lose the ability of just going back 20 years later and read my own thoughts and ideas, to meet the person I was at that point. Yeah, my "second-brain" doubles as a journal too, and I have written notebooks from when I first arrived in my "real home country" with basically nothing, and it's always a pleasure to go back to read through and realize (again) how different my life is now. It's really easy to lose track of our own progress day-to-day, and being able to analyze your past perspectives and situations is like a hack to instant happiness.
    • 1y ago
• isolatedsystem 1y ago
  This article is visibly, annoyingly, distractingly in threes. > It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage. > but to keep it alive, replayed, and reworked. > A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions... > A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it... > There is a guilt that accompanies unread books, articles and blog posts > The belief that by naming a goal, you are closer to achieving it. That by storing a thought, you have understood it. That by filing a fact, you have earned the right to deploy it. > ...the fear of losing track, of forgetting, of not being caught up. > Nietzsche burned early drafts. Michelangelo destroyed sketches. Leonardo left thousands of pages unfinished.
  • tolerance 1y ago
    I'm starting to notice this style a lot. Apparently there's a formal term for it, but I didn't begin to notice it until I started using ChatGPT regularly. Granted, there are people who didn't notice the utility of the em dash until it became apparent in ChatGPT's responses, but aside from either device there is a certain vibe I'm starting to pick up from a lot of writing online that mirrors AI writing although you can't just call it that, especially if people enjoy it. A kind of abstract solipsism that only resonates unless you consent to a platonic relationship with the author through their writing. About as close as you can get to reading something written with the aid of AI, I'd imagine.
    • alwa 1y ago
      I choose to think optimistically, in the same way as I did when smartphones put a camera in everyone’s pocket: suddenly, “bokeh” is a term with purchase in the mainstream! “Portrait mode” for every adorable baby pic! A ring light in every makeshift bedroom-dresser studio! Everybody’s participating now, and taking pride in using more of the visual language of photography for themselves. That makes us all richer! Now, then, that the language-bots have sensitized our collective ear to the hypnotic rhythm of a parallel-constructed triplet, the drama of a “—“, and the muscular power of a strong active voice (…that’s three, right?)—aren’t we all richer for it?
      • 1y ago
• cornfieldlabs 1y ago
  I deleted all my bookmarks since I was hoarding unhealthy amount of them. A lot of them were in "to read" folder. It was so freeing to "let go"
  • sunaookami 1y ago
    Ha did the same a few years ago with over 2000 bookmarks! A lot of links were already dead anyway.
    • cornfieldlabs 1y ago
      Sometimes I remember a particular line from a particular article and wish I had kept the links. But I have learnt that things should go away permanently and it's normal to never get to read it again. "Life is like that" I had around 3.8k collected over the span of 4 years
• doesnt_know 1y ago
  > But what got me sober, what got me through the first one, two, three hard years - none of it was in those notes. > It hit me: what got me here won’t get me where I need to be next. Where was it, or, what was it that did? I believe the author when they went through their system of notes and effectively found nothing that contributed to the most important parts of themselves, but I was also sort of waiting for the alternative answer that I thought was supposed to be coming...
• kkfx 1y ago
  The main problem of notes is that most tools are bad, Emacs/org-mode outshine the others, still having it's own hiccups (for instance a very limited transclusion support so far with org-transclusion and delve at the best). Nevertheless for me it's my main digital life, I have all in notes (org-mode) and the result is another level of computer help in my physical life!
• urbandw311er 1y ago
  I can’t help but wonder if it was the journaling, the act itself of creating and keeping a second brain, that ultimately was useful for the author.
• winter_blue 1y ago
  > The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it - and move on. But the insight was never lived. It was stored. Like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away. The better answer here would have been to make some time to go back and reflect and write more. Not necessarily to throw it all away. The goal should have been to reflect deeply, and write more on the most interesting topics therein. > Worse, the architecture began to shape my attention. I started reading to extract. Listening to summarize. Thinking in formats I could file. Every experience became fodder. I stopped wondering and started processing. Summarization could now be done by LLMs.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • latexr 1y ago
    I don’t understand why so many people on this thread feel the need to prescribe to the author what would’ve been better for them. You don’t know the author, don’t know their mind, and clearly do not understand their thought process. This post is a personal reflection. The author’s actions affect exactly one person: themselves. The “better answer” is unambiguously the one which works out best for the author. Period. They are better equipped than any of us to know what that is.
• atoav 1y ago
  Having went through similar deletions before the important takeaway is that the reason the author felt relief is that deleted things that were weighing them down. A common mistake is to keep stuff you won't need (or worse stuff actively keeping up mental space). If you're really worried about losing something you can still keep those old notes somewhere where it doesn't bother you, but the real useful notes.
• BeetleB 1y ago
  I'd like to believe there is a happy medium. The problem likely is an obsession with any of the following: Trying to keep your notes accurate. Trying to have a "good" organizational scheme (categories? folders? tags?) Trying not to have your notes on a topic fragmented. (Didn't I write about this before? Let me find my earlier note and add to it. Oh, and let me find the appropriate places within a note to add the new info). I've suffered from all of the above. Late last year I decided to start afresh. I use org mode + capture. All notes go in one org file. I don't try to find a prior note on the same topic. I just tag the new note (hopefully with the same tag as before), and start writing. I don't check if I've written some thought before. I then have a function that takes a tag as an input, and creates a new (temporary) org file with only the entries from that note. It's in the same format as my blog's publishing SW, so if I want, I can output to HTML and view it in the browser - with each note being a blog post. 6 months in, though, I've never needed that function. What I like about this: I enter freely without worrying about how it should be organized - I tag it with whatever comes to mind at the moment. I rely on basic search when looking for something. It's not great, but I'll live with it. If I ever do work on a long term project where I can work only very sporadically, that export function will be handy. I never randomly browse. The fact that the file has X notes not acted on - doesn't bother me. That it's all in one file - is surprisingly nice. Since it's in Org mode, I can always do queries on it (but haven't so far).
  • ParetoOptimal 1y ago
    I like howm for this because it's designed around "writing notes fragmentarily". Or as their tagline says: > Write fragmentarily and read collectively. I felt a lot lighter just writing things without thinking about organization too heavily and howm gave nice tools to find/see what I needed. https://github.com/kaorahi/howm/ https://github.com/kaorahi/howm/
• gabrieledarrigo 1y ago
  Well done. I also think that mental clarity comes from a lean, blank sheet of paper, instead of a useless pile of accumulated knowledge. I'm still familiar with the act of deleting, which is liberatory: destroying drawings, writings, trashing things from the past, pictures, and deleting graffiti. I don't want to be productive, I don't care about being able to access a thought from 7 years ago to do...what? I don't want to summarize, I don't want a stupid LLM to dictate my knowledge. I'm a human being, I change, I forget, I can fail, I'll die, and that's it.
• notsydonia 1y ago
  I enjoyed reading this but it also made me think I must be a bit weird. Depending on what I'm working on and where I'm at, I keep notes in Apple notes or obsidian, extended descriptions on bookmarks, physical sticky notes, an actual journal and pages files on desktop - barely any of it is tagged and I'd call it 'notes' rather than a 2nd brain but i go through it all every eight-12 weeks, cull what now seems irrelevant and try to act on the rest of it. I should probably learn how to actually use obsidian properly but I still don't get the 'second brain' terminology.
• 2pie 1y ago
  >It hit me: what got me here won’t get me where I need to be next. This resonates a lot. I always have this feeling when I am browsing old notes.
• yard2010 1y ago
  I think this is not the time to delete an old archive of personal data, it feels like someone who deleted his bitcoin in 2010.. Data is eating the world.
• 1dom 1y ago
  I don't really like this. I think the author let their own personal issues lead to the destruction of knowledge. I relate to the issues, but the nuclear option seems extreme. They could have just left their library for a bit, there was no need to burn it to the ground. "I've just lobotomised myself and I look forward to having to relearn everything and doing it all again". If nothing else, in 7 years time, they'll regret not being able to compare how their new manifestation of internal knowledge anxiety compares to their previous. There was no need to do this. Please anyone, if you're considering this, just zip them up and put them on a usb or cloud storage somewhere out of the way - that's a lot harder to regret.
