I deleted my second brain

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.

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.

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.

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 It's disorganised, full of out of date information, and it's hard to find the things you need.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 Now you have to search two badly-organized, partially out of date knowledge bases.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...

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.

Instead I mostly just write notes with hyperlinks: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Godspeed, but there’s no way I’d give any of that up.

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.

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.

Would have been better to figure out how to prune 50% in a way that hits the right spots.

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.

https://basecamp.com/shapeup/2.1-chapter-07

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!"

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.

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

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).

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.

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-th... [2]https://gtpedrosa.github.io/blog/on-taking-notes-and-learnin...

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.

I have maybe a few hundred notes on the handful of topics that matter to me and that’s it.

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?

> 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.

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).

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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...

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.

+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.

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.

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!

This resonates a lot. I always have this feeling when I am browsing old notes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You can't really deny the past, it's part of you.

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.

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.

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

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.

The former is likely a mental burden, the latter not?

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.

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

But the whole "second brain" trend always made my stomach turn and the surrounding culture of productivity/personal knowledge management is a tarpit.

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?

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.

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.

Ruh roh

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?

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.

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.

Well

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.

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.

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