Hypothesis: people who use these “second brain” knowledge systems spend more time writing about using them, then actually using them.
Disclaimer: I use obsidian myself
Disclaimer: I use obsidian myself
People who use these things are fooling themselves. I used to fool myself. We're not really achieving or producing and we're certainly not "assimilating knowledge." What we're doing is procrastinating. We're wasting time. We're struggling at our current, real endeavors, and we turn to a scapegoat: "oh darn, it's my knowledge management system that needs work; oh, it's just my productivity system that's just not efficient enough". So we find a nice game, a tool game [1], to: (1) distract ourselves (2) give us the feeling of accomplishment - "I'm taking second brain notes in a fun new app - I'm learning!".
For me, the first step to actually getting things done wasn't to optimize my productivity workflow, it wasn't to find the perfect knowledge management app/system, it was to...get things done. When I became dissatisfied with my work, when I hit a difficult obstacle with my projects, I felt pain, and procrastinated to avoid that pain. There was no secret cure. I just needed to realize that playing with these tools and systems is not getting things done - it's just procrastination.
I agree. A lot of personal systems like this are indeed unconsciously used to (1) and (2). This is especially the case when you try to implement a very complex+generic one like this vault. I can guarantee 90-99% failure, albeit you may learn something along the way !
Also, it is not a "BRAIN". It is worth stressing that because It is a bad and misleading name (almost as bad as PKM)
But you are generalizing too much. The problem is the "just" in your "it's just procrastination."
The thread is pointing to many benefits. For ME, it is not even about productivity anymore. It is about "healthier" work environment (in research-intensive activities).
More than that, It is not even about "ME" anymore. It about creating better tools and systems in the long term. Obsession and Fooling-ourselves (at the "MICRO" level) is exactly what feeds that larger MACRO evolutionary dynamics.
> We're not really achieving or producing
Speaking of fooling-ourselves, I feel that getting things done itself (at any cost) is also sometimes just a way to distract ourselves and give us the feeling of accomplishment, and also to "avoid that pain" (all three you cited). We may also be fooling ourselves at occasions here too in our rush to “producing” and "“producing” stuff. just saying…
a page from Lao Tzu comes to mind
> Those who think to win the world > by doing something to it, > I see them come to grief. >For the world is a sacred object. >Nothing is to be done to it. >To do anything to it is to damage it. > To seize it is to lose it.
Honestly, this is probably a good description of your situation, but certainly not everyone's. I use Obsidian every day and nothing you've written resonates with me. I dump things into the tool. I find those things when I need them. I'm much, much more productive as a result. Plus the sync is the best I've ever used. Works flawlessly every time on my Linux desktop, my Surface running Windows, my Chromebook, and my Android phone.
Maybe your work doesn't require these tools?
If there’s any productivity gain to be had here, it’s because you chose to write things down in a system you can search. Maybe the hyperlinking works, maybe it doesn’t. I’ve met a decent number of productive smart people and have seen zero correlation between note taking styles (or even note taking at all) and their outputs.
> If there’s any productivity gain to be had here, it’s because you chose to write things down in a system you can search. Maybe the hyperlinking works, maybe it doesn’t.
I realized that my system was useless if it didn't do 100% of what I needed. Sure, search usually works, but sometimes I need linking. If I'm taking notes on a paper, search doesn't help - I need a link to the paper and convenient storage.
> I’ve met a decent number of productive smart people and have seen zero correlation between note taking styles (or even note taking at all) and their outputs.
That's because needs vary widely. My father ran a business doing things like installing water and power lines. He didn't have an elaborate notes system, but he had one that was elaborate enough. Some things had to be captured and had to be retrievable with certainty. It had to be something he could do from the inside of the backhoe.
I'm an academic. My needs are vastly different. His system would not have helped me at all.
I'm not denying that some people waste time on these things. I don't see that as an argument that all of these apps and systems are useless though.
> Except maybe when they’re writing a book or something.
This may be part of the difference; Luhmann wrote like 70 books or something.
Some years I use filing cabinets. Some years I use OneNote. Some years I use Markdown. It all depends on the collection of tasks I expect to be doing.
At the end of the year, I make everything (worth saving) a PDF, no matter what system I used - because they're very utilitarian. Then I decide if I'm going to keep using the same system. For the last three years, I've used self-hosted GitLab exclusively, even for non-code stuff.
I doubt I'll adopt Obsidian next year, but if you don't already have a system, it's probably as good as any.
I built my own "digital notebook" and use it literally every single day for almost everything I do. When I'm in the middle of a project, I use it to take notes, write down questions, organize my thoughts, and save useful web links. It's hard for me to overstate how critical this to is to my day-to-day life. My notes ARE the thing I need most in order to "just get shit done."