  • manmal 1y ago
    The problem with hoarding is that, on the whole, the hoarded items are worthless. There’s too much noise and too little signal. Finding the gems takes an active effort, which author found daunting. Hoarders usually need help from the outside, and if they don’t get that help, it’s IMO fair to throw it all out.
    • noisy_boy 1y ago
      > Finding the gems takes an active effort, which author found daunting. Who knows what are gems are what are not? I scan tons of stuff related to my children's school/activities etc. One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them and find some things they will call gems and lots of other junk. Or maybe they will consider it all junk and just get rid of it. But I can't be the judge of that now, I can only be the custodian.
      • manmal 1y ago
        You are perfectly describing the issue when sorting out a hoarder‘s stuff. There‘s no way of knowing what‘s precious and what not for most of the things. There might be some obvious things (wooden furniture / ISO documents that are still relevant), but the rest goes in the trash usually. > One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them My mother used to say the same thing. But I‘m not looking at that old stuff, ever. Maybe your kids will. It’s your decision whether it’s worse to be false negative or false positive here. If the stuff is not taking up too much space, it’s probably a good idea to keep it. Hoarding is something else though.
• ValveFan6969 1y ago
  [dead]
• keizo 1y ago
  i like this. complexity bad, delete it! Most pkm, tools for thought, second brain apps confuse me. I drank the coolade with roam research but it drove me kinda nuts I've spent almost 3 years making my own tool. I mostly use it as a paste-bin, todos, lists -- and for the only thing i would never delete, voice notes on funny sayings or interactions with my 3 y/o daughter. my project is over at https://grugnotes.com https://grugnotes.com if anyone else fits the anti note app vibe i'm kinda leaning into.
• lawgimenez 1y ago
  I've been sober for over 19 years, the first few years are the most difficult transition if I remember. I think the author is overreacting. You can't really deny the past, it's part of you.
• Ezhik 1y ago
  I don't know about everyone, but I found the whole PKM/second brain "industry" a bit much, I was never able to stick to complex rules and things like atomic notes. Instead I mostly just write notes with hyperlinks: https://ezhik.jp/hypertext-maximalism/ https://ezhik.jp/hypertext-maximalism/ I like hoarding my notes. I don't actually have to come back to the notes I write unless I need them. Because I keep my system very simple, having lots of notes doesn't weigh on my mind. My notes are glimpses of my old selves and old interests, but I like being able to trace a line between my old self and my present self. At the same time, I'm not really at odds with my past self - but we all have different relationships with time.
  • motorest 1y ago
    > I don't know about everyone, but I found the whole PKM/second brain "industry" a bit much, I was never able to stick to complex rules and things like atomic notes. I agree. I think that ultimately their product is not a note-taking tool but a vague promise of structure that solves whatever issues the user has in keeping something organized.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• melvinroest 1y ago
  So... I just use Apple Notes and almost never reread my notes. The search functionality is almost always enough to find what I'm looking for. If I really need to dive deep/search deep, then I just open up the SQLite db that's somewhere on my Mac to find a very particular note. That's only needed if I have 100s of notes to sift through. I guess I don't need to know all the link between what I know? The reason I write my experience is: I never got it. Why make things so complicated? How do you write stuff up if you're severely sleep deprived but still have a fun thought? I just become a mess of old habits and even can't be bothered to open my Apple Notes so I just WhatsApp my thoughts to myself, to sort it out later what to do with them when I'm not sleep deprived. Can anyone relate and did they make the switch to something like Obsidian? If so, I'm curious what I'm missing out on or what it is that I'm not understanding. I'm currently around 2500 notes, I started 2 years ago. I wanted a note taking habit for years, none ever stuck. The Apple Notes habit is the only one that really stuck. It's a very KISS-style approach, on purpose. When it becomes more complicated I can only follow through 50% of the time. Now I can follow through 98% of the time.
  • SirHumphrey 1y ago
    One senior researcher I know, though an extremely early user of computers and Emacs, still uses basic paper notebooks for writing things down. The system is not searchable, not hyperlinked - but he still finds things almost effortlessly even though he hasn't been young for a long time. So if the only habit that sticks is Apple notes - keep doing that. At least in my experience hyperlinking was never that useful, because the act of remembering what to hyperlink where was about as difficult as just remembering the what other notes exist - in which case, what do I need hyperlinking for? I also find hyperlinked text hard to read because you end up in Wikipedia style 3 pages deep hyperlink hell - a fun way to spend an afternoon, a terrible way to work and understand.
    • xeonmc 1y ago
      The act of physically writing things down commits the event to incidental memory. The more effort it took to concert all your neurons into outputting an action, the less easily it fades from your impression.
• coldblues 1y ago
  Digital notes take an insignificant amount of space, you can just keep them and ignore them, use them when you need to. Deleting them seems to me like neuroticism. Some kind of symbolic gesture for emotional relief. There are a lot of productivity gurus online that will try to sell you a course on the best way to take notes, and perhaps the author has fallen into one of those traps, taking notes of things they don’t have interest in. in a way that does not feel natural and satisfying. I only take notes when I am compelled to. It’s a gut feeling that I rely on. It’s effortless for me to take notes because of it. It provides me comfort and relief knowing that my memories are accessible, and I gladly write them. The author makes some grandiose assumptions that we have to forget. You don’t have to, and neither do you have a choice in it. It’s some kind of idealist way of thinking to justify the author's actions. Seems misguided. Memorization plays an extremely important role in learning, but for those of us with executive function problems, using our notes augments our life for the better. Just as the author talks about how memories work, my notes are just like my thoughts, webs of interlinked notes strung together. A lot of times, I just remember what tags and backlinks I can use to find the information I am looking for in my notes.
  • junon 1y ago
    > Some kind of symbolic gesture for emotional relief. Calling someone neurotic and insinuating they are doing this for symbolism instead of having a real, tangible effect on their life is rather narcissistic, don't you think? These sort of comments always baffled me; they read as if you've never taken the time to talk to someone who lives or operates differently than you, and don't consider any way but yours a valid worldview and lifestyle.
    • wiseowise 1y ago
      [flagged]
      • junon 1y ago
        [flagged]
• eviks 1y ago
  What if you change your mind again a year later? Couldn't you achieve exactly the same by simply archiving everything and starting from scratch without big data loss?
  • latexr 1y ago
    > Couldn't you achieve exactly the same by simply archiving everything and starting from scratch without big data loss? No. The act of irreversible deletion is meaningful and has a real effect, archiving is not at all the same thing. It’s like moving houses and carrying all the junk you had in your attic to a new garage: all the crap is still there, you still think about it, getting rid of it is liberating. Even if you discover you needed something you threw away, having to redo it from scratch will require doing it differently, with fresh insights.
    • eviks 1y ago
      The analogy doesn't make sense since you can't avoid physical things you moved, they still take space and you see it every time you visit the garage. > has a real effect Sure, and I've mentioned one such effect - inability to access knowledge when you change your mind later. And redoing doesn't require doing anything differently, you could end up doing exactly the same thing finding that useful info, just wasting more time in the process.
      • latexr 1y ago
        > they still take space and you see it every time you visit the garage. And the digital things take space in your disk and, more importantly, the mind. > inability to access knowledge when you change your mind later. If you change your mind later. I’m an avid deleter, have been for years, and have never regretted it. It won’t happen, the upside of deletion is just too good. That regret is a you thing (shared by many others), not a universal human characteristic. You’re not the author of the post, so your feelings don’t apply to them and their decision. > you could end up doing exactly the same thing finding that useful info Yes, you could. That is extremely unlikely, but you could. > just wasting more time in the process. And it still wouldn’t have been a waste of time. Not only would you have confirmed everything, which is extremely useful, it is very unlikely you wouldn’t have thought of new ideas or gained new insights in the process.
