Second Brain-less

Thoughts on Obsidian and the "second brain" process.

#obsidian

This tweet I shared recently on Obsidian was the most recent exploration I’ve done into how to use the app effectively:

This video from a few weeks ago by @odysseas_px was the first thing that has genuinely made me curious about the “second brain” thing in @obsdmd

To be honest, I’m still not 100% sold on it being a good investment of time But this vid has done a lot more to advocate for the concept than anything else I’ve seen in the community/online The approach in this vid seems pretty reasonable, not overoptimized - I’m interested!

Either way, @obsdmd is undoubtedly the best Markdown editor on Mac But I do feel like I’m always missing a big part of the overall vision of the app not using backlinks, graph view, etc. If there is a way to make it work for me, I definitely want to explore that

This is the video in question - it’s great!

I’ll expand on this more in this post. I would find it particularly interesting if my thoughts on this were to dramatically change in the future, so this would be a cool artifact of that.

I don’t think the second brain concept gels for me. I’m pretty “learn-by-doing” oriented, particularly when it comes to coding. So the idea of stopping and taking notes, and even more so, organizing them and structuring them to fit a pattern… I just don’t know if it works for me.

But when it comes to effectively learning things, I could see this being useful. I sometimes worry that I consume a ton of content - podcasts, books - and I certainly remember some things from them, but I don’t know how much. 30%? 40%? I wonder if taking better notes and then reviewing them (Obsidian has a built-in flashcard review feature, inspired by Anki) would lead to better recall of past things I read/listened to.

But I’m still not there yet. I’m dipping my toes into it, but I still don’t find it super compelling. Maybe that will change in the future. I see some promise in certain situations, but I don’t know if it’s worth the investment or if it’s a mental pipe-dream that people just find very appealing.