Yes, there are "tool fetishists" in this space, just like you'll find in any career or hobby. They get their enjoyment out of tinkering with these apps and cataloging the hell out of their notes. I'm not one of those which is why my app has practically no curation abilities. But I also think it's in extremely bad taste to shame those who apparently enjoy it.
The "fooling themselves" element is in thinking adding sophistication beyond two those things improves the usefulness of the notes themselves. And there's some personal flexibility here too sure; if you truly can't ever find a note when you need it and adding a tagging system gets you there then that's useful additional sophistication.
I think the point they were trying to make, definitely the one I'm making, is that the line between useful system and hobbyist tinkering is a lot lower than people want to think, because they want to ascribe purpose or benefits to their tinkering. Which is where the productivity porn comes in, a framework that only values things if they are or contribute to "productivity" demands everything be productive, demands that you justify it.
But truly and honestly if you have a flat folder of text files and grep you have what you need and beyond that is tinkering. That's what people are fooling themselves about.
Same with, say, ring binders: Having some is probably better than none, but if you have one hundred you have other problems.
Same for hammers, pans,.... Buying them won't magically teach you skills, but if you want to learn skills tools will help you.
If you go straight into OPs system you'll spend way more time trying to figure out how it works (and it might not even work for you) rather than getting actual work done
Start simple. Write a few notes. Maybe you need to draw things: add Excalidraw. Maybe some note structures are similar: consider Templater.
This. I'm a hardcore Obsidian user both at work and at home, and I started both vaults from absolutely nothing - no user scripts, no organisation, literally no plan at all. Since then, they've evolved and optimized in radically different ways. Taking someone else's "system" is just a way to fool yourself into thinking you can be more productive than you are; you have to find that for yourself and what works specifically for you.
My personal vault is geared much more toward organizing creativity, with a little bit of task-oriented stuff and technical documentation, while my corporate vault is heavily schedule based and contains mostly tactical information, meeting notes and thoughts, etc. For it to be a "second brain", you need it to model your brain - and I work very modally. I have a "work mode" and a "non-work mode" that order things pretty differently, and it shows in the hierarchies and organization of both vaults.
Looks like I am not the only one who would like that: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/custom-default-vault-settings/66...
Hypothesis: people who've obsessed over "knowledge gardens" tend to be great at sustaining documentation
1: There's a good chance this is already a term with a different meaning. If that's the case I don't mean to rip it off, it's just what sounded good at the time.
On the other side, as we are already using computers, we might sometimes want to explore and get lost in this forest of problems and possible solutions and have some fun.
After all, as Douglas Adams put it:
“(..) a nerd is a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people about telephones. And a computer nerd therefore is somebody who uses a computer in order to use a computer.”
[0] https://gameweld.medium.com/fractal-tasks-and-the-journey-th...
Thoughts that were dissipating into the ether now increasingly get written down there, which frees up mental bandwidth for other things, which has translated in increased motivation to actually do the things I'm writing about.
I'd tried doing similar things with Apple Notes and Bear in the past, but it never stuck very well and I didn't find myself revisiting notes too often. Something about Obsidian has worked better so for though and I'm not sure what it is.
That said, I could see easily getting lost in the weeds and "overmanaging".
I like it when people feel good about what they do, spend a few minutes each weekend and then in months or even years, they publish it. Or just publish as you go on. I also like "work-in-progress" in the wild.
- Look at the endless threads in /r/fitness discussing the 0.01% gain of getting the exact rep range right vs likely just going to the gym.
- you can browse /r/language for days and prepare yourself fully for the day you actually begin ... learning a language
It's a type of productivity illusion, I think there is just a greater overlap of this community with HN.
That being said, I highly recommend obsidian to anyone, it's a great place to journal, and capture ideas. But just start typing, and don't worry too much about organization (ironically this is the biggest benefit of the tool).
I probably spend 15 minutes total writing in Obsidian each week. I'm not writing down things that I don't have difficulty remembering or things that are very easy to search for online. Obsidian is a place for me to store info that I might want later but would have difficulty finding/remembering again.
I hate that I needed to install flatpack for it but that is literally my only complaint. Sadly, it can't replace a text/code editor lime sublime which is where I dumped a lot of non-note knowledge. If only sublimetext copied some of this stuff for markdown.
In school,I never, ever took notes unless threatened. I mention that to show you how even someone like me liked Obsidian.
All people is far too strong of a claim I think, though if you'd said (or in fact mean) many I might agree.
Is systems attract people who feel they need a better system surprising though? Or is it surprising we hear most from those who go on to spend much of their time talking about systems?
I think there are many who have and use a second brain effectively, but perhaps most don't know that term.