• sixpackpg 1y ago
  A poor workman blames their tools. My notes are basically like Smeegol's precious ring, and to burn them is unfathomable. But initially these notes they were garbage, I initially got into all these PKM systems and used a stripped down Zettelkasten, but then realised that I was focused on creating the system not the outcome. My wonderfully linked notes were never being seen, the notes I was taking was not connected to my current focuses. They were virtually all "maybe I'll use this in the next 10 years" type notes. I changed my goal away from following a system to focusing on getting meaningful changes in understanding from notes. This means having the ability to recall information, not rely on a second brain. I spent a fair chunk of time reducing my inputs to notes which are focused on my current goals: metacognition, mental health and business. If the note does not fall in these category it is not noted, I still read things for pleasure just noteless. The value of applying what I read in the short-term outweighs notes for possible futures. As possible futures are everchanging and so the likely value of these notes are heavily weighted down. I do have troves of notes which will be transformed when I need them, but these notes have a very high chance of being seen and are related to my goals, but not applicable currently. I delayed transforming these troves until I am applying them, as I will get the most value out of my notes when they are being applied Not someday dreams, but in reality never to seen again notes of yesteryear. Relying on a second brain is not the same as understanding concepts and applicable learning. An example: When you read an article and come across a word you don't know it stops your train of thought, going to you PKM to find the definition doesn't help. When you know the word it allows you to chunk info and think deeper thoughts about said article. That requires understanding, which you won't get from these PKM systems which focus on input with little concern for output. By having deeper understanding it reveals further planes of thought previously impossible. Adding a note feels good, it feels like work but it really isn't. PKM has sprung up about making feel good systems but have rarely leads to any meaningful changes or outcomes, such as this blog. To get to deeper thought requires way more than creating a note which is literally one of the first parts in my understanding chain. PKM systems focus on this, but spend very little on the other end- meaningful output. My "learning stack" - fleeting ideas go into Todoist, ideas are encoded/transformed and go to into Obsidian, at the same time these ideas go into Anki, which I go through multiple times a week. These ideas are further elaborated on and changed in Anki. My pkm is a single step in developing understanding not the destination. for further anki learning: https://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html https://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html
• DavidPiper 1y ago
  I'm in a similar spot to the author. I have a stack of notes curated over years. Got hooked on the whole Second Brain thing. But I think it's time to trash the lot. I'll probably keep some of the how-tos and syntax reminders for various tools -- looking at you, ffmpeg and defaults -- but most of it, even many of the curated notes from books, is just junk that I carry now carry around, with the added bonus of that little voice saying "hey, you haven't reviewed me in a while, maybe you should because _this time_ there'll be some productivity hack or life-changing insight you'll glean from it". When I look at the physical hoarding tendencies of some people close to me, it looks scarily similar. A long time ago someone told me that you should always be wary of the difference between what you know and what you can look up. Trying to merge those things seems to have been a mistake for me.
  • rwnspace 1y ago
    Intentionally wiping almost all of my obsidian vaults and accidentally wiping my 2TB HDD was the most freeing thing. I'd amassed so many books and papers and notes and half-finished projects over a frenzied couple of years where the main drivers were stimulant abuse and low self-worth. It turns out that the excitement of finding some resource that's perfectly fit for your requirements is it's own rare pleasure, and it can be harmful to make them a demand on yourself in their own right, and especially harmful to try and catch'em all I think I'd decided to grind my way out of my situation and channelled that energy into the most elaborate resource-hoarding and procrastination. I did genuinely learn a lot but very, very inefficiently, and in such a way I was sick of computers and self-motivated learning for a couple years. Second-brain culture definitely provides an open door to hoarding (and stimulant users). I still like using obsidian but I don't care for the various "methods", I just do what makes sense. It turns out when I enjoy the process of doing/learning things, I remember stuff about them pretty well.
  • dist-epoch 1y ago
    > I'll probably keep some of the how-tos and syntax reminders for various tools -- looking at you, ffmpeg and defaults or maybe just ask an LLM for the exact command each time you need it.
• aucisson_masque 1y ago
  i will just give a fresh counterargument I encountered yesterday. when trying to reset my Passat service warning, you got to press a combination of button, hold a few seconds, etc. I spent about an hour yesterday looking for the right combination, for the right model of Passat produced in the right year. A freaking hour of wasted time. Been doing that every 2 year or something for the past decade. You have no idea how many times I angered if only I had taken 30 seconds the last time to put the right YouTube link in an obsidian note. Even if the second brain is messy, it's still your mess. Internet is even a bigger mess than that. And to that, I'd add that a second brain should behave like a real brain in the way that our brain get rid of (what it thinks) is useless. Your note should reflect on that and be cleaned up once a while for things that are not relevant anymore and should be disregarded, it doesn't negate the advantage of the second brain tho which is that it's able to retain much more information and even file. Good luck embedding a pdf or a tax report in your brain.
• KronisLV 1y ago
  I don't really use any PKM tools outside of an instance of Kanboard and OpenProject for tracking the stuff I want to do in the future, but because of my mTLS setup and limited hardware in my homelab, using them ends up feeling slow and sluggish (Kanboard is okay except for mTLS, whereas OpenProject is just unbearably slow all the time). I did consider having a personal Wiki a while back where I'd jot down the solutions to various problems that I encounter over the years, but instead opted for just writing the occasional blog post on my blog, which also ends up feeling even higher friction, because I still need what I write to have some sort of a structure and the expectation is that it will mostly make sense to a reader that stumbles upon it, not just me. Maybe that was a mistake. It would actually be immensely cool to be able to reference solutions to a particular problem that I had 2 years ago, once I encounter it again but what I did back then has slipped my mind. Only as long as there is really good search (maybe even semantic search and automatic tagging) and it's easy to use. If nothing else, I can easily imagine that being another side project to work on, for the fun of it, a software package that I customize to my own needs and control.
• ecocentrik 1y ago
  Why not just start a new notebook/vault? Notetaking systems are all imperfect and it's best not to throw a fit every time you run into those imperfections.
• tasuki 1y ago
  > I still love Obsidian. And I’m planning on using it again. From scratch. And with a deeper level of curation and care - not as a second brain, but as a workspace for the one I already have. Different, but reminds me of something I have regrettably witnessed at several of my workplaces: "Our knowledge base is in disarray. It's disorganised, full of out of date information, and it's hard to find the things you need. Let's discard it and create a better one!" Then the new one quickly falls into disarray just the same. Now you have to search two badly-organized, partially out of date knowledge bases. I wonder why people are so resistant to organising whatever they have already. I'm surely never deleting my personal knowledge base. I might rework parts of it in the future...
  • recursivecaveat 1y ago
    Organizing your stuff means starting a big unpleasant task today. Starting a new knowledge base lets you have fun today, and you cross your fingers that future you will eat their vegetables and diligently keep it up to date forever.
    • Cub3 1y ago
      Something you could get an LLM to do for you
  • Dylan16807 1y ago
    > Let's discard it and create a better one!" Then the new one quickly falls into disarray just the same. Now you have to search two badly-organized, partially out of date knowledge bases. I could blame the idea of moving to a new knowledge base here, or say it was a waste of time, but instead I'm going to blame a stark refusal to make a schedule for a simple job and then follow it. "Discard it and create a better one" is very easy to understand. If you still have two after a few weeks you failed at a fundamental level. The problem wasn't the idea.
    • tasuki 1y ago
      > The problem wasn't the idea. I'll double down: yes, the initial idea is the problem. In a large organization, you can never discard the old knowledge base because you do not understand it well enough. No one does. No one knows which pieces of the old knowledge base are useful to whom. So it sticks around indefinitely. The best you can do as an individual is to gradually improve your corner of the knowledge base. The idea that "we'll create a new one and it'll be up-to-date forever" is unrealistic, it's wishful thinking. If we weren't able to do it with the old one, why think we'll be able to do it with the new one?
• admiralrohan 1y ago
  I only keep my own thoughts in my 2nd brain, mostly daily journals. To see how my thinking evolves over time. Helped me to develop my unique theory on human behavior.
• kashunstva 1y ago
  Part of the problem with these collections of notes, whether you call them Zettelkasten, Second Brain, PKM or whatever, is the expectation that something unique, amazing, or earth-shattering emerge from the process of using it. The expectation is strongest in the Zettelkasten community where they trot out the story of some academic sociologist of old who invented the system and cranked out tons of publications. Never mind that those publications have practically zero impact on the field currently. There is also the apparent expectation that you follow a specific and arcane method, with specific types of notes that evolve in a certain prescribed way. I’m a reasonably smart person and the ZK ontology perpetually escapes me. Maybe because it’s needlessly reductive. Yes maybe Luhmann used the system to generate a lot of publications. But the academics I know have never even heard of this. My spouse has a few hundred published papers and her process is nothing like this. Anyway, I don’t see the point in destroying one’s notes. It seems performatively symbolic; and if that helps you get past a block of some sort, more power to you. My own notes are half-organized, half-chaotic. Vestiges of a dozen different systems live on in it. It shows that I suffer from collector’s fallacy. I don’t care.
  • Tomte 1y ago
    > some academic sociologist of old > Never mind that those publications have practically zero impact on the field currently You‘re so cool and edgy. Luhmann is still one of the most cited, grappled-with and thought-about sociologist across a number of disciplines.
    • warpspin 1y ago
      > Luhmann is still one of the most cited, grappled-with and thought-about sociologist across a number of disciplines. Unfortunately (though I think this is a regional thing also - Luhmann's still pretty strong in Europe, especially in Germany where "systems theory" has become synonymous with Luhmann's systems theory, but not so much in the USA, I think). One of the problems with Luhmann stems directly from his Zettelkasten: His tendency to tear citations out of their original contexts and name drop witnesses for his own point of views where the original text did not support his view at all. You can see the system at work actually: He truly made a lot of stuff his own in ways never intended by the original authors - boon and bane at same time.
• tucnak 1y ago
  > Sorry, you have been blocked You are unable to access beehiiv.com Well
• kmarc 1y ago
  I find it interesting, that some (many? most?) people develop anxiety about the stash of never-read but captured content in their note-taking apps. I would think I am normally this guy. The one, who gets anxious over exactly this kind of matter. However, the (almost-)never-read captured content induces two substantially different emotions in me: * safety * joy Safety, because I know the content is there, in case i ever want to search for it (I do daily worklog, I capture web pages for later reads, I also draft my own blog posts / etc before posting it on intranet, and so on). And joy! Sometimes, accidentally I find a snippet, a piece of knowledge, something I quickly jotted down during a guided tour 4 years ago somewhere in the Andes. I know that at that time I thought it's so, so super important to research the topic later. Even with zero connectivity, probably freezing and bothered by the wind, I went through the trouble of grabbing my phone and taking the misspelled note. Looking at this kind of notes brings back memories. A joyful experience.
• rsanek 1y ago
  >Worse, the architecture began to shape my attention. I started reading to extract. Listening to summarize. Thinking in formats I could file. Every experience became fodder. I stopped wondering and started processing. This sort of experience is what I've seen pop up consistently in folks that feel relief in letting go of some sort of knowledge management system. The trick might lie in one's ability to avoid (or get past) this sort of feeling. I think I agree that it's better to trash the whole thing than to be stuck in this kind of mindset. For me, the mindset took 1~2 years to take hold after I started using Anki. Probably 3~4 years after that until I was able to dispose of it. Now, it's fun again.
• kristjank 1y ago
  When people discard something and Chesterton's fence doesn't come around to bite them in the back, I assume that the something was a bunch of rubbish in the first place.
• dirkc 1y ago
  I'd like a digital reset - like starting a new play-through in a game. I don't know how exactly? Buy a new PC, maybe I should jump platforms, a new email address, no past bookmarks, some deliberate avoidance of things I know by memory. The old stuff will always be there, but I feel like a fresh opportunity to explore the digital world could be nice. Or maybe not?
• M0r13n 1y ago
  I can absolutely relate to this. I had similar feelings for the last year or so - although I couldn't express these thoughts as well as the author did. I've developed this weird addiction to making notes in Obsidian. It wasn't really about learning or understanding anything. I bought into the illusion that having notes in my PKM meant I had actual knowledge. Bigger graph = smarter me, or so I thought. I even started reading books just to feed the system: Look at me with my 3,587 notes this year - aren't I clever!" Currently, I am just taking notes where it really matters: Readme, documentation and some loosely organised markdown files
• barrnell3 1y ago
  Word of advice: don't do what the author has done. He has gone from one extreme (categorizing all notes obsessively) to the other extreme (wiping all notes, to start fresh). The answer, as usual, is in the middle: keep all notes, archived. Feel free to restart old projects/ideas by archiving old projects to old/2024/legacy, and starting with a fresh page/folder, occasionally looking back at archived notes, if needed.
  • gtsop 1y ago
    > He has gone from one extreme (categorizing all notes obsessively) to the other extreme (wiping all notes, to start fresh). No, he went from extreme to "in the middle", if you find yourself in their place you should do EXACTLY what he did. > I’m planning on using it again. From scratch. And with a deeper level of curation and care - not as a second brain, but as a workspace for the one I already have. You can't categorize a gazillion notes you obsessively picked up over years. Do anything required to become functional again, in this case, delete it all if it is psychologically weighing on you
• kelvinjps10 1y ago
  I don't delete them but I put them in a archive folder and kn the main folder I only maintain the current version of the files
• bilvar 1y ago
  I'm not sure I can relate to the author. My Zettelkasten is not a todo list or project binder or whatever personal life management function they use it for. Mine is for consolidation of knowledge. For instance, when I study math and I write a pen and paper proof as an exercise I then write a clean note from scratch and link to other theorems or corollary notes I have etc. Similar stuff for computer science or programming. I find out that this process solidifies the work I'd already done and make it less likely to forget. I also think people get a bit too dogmatic about the ways to use technology to help improve your life. Like, what the heck complex rules about Zettelkasten? I don't know what kind of expectations they have going into this. Do these "influencers" telling you how to use it sell the promise of the ultra-intelligent god from the popular meme? Just open the damn editor and write, you will find what works for you through tinkering and iteration.
  • kaashif 1y ago
    Yeah, it seems like they were writing massive volumes of useless ephemeral to-do lists and throwing them away was easy. Maybe they were doing it wrong and should've been writing down durable knowledge that has lasting value. I write down guides to do things, explanations of how things work that make sense to me, information that I know will be useful at some time but will be accessed infrequently (e.g. information about people or projects). A 7,000 book reading list seems useless if your goal is to read all of them. But if it's just a bank of interesting books to pull from when you want something to read on the beach or on a sunny weekend, that doesn't cause me stress at least. I'm adding to the bank, not adding items to do. Like my list of board games to try.
• kelvinjps10 1y ago
  I maintain a very simple system a folder my ideas, another for my projects and one for thoughts I think that with the current search tools at our disposal there is no need to set up a complex system
• metalman 1y ago
  ,.............the ancient greeks, correctly identified nostalgia as a disease.That said ,deap personal memories do serve a central place is familial and tribal/cultural knowledge, but the ......."insignificant bits (and bobs)" are poison this is something that I have experienced on a number of occasions when knowledge keepers have......inserted, very short statements that serve to turn a great deal of other myth and trivia into a cohearant whole containing actionable instructions. a list can never,ever, serve this function
• gtsop 1y ago
  > I don’t want to manage knowledge. I want to live it. This is the essence! Very good post. I think the nuclear action was perfect, it was neede to get out of the loop. You should write your thoughts, not copy paste others'. This way you help reorganise your brain to adapt to the subject. Some thoughts should be written as a tool and then thrown away, others (more important) should be kept
• Havoc 1y ago
  These types of impulsive grand swings ("Remember everything -> Delete everything") are in my experience always mistakes in the long run. Would have been better to figure out how to prune 50% in a way that hits the right spots.
• igiveup 1y ago
  I don't get this. I have a megabyte or two of plain-text notes, and going through them and maintaining them and extending them is fun (apologize to the person who doesn't like threes). There are notes for a novel, ideas for future personal projects (way too many to do in my remaining lifetime), attempts at capturing my understanding of great scientific and philosophical problems, weird things I invented in my dreams, various ideas which didn't fit anywhere else. Guess what, the novel will probably never get written, projects will never get done, I will not make a philosophical breakthrough. So what? Some ideas on how am I supposed to start hating my notes: * They grow to 100MB, then it starts to be a burden * I switch from notepad.exe to a dedicated application which somehow exploits my hobby of writing notes * I develop OCD or something else None of this seems very relatable. At this point, I might be writing a new note with these ideas, updating it when I get more ideas or when the one, most plausible explanation jumps out at me. Then I would read it years later and have something to think about before bed and have a good feeling that I didn't lose something and I am not left with thougths about the last episode of a TV show. Or is that supposed to be a bad feeling?
  • latexr 1y ago
    > I don't get this. I’ll try to help. > going through them and maintaining them and extending them is fun It’s fun for you, not for everyone else. There, it’s as simple as that. All you need to understand is different people enjoy different things. > Or is that supposed to be a bad feeling? It’s not “supposed” to be anything. It will be good for some, bad for others, neutral for others still. There’s no objective right answer. If you enjoy something and it doesn’t harm anyone, do it. If you don’t enjoy it and it isn’t necessary, don’t do it. Other people will have different preferences.
    • igiveup 1y ago
      Oh, the OP pretty much told me that they didn't like taking notes. I am trying to understand why, what is the mechanism? Is it like burning out? Can it happen to me and my notes when I start doing something wrong? Why is "just do less of it" not a solution? Why is "just expect less from it" not a solution? Am I an exception? If so, why? "All you need to understand" is for insects.
• edem 1y ago
  I started building the second brain a while ago but I quickly started to feel like I was trying to dance while wearing a straitjacket so I stopped doing it.
• nkrisc 1y ago
  Notes should be for things you can’t remember. How long did I bake that loaf of bread that turned out great? I’m not carrying that detail around in my mind with me unless I’m a baker and baking thirty loaves a day. Only then does become a permanent resident in my brain through pure repetition. Thinking and processing and making connections is a dynamic and amorphous experience that can’t be put into static notes. It’s always changing, based on your mood, recent experiences, and new knowledge acquired. Write down things you can’t remember, but keep the thinking in your head.
• alabhyajindal 1y ago
  This matches my experience as well. I have been journalling on and off for 4-5 years. It's a way for me to process my thoughts. But I never look back it, I don't feel the need to. The writing is the important bit, not the resulting output.
• jbs789 1y ago
  This whole Second Brain idea is new to me. Sounds like a lot of work relative to what you get in return.
  • al_borland 1y ago
    It's effectively a really intense form of procrastination.
• UltraSane 1y ago
  What an incredibly stupid thing to do.
• emadda 1y ago
  I think the speed at which you can open previous notes matters. If it takes you 1 minute of scrambling in a GUI to find a previous note, you are less likely to read previous notes. And also less likely to write new ones as you know you’ll never visit it again. I have an app built on the fzy CLI and Ghostty terminal for Apple Notes. It is working well for me: https://github.com/emadda/hot-notes https://github.com/emadda/hot-notes
• johnplatte 1y ago
  I remember reading the compendium of human-interface writings Apple put together in the 1990s. There was an exploration of ways to show age in software. They were changing the color and adding other aging effects to old files in the Finder. I think part of that thought has stuck with me. I like storing things in directories by year. It is a structural reminder that a lot of the value of what I'm doing is tied to this moment in time. I can search back through "over the years" to find things, and it addresses this question of guilt.
• birriel 1y ago
  It's baffling to me that anyone would do this in the age of LLMs. All of the author's concerns could've been solved or greatly mitigated by loading her PKM into a model as context. The article doesn't mention that she even considered this as an option. I hope the files can be recovered when she realizes this possibility.
  • Barrin92 1y ago
    >All of the author's concerns could've been solved or greatly mitigated by loading her PKM into a model as context No, because the correctly identified concern by the author is much deeper. Knowledge isn't some repository of data, or some solipsistic LLM simulacrum of it, it's practiced, social, contextual. A real brain, unlike the "second brain", intentionally forgets. To have agency is to purposefully erase, cut through BS, and start from a clean slate. Any person who has done anything meaningful starts with an empty sheet of paper. There's a reason all these note taking gurus have exactly zero actual work to their name, it's just productivity LARPing. Every single time you see one of these "productivity" advocates you try to look up if they've build something that has helped even one person with all their productivity, nothing. They just keep yapping about their notes.
• ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  Sounds like Hoarder’s Syndrome, but digitally. I’m a cable hoarder. It’s pretty bad. I have cables for tech that’s been dead for a couple of decades. “Just in case.” Need a FireWire 400 hub? Got you covered. Even better, how about SCSI? Every now and then, I go through them, and toss out a few, but many remain. I’ve also been in Recovery for a while. Suspect the Venn diagram overlaps a bit.
• roxolotl 1y ago
  > I delete what I don’t need. I don’t capture everything. I don’t try to. I read what I feel like. I think in conversation, in movement, in context. I don’t build a second brain. I inhabit the first. This is a really important insight especially today. There is a ton of pressure to move faster, produce, consume, be the absolute best. Use AI to do things you’d never be able to before. Build a zettlekasten that insights will fall out of. Give up your attention to the next big thing. For some I’m sure that’s fulfilling and I do not mean to say to stop. But for those whom it brings anxiety, a feeling they can never have or be enough, that meaning is just around the corner this is an important insight. It reminds me of a favorite quote of mine from Emerson’s Self Reliance: Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes; for that for ever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside.
• jbmny 1y ago
  What a well-written piece. It reminded me of my own habit of logging my pour-over coffee brews. For months I saved every variable about every cup, imagining that one day I'd analyze that data and arrive at the perfect recipe. I never once looked at the data. Eventually I realized that I'd rather learn by just paying close attention to this cup, and using it to change my approach for the next cup. It feels like a more human, living knowledge.
  • Fade_Dance 1y ago
    Overanalyzing everything loses some of the "magic". I drink tea, but I assume there's a similar sort of zen-like ritual to the whole process. That's somewhat it odds with turning the whole thing into a science experiment. Granted, some of that is a projection of positivity onto what is just another simply addictive substance, but I digress. A lot of tasks in life have elements of this though, including creative thinking and flow-state work which continually logging and categorizing can somewhat interrupt. In your case I'd consider doing a 1-off analysis of "the perfect cup", with full data collection for a couple of weeks. Then analyze it, distill it down, and extract the lesson and conclusions. Then go back to the more organic method, and hopefully the cup is a little better. Win win. As some other comments have mentioned, there's a streak of obsessiveness and anxiety in the original piece. Everything doesn't need to be extensively logged, and it doesn't necessarily need to be something you do everyday. A lot of the "burden" aspect seems to be from some internal issues that the author needs to work on. All of these approaches are just tools. They can be used with a light touch approach (maybe only very complex projects need a vigorously searchable and indexed "second brain", and most of the time a .txt file in a simple daily log that takes no more than 2 minutes per day is more than enough, etc). And I know, those two approaches don't perfectly interface with one another, but creating an all-encompassing perfect system is an exercise and futility, and if that's the goal, then no wonder it's a massive cause of anxiety.
• melodyogonna 1y ago
  I have a simple philosophy in how I approach everything: Too much of anything is bad. When I started taking notes with obsidian I almost fell into this trap of over-analysing everything in terms of what should go into a note, making folders and sub-folders. It became quickly obvious to me that the mental burden of this can accumulate quickly. These days I store most of my notes in one folder. The only times I now make a note are: 1. When I'm reading. 2. Very rare these days, but sometimes I still have nagging thoughts that wants to be written down. 3. When I have important information that needs to be stored, like IP address, things like this. I've found that not thinking about notes obsessively like this helps me better, most thoughts are useless and fleeting, they're not worth writing down imo. Best to be in your mind in those. The outcome of this is that my vault has remained simple and small even after a year, and when I search it for information it is almost always for some important detail I knew I wrote down, I don't get overloaded with junk. To keep my notes space clean I also regularly move things to archive, which I rarely check.
  • chrbr 1y ago
    I’ve also struggled with over-analyzing where stuff should go. I’ve restarted a new Obsidian vault based on PARA [1], and am experimenting with using LLMs (both Cursor and Claude Code) to help me decide where stuff should go. Been a big help so far. [1] https://fortelabs.com/blog/para/ https://fortelabs.com/blog/para/
    • sothatsit 1y ago
      I've started seeing a number of people talk about using Claude Code for searching, writing, and organising text documents. It is an interesting trend to me. I tried it out with my non-technical girlfriend and she really liked using it for helping with analysing interview transcripts. It seems like that agentic workflow is really effective outside of coding as well. I just hope non-technical people that pick this up also pick up version control. Or, is there a better alternative to Claude Code that can accomplish a similar thing while being more friendly to non-technical people?
    • rkwz 1y ago
      > am experimenting with using LLMs (both Cursor and Claude Code) to help me decide where stuff should go. Can you elaborate on this?
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• pugdev7 1y ago
  Who needs two brains anyway?
• somewhatrandom9 1y ago
  I enjoyed the piece, but wonder if the author could have found some benefit if they used the corpus to train an (ideally locally-run (for privacy)) ai - so that questions could be asked of it and some value extracted..
• bee_rider 1y ago
  This seems like a particular curse of having an indexable, easily searchable journal. I use a paper notebook, which comes with the built in assumption that most of your notes are going to be permanently put on the shelf and forgotten. A couple pages can be marked somehow or another if anything really useful somehow ends up on them. Writing things out is an important part of the process… I’d be a bit worried about obtaining a default assumption where those notes become anything other than ephemera.
• blindriver 1y ago
  I deleted all my gchats over 10 Years ago and it was the most freeing thing I did in my digital life. I realized they were absolutely useless but carried a weird weight for me. “What if I need something important from them?” Nope. If there’s something important then I can ask whomever again. “What if I want to go through them?” Nope. Never even thought about it since I deleted them. Not even the first times I chatted with my now-wife. Once I realized they were useless it helped me never save my WhatsApp messages and I turned on disappearing messages as soon as the feature appeared. I have another friend I’ve known for 20+ years, we set messages to 8 hours disappearing. If we miss a message or forget what we talked about, so be it. It’s all so freeing, I never realized what a burden it could be, worrying about what if I lost something. I delete everything now except my photos which have more value.
  • kaashif 1y ago
    This is interesting. I guess I have all of my Whatsapp and Facebook messenger chats saved and have never thought about it. I have never even thought about this being a burden in any way. It's interesting that people have such different perspectives on this.
    • blindriver 1y ago
      Why do you keep them? Why don't you just delete them?
      • kaashif 1y ago
        Why should I? They just sit there and don't bother me. Never even thought about them.
• iamsanteri 1y ago
  Very nice article as I’ve felt the same. Throughout my 20’s I’ve accumulated a huge amount of mental models, diary entries, ambitions, goals, knowledge, thoughts, interests and everything in-between. It helped me a lot and truly let me excel in some things – surprisingly enough. Since I turned 30 last year I’ve almost sort of been afraid to look into that repository whatsoever. It’s a mix of amusement and anxiety. What felt like unlimited potential and a nearing of the “apex”, my motivation is still there somewhere in my head, but I’ve suppressed it and opened my eyes to almost half of my life being lived. Sometimes I’m even afraid to stop and think deeply like I tended to do before. I distract myself. Was that a some sort of a religion carrying me week by week month to month? I take it step-by-step, day by day now and try to worry less while bringing back the focus of what I’d want to achieve. I calm myself down and work on things more gradually, cutting myself some slack. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t just delete it all. Instead I’m just using it less and less, only adding some truly profound things and thoughts when I come across them. My reading list keeps filling up… I fulfill some of my ambitions, but also leave many of them undone by the time I thought I should’ve been done with them trying not to not feel bad about it. This techno-masochistic models-oriented mega-productive way of living is already perhaps disillusioning a lot of people out there, and we are entering the next stage. Feels like end of an era, at least for me personally.
• QuiEgo 1y ago
  I think it's important to acknowledge everyone's mind works differently, and something different works for everyone. For me, I've found once I start trying to follow a system, like PARA or zettelkästen or whatever else, it just becomes tedious and time consuming and I feel like a slave to the system. After going through 3-4 cycles of this, I came to feel like the main point of these systems is to sell books to people like me, who's brain craves structure yet struggles to create it :). I also came to realize most of my notes are write once, read never. I now just make quick and dirty notes and throw them in an "archive" folder once they are not active (one "inbox" folder for active ones), and rely on search. No system, no curation. Same strategy for email. I do find the notes useful to keep; e.x. "when was the last time I got bloodwork done at the doctor" or "what command did I run to get the debugger to hit the right symbol server for that old old project", but I spend basically 0 thought cycles on them now. I also find plaintext or markdown to be the ideal format for these notes. There's a whole other category of notes, where you want to share information with others or teach. This is documentation. It is best suited to a wiki format with rich text. I think a lot of people end up making wiki-style notes, but really they are never going to look at them again or share them and they could have just hacked up a quick text file and then archived it, instead of making something pretty no one will ever care about afterwords (including themselves). It's really hard to admit this though.
  • aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
    started with PARA, and ended up in PR. I have one note per topic. I write down in summary when I'm activity studying something. Most of it i end up remembering but its nice knowing where to look when i forget. (Especially a link to what i used to study it last time). Some of them could probably be printed as a compendium at this point. I have one note per project, running as a log of quick paste dump or thoughts when i leave for the day. Usually never revisited. I have some journal notes. But they're rare and only written for larger events (trips, holidays). I was all-in on backlings and atomic notes for a while, but it ended up being unsearhable. The current method could survive without backlings at all.
  • kilroy123 1y ago
    I agree. I have come to this conclusion PARA and zettelkästen are just forms of procrastination.
• zkmon 1y ago
  I interpret this as humanity's struggle to get back to its habitat, real world and fall back to keep pace with much slower biological evolution. Tools - all the way from stone tools used for hunting, to the AI assistants - are compensation for the desired extra pace in evolution. We can't grow horns over night and grow large in size to rule the jungle, so we got our hunting tools. But then we let the tools and thought dictate the biological human. Mind has always been a slave of the body, serving just enough intelligence as commanded by the body. But then mind grew to be the master, commanding the body and demanding faster evolution. When body could not deliver to the demands, mind went ahead and created artificial extensions to the body using tools, technologies and science. Mind no longer responds to the body signals leading to suppressed senses, unmet bodily needs, lack of intimacy with the ongoings of the body and total lack of basic understanding of purpose and function of body.
• NalNezumi 1y ago
  Thanks for sharing, it was an interesting read that made me introspect on my usage of Obsidian too. I think there's a couple of points during his journey the author could've came to a more balanced conclusion than deleting his "second brain" (obsidian folder). First is ofc the tool-creep that he mention. It was supposed to be a support tool, to make you reach a goal or solve a problem. Yet it become a goal in itself. A classic Goodhart's law. This should've led him to realize that he need to limit what context the Second brain idea is applied to. Luhmann, the Zettlekasten guy kept in his physical office, segregating his "thinking & writing, work" with the rest of his life. The authors case is the classic "Todolist trap". If he could've identified that early, he could've maybe siloed it better to the useful part. Second, The "Unread list". One of the first things even in the Zettlekasten ideal (which spanned the entire second brain idea) is to never put in anything unprocessed. Everything, new idea to new reading, should be first processed, thought of, and then written down in your own word. When you break this principle, your second brain is not a brain, it's a todo list. The third is to humanize it. This also affect point 2. If you properly review your second brain, you'll notice that great insight or ideas you wrote down doesn't seem so great anymore, or lacking. It's also hard to recount why you considered this thing great, or worth writing down. That's when you realize that sometimes, the detail of the idea doesn't matter as much as why/when and how you came up with it. You more often can come up with same idea, hopefully even more refined, if you just remember the context of it. This should transform your "second brain" from not merely being a list of connected ideas, but with contexts. Who did you share that idea with? Where you sad/mad/angry? what did you do the day you got that idea? Those are all ques your brain can use to reconstruct the entire picture, wayyy better than just words. People that wrote diaries have known this since forever. It's not the ideas you want to keep, but the mental state that reached you to that idea. New, future you, can take that idea way way further, given the same mental state. This insight alone should delete all unread lists. At best it should be delegated to a reference/archive "folder" disconnected from your second brain. Second brain is not an archive, it's a process. When you misunderstand that, often because you're attached (ego) to the ideas you generate, you fall for the trap the author did. Edit: I realized that the author is from the rationalist movement. That kinda figures.
• scuol 1y ago
  I understand the sentiment, but disagree with the solution. PKMs can be overwhelming if someone nerdy enough to use one ends up using it ineffectively. The way I do it that I find works well is to have the following: 1. each day, have a journal page for a given day. Content only happens in the journal pages 2. have a series of topics that you tag. This system is up to you, but I usually find something with a hierarchy that is <=3 levels deep is best, e.g. I have "Job Search/2025/Company" 3. for each of the relevant tag pages, have those have some sort of "query" that will pull in all relevant tasks from all the journal pages, sort them by priority / state / deadline so you can see this all in one place (e.g. "What's the next step I have to do for my Nvidia application?" -> easy to answer with this system). Depending on your PKM, the hierarchy enables you to easily answer that question at a higher level, e.g. "What's the next steps I have to do for ALL of my applications?". In each journal page, you can also write down a "task backlog" so minor tasks that you remember don't take up headspace while you intend to work on other major tasks (e.g. write down "get back to Joel about the Nvidia referral"). Regarding a point other folks have made: treat the journal and these tags as more of a "stream" of things you're doing in your life, instead of a collection of every-expanding obligations or a mausoleum of unexplored ambition. I built this in Logseq, which seems to be the only one that has an advanced-enough query language to do this in that is possible to do local-only (no mandatory cloud data) in text files. If anyone knows how to build such a system in a different application, I'd be happy to learn! Logseq has been stale for a year or 2 as the authors are working on a much needed near-total rewrite which I'm not sure is ever going to arrive at this point.
• goosejuice 1y ago
  This is like the personal version of shapeup's reasoning to get rid of backlogs and there's a little nod to it. But yes, a backlog is a list of tasks not a second brain. https://basecamp.com/shapeup/2.1-chapter-07 https://basecamp.com/shapeup/2.1-chapter-07
  • StochasticLi 1y ago
    For a similar reason I kill all my unpinned tabs automatically every 24 hours. If I didn't do/read it, it means there are more important issues.
    • aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
      I delete my tabs at shutdown. If its an important resource ut should be in the documentation for the project.
      • StochasticLi 1y ago
        I'm running a company so it's more than a project.
    • goosejuice 1y ago
      I never understood the large browser tab list. Though I am the kind of person that typically keeps only one to two buffers open in my editor. I must have a mild allergy to visual noise or something.
      • SoftTalker 1y ago
        Very much the same. I almost never have more than half a dozen browser tabs open. They are always ephemeral. I don't save browser history or cookies either. Dispite all technology advances, a person's short-term memory can still only actively handle to four to seven things at a time. I'm probably on the low side of that. Having 30 browser tabs open is utterly pointless as I won't have any idea what 25 of them are for.
• hombre_fatal 1y ago
  Damn. My notes over the years are the only that gives me insight into who I was and what I cared about back then. Every once in a while I boot up a 15 year old Evernote archive or scroll through my Notes.app to get a new glimpse into the things my younger me was up to. It's often endearing, and it also reminds me of how much I will forget about myself in another 10 years, yet these were the things that I spent my free time doing, and this person used to exist. I feel like an archaeologist into my own life. Even my most technical notes are laced with the residue of my character that I can see myself in. I'm super sentimental though. I could scroll back to an ancient journal entry and probably make myself tear up if I consider it long enough.
  • kaashif 1y ago
    I feel like this too. I remember one time I came across a stack of notes (the throwaway kind I just write to help me learn) from school and I read through them, it made me very nostalgic. Especially reading homework set by teachers who have since died. It actually did make me tear up a bit. I even feel nostalgic and tearful looking at random doodles on a piece of paper that I did during my first job many years ago.
  • BrtByte 1y ago
    That feeling of being an archaeologist in your own life really resonates, like rediscovering forgotten versions of yourself, preserved in the syntax of old thoughts
• BrtByte 1y ago
  Kinda ironic how tools meant to externalize thinking can end up stifling it. Might be time to clean house
• ChaoPrayaWave 1y ago
  There’s something freeing about admitting that you won’t capture everything. I still write stuff down, but I stopped trying to build the “perfect” system. Life’s messy. Notes can be, too.
• gtpedrosa 1y ago
  That was an interesting read. Even more if you take a look into another of the author's text on the decline of personal thought [1]. I believe the author is engaging with very interesting questions: what is knowledge? How can I achieve it? How does it feel during the pursuit? Of course the answer is deeply personal. My take is that I agree with the author on that knowledge should be inhabited, as I quoted Arendt on a former blog entry of mine [2] "For memory and depth are the same, or rather depth can only be reached by man through remembrance.". If your journey using whatever tool du jour helps you, more power to you! But if it feels like a burden, drop it and adapt. In my process, I tried many different methods of note taking, but the one I haven't dropped is pen and paper. The act of writing is thinking to me. I do not have a plan to go through what I have written and treat them as a fortuitous encounter rather than having a procedure/method in place. But I still find the idea of having digital notes somewhat appealing, luring even. [1]https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/cognitive-offshoring-and-the-decline-of-personal-thought-26c6d43ac5089a9a https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/cognitive-offshoring-and-th... [2]https://gtpedrosa.github.io/blog/on-taking-notes-and-learning-methods/ https://gtpedrosa.github.io/blog/on-taking-notes-and-learnin...
• basisword 1y ago
  I understand this and I have done similar a few times (e.g. deleting all old emails, deleting all notes, deleting a tonne of old files etc.). It's quite freeing. We do hoard a lot of digital stuff that we really don't need. Saying that, there are a few times over the years I've needed somethings, realised I deleted it and regretted it. That feeling passed quickly though and I soon realised it probably didn't matter.
• nprateem 1y ago
  The futile craving for permanence.
• _aleph2c_ 1y ago
  This post is a masterpiece
• scop 1y ago
  I did the same thing recently, excluding quotes from books. Every other note, How To, and To Do gone. It provided tremendous relief. The vast majority of the stuff may as well have been written by a complete stranger. But, again, I kept my book quotes and notes as that is something I reference regularly. I guess the main thing was the realization that I literally don’t access 90% of my notes and they were of no value other than making me feel something about myself.
• colelyman 1y ago
  I have been enamored with developing a second brain and other productivity hacks, but have recently been turned off to them, because I believe the benefits are over-promised. Similar to OP, I haven’t been able to achieve the clarity of mind and creative thoughts that are promised by a second brain. While I do think that deleting the whole thing is extreme, I can imagine that there is a level of catharsis experienced by that. Lately I have subscribed to Oliver Burkeman’s (author of “4,000 Weeks”) line of thinking where life, and subsequently thoughts, are more meant to be experience rather than optimized. For me, I have seen a negative drop in “life enjoyment” when I have tried to capture everything, and have yet to realize the results and even stick with it consistently (which may be the reason for not seeing the positives).
• lowleveldesign 1y ago
  I understand the burden that too much notes may take on you. I am a software troubleshooter and I used to keep my raw notes of all the interesting cases I encountered. However, with time, this set became hard to navigate. Additionally, when I was rereading my notes, they seemed chaotic and hard to follow. I now prefer to create a succinct summary of a closed case, explaining the taken steps, my thinking, and the solution, so that my future self could understand it :)
• godot 1y ago
  I realize I must be in the minority of software engineers/tech circles, I do not keep a "personal knowledge management" base. I do have a personal Notion, but the things I keep in it are like list of restaurants we want to try and haven't yet, list of travel destinations we want to go at some point, the trash collection schedule, things like that. Basically references/bookmarks. I don't keep reading lists, knowledge I learned, or anything like that in an archive. I rely completely on my own memory in my brain for those. (I also don't open up tabs with intentions of "I'll read this later". Either I read it and close it, or don't. If it feels semi-interesting but long, I just skim it, then close it.) If anything interesting comes up, I talk about it, typically in a group chat (I have about half a dozen group chats with various friend groups or ex-coworkers groups that are active). If a discussion took place about something, I will likely remember it. If I remember some key points, if something comes up in the future about it, I will remember enough to look it up, whether by Google or by LLM. * I've lived this way for decades professionally and never found myself missing a piece of knowledge in any context that I wish I had. In other words I don't find a use to keep a personal knowledge base. For those reading this, maybe it helps you think about whether you need one like this as well. Perhaps like the article author here, you might feel more relieved not having one. * I also want to note that I operate this way at work / in meetings as well. I find that if I try to take notes during meetings, I can't pay attention fully, and can't digest the information being discussed. It works much better if I don't take any notes at all, pay attention in the meeting, and if there's anything important from the meeting, I try to write it down afterwards (typically in a Slack message) from memory. 99% of the time it works fine and once in a long while I might miss something (but someone else who reads my Slack message would fill out what I missed).
  • gen220 1y ago
    You do have a personal knowledge management base, it’s all your friends and coworkers :) I’ve heard this concept described as the “external brain”. If I don’t talk about something or write it down, it’s more likely than not getting flushed out of my brain. My friends or calendar app or sparingly few notes will be there to remind me if it’s actually important! I only write to make/check-in on longer term plans
• Vegenoid 1y ago
  My “second brain” is almost entirely technical information and learnings. I can see why someone who uses it more like a fancy personal journal, for mental reflection and creative work, would delete it - but I would be devastated if I lost my notes, because they are key to my ability to quickly navigate technology and systems.
• Moosdijk 1y ago
  Not even my bookmarks get trashed. It’s like a treasure trove.
• sedatk 1y ago
  One of the few decisions I absolutely regret in my life was to throw away my old notebook that I used to keep notes in when I was learning programming in the 80's. I had pretty much the same kind of thinking as the author: the nostaliga was dragging me back, cluttering my mind, and I simply had to move on. But, the thing is, those notes actually highlighted a part, or more aptly, an era of my existence that had no longer existed. I basically destroyed a part of me, similar to destroying photographs or any other memento that related to my "former self". Not only are those kinds of mementos endearing, but they are anchoring in a sense too. They let you draw an unbroken line over all versions of yourself to get the whole picture. They also have the potential to trigger certain parts of your mind, motivate you in ways that you can't imagine. So, the stuff the author had thrown away might be useless as a tool, but I think they would certainly be useful in an introspective archeological sense. I strongly urge anyone to consider that before performing a similar infocide. I'd at least suggest archiving them in a hard to reach place, instead of completely destroying them because you might regret it later.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • escapedmoose 1y ago
    Pen on paper is so inefficient that it both forces you to be selective about your records, and to paraphrase and condense thoughts in a way that I suspect prompts deeper thought. This is exactly what the author complained about—-that their PKM system led them to defer processing thoughts. I imagine it also collected much more noise vs signal simply because it was highly automated and easy to do so. I.e., I think your notebooks were likely more valuable/useful toward the “ introspective archeological” purpose that you mentioned, because your notebook contained true, original thought in a more curated manner. It sounds like the author’s archive didn’t contain much of that. Sorry you regret your decision :/
    • sedatk 1y ago
      True, it’s easier to accumulate noise digitally, but I don’t think it applies to all digital clutter equally. Some digital notes can be more valuable than some paper ones, so my recommendation stands. :)
• 11235813213455 1y ago
  The second brain is more generally refered as the guts tho, he should have said third brain
• il-b 1y ago
  I still use nvAlt (formerly Notational Velocity) for note taking. It is synced to a Dropbox folder. I can use the native Dropbox app to search, view, and edit the files. What I really like is the speed of note taking and searching in the nvAlt app. All my notes have a title in a loose format such as "project_name keyword ... keyword". It takes a second to find the note I need. Therefore, nvAlt serves as a bookmark manager as well. Obsidian feels clunky and slow, and I couldn't get it to switch to the .txt file extension (which is possible to edit via Dropbox on an iPhone).
• molszanski 1y ago
  If you don’t do regular forest fires, one day you will need to nuke everything
• apitman 1y ago
  Halfway through reading this I thought "did I already bookmark this? I need to make sure I bookmark it so I can review it later." Ruh roh
• afinlayson 1y ago
  Has OP never had too many tabs, too many unread emails before? Declare bankrupcy, archive instead of delete. Obsidian allows you to have multiple vaults - and you can link to other vaults, Maybe a Vault per year will work better for you if you ever decide to not use Second brain again.
• novoreorx 1y ago
  No, you deleted your text trash bin
• Too 1y ago
  Did the same many years ago and felt equally liberated. The thing i found about most of my notes was that they quickly got irrelevant, "PHP and MySQL best practices, on Windows..."? First, the notes that were referred to often, they quickly got upgraded to a script or stuck to my first brain so that note wasn't needed any more. Second, finding it through Google was easier than searching through my personal notes, and would often yield some new insight I wasn't aware of. Learning how to read official documentation rather than blog posts was a large part of this journey as well, now I trust that no voodoo tricks are needed to get things flying if you just follow the standard process. Being savvy enough to debug and lookup anything helps. Third, the tools, or their best practices, got superseded by others. Articles that might be interesting to read (or re-read) one rainy day. Forget about it. Stop the wishful thinking. Every week there are new ones, more up-to-date and equally insightful. Your future self will also have other interests. This was by far the most liberating. Nowadays, the few things I keep are topics that don't change, that I know will be difficult to remember between the rare occasion I need it (annual domain renewal, spare part number for oil filter). One final thing i still like to hoard is material from experts about recurring religious topics. So that next time someone at work starts arguing about monolith vs microservices again, I can just link to authoritative source instead of having to reiterate the same old arguments and prove my expertise in the area again.
• nsonha 1y ago
  Pretty weird timing and not even a passing thought about LLM
• wzrr 1y ago
  I am jealous, I barely can manage half of my brain, and everyone else is building their 2nd brain. Future will whether 2nd brian is something useful or just a marketing pitch. 50 years how many great things have been created because we are using these this system, or in 2nd-brian's term: distill ! Einstein didn't have a second brian, Feynman wrote his notes on any piece of paper he can find at the time. Time will tell, till then, it is not proven.
• absurdo 1y ago
  [flagged]
• esjeon 1y ago
  I've done the same several times with different media. I've used notebooks, wikis, post-its, Obsidian, etc, to organize my thoughts and ideas, but in the end, I've rarely revisited them. Don't get me wrong - it's still critical to keep track of important information in one way or another. But your own thoughts usually aren't part of that. You are always you, so given the same situation, your future self will likely come up with the same idea you have now (or something even better). That's why keeping track of quick ideas rarely bears fruit. What you really need to track is unusual information: - something not from you - something you can't easily reproduce - something that sparks new ideas you wouldn't have on your own In other words, keep the sources of your ideas, not the ideas themselves. This leads to a much lower noise-to-signal ratio because you're more likely to consume well-formulated information, at least much better written than your scattered quick notes.
• predkambrij 1y ago
  I regularly create a new folder with current date and work in it until it gets overbloated and then create a new one. Past ones remain until they are still relevant. If something is generally (evergreen) relevant, it gets placed in a text "longnotes.md" where they can also be searched and also found roughly by its date. Do whatever works for you.