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> 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).

It struck me as odd how the blog post waxed lyrical about "second brains" but the description of the notes seemed to point at mostly to-do lists. That's not what I would call a second brain. The definition of "second brain" is in line with the old tradition of engineering logs, where engineers write down things they did, measurements they took, and observations they did. On the other hand, to-do lists is just work you assign to yourself.

No wonder those notes caused anxiety. I would also be anxious if I was faced with a log with 7-years worth of chores that are both late and stale.

Logs are logs. You write down what you feel is important, and forget about them. After some time, you can delete them without a second thought. You write down stuff today because you feel it will help you in the future. If what you wrote down today is not a present from your past to your present, and instead is causing you grief, then just remove it from your notes.

As all things in life, you need to preserve the things that cause joy and push away those that cause grief. Your second brain is no different.

You can delete all the TODO lists in the world, but those hundreds of domain names that were registered because of a new brilliant idea but weren’t touched after you finished designing the logo still have another two and a half years before they expire :)

Underrated comment.

Ouch, that hit a nerve.

Should some one buy domain for a website that will aggregate and display the graveyard of buried project that never advanced beyond domain and logo ? maybe IdeaGraveyard.dev ? haha

No, it did not mostly refer to to-do lists. At least that's not what I understood.

It was an example, yes. But he also referred to Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, a huge collection of notes, systematically interconnected, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann#Note-taking_sys.... Looks like the author followed a similar approach in Obsidian, a tool to store markdown notes in an interconnected manner.

He wrote: "Roam Research turned bidirectional links into a cult. Obsidian let the cult go off-grid. The lore deepened. You weren’t taking notes. You were building a lattice of meaning. ... A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it - and move on."

But it didn't work out: "the insight was never lived. It was stored. ... In trying to remember everything, I outsourced the act of reflection. I didn’t revisit ideas. I didn’t interrogate them. I filed them away and trusted the structure. ... 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."

Hence, what he mostly wrote down were thoughts, ideas, quotes, hoping that insights and value will come from this huge collection. Turns out, it wasn't so easy for him. I believe he'll need more focus, more curation, a more targeted and heartfelt approach.

Well, it sounds like it did work out back then for Niklas Luhmann. He said that all his famous publications wouldn't have been possible without his structured note taking approach. His 90,000 cards were digitized and are now available online, see https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel...

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.

> 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.

> 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.

The author mentions being sober for 6 years. Chances are she's not terribly interested in meeting her past self.

Sometimes it's nice to remind yourself how far you've come.

I have an archive of all my email going back to 1992. (Granted, this is more accessible prior to 2000 or so when things went unnecessarily to HTML). It is a wonderful resource, not only for practical reasons but also it's like my own personal Pepys diary -- I can tell you what I was doing in 1992 and later on any date. I love reading it, even if I encounter sad messages from mentors who have since passed or significant others decades since the breakup.

I recently recovered about 3TB of data from over 15 years ago. It was just on a hard drive with a friend that we thought was lost. I dont really miss the data, but oh it was nice to see some old photos and notes!!

So what I recoomend is put on a hd and hide it some where. Go check it in 15 years

An HDD (or tape if you really want want it to stick around), not an SSD.

TIL that tape storage exists with density competitive with HDDs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open

but I still don't understand what supposedly makes it more reliable long-term as storage.

I believe it is cost per unit density that allows magnetic tape to be more suitable for archival storage than HDD, which surpasses it in I/O speeds. Magnetic tape storage is still usually in RAID-like configurations and while tape only survives for 15-30 years, data survival by migration is typically done well before medium degradation.

LTO-9 drives are expensive, but the media is around $90 for an 18TB (pre-compression) tape. That’s a pretty good price if you make lots of backups for work. They also offer append-only mode, which is awesome for archives where you want it to be essentially impossible to delete a backup without physical access.

But the tape itself has a great reputation for being physically robust. There are fewer parts to break than in an HDD, too. If your tape drive dies, you can replace it and keep using the same media. That’d be like having hard drive platters you could swap into another HDD later on.

Tape media doesn't last forever. I suppose that tapes specifically meant for archiving are better, but I have old audio tapes from the 1970s and 80s that are just falling apart.

Mylar audio tape of that vintage had longevity problems. I remember reading about an audio archive that thought they had done the right thing by preserving onto high quality tape of the time and then they found their archives disintegrating. I think they got lucky and moved things to new media before losing everything.

This is always the risk. Longevity testing is often done at high temperatures or other artificial means but cannot exactly simulate 30-50 years of storage. If something is important, it's best to use two different media, and check them over the years.

It is a question of failure mode. If your hard drive motor dies, if the heads fail, if the electronics fail, if the sealing fail (in some cases it can be repaired by specialists but that's not easy and much more expensive than a tape reader)... lots of things can go wrong that are not related with the media itself. The advantage of tape is that the device that reads it is separate from the mechanically simple tape. It comes at a cost but that's for hedging against a different risk.

I also follow this philosophy. I also have an anxious brain, though. To manage the clutter, I zip up old notes & projects by date and put them in an archive folder. They're always there if I need to reference them, but I have a clean workspace too. I include file trees in those archives for easy reference. Very easy to script with a cron job.

What you've built sounds more like an external memory prosthetic than a second brain - grounded, functional, and geared toward real-world utility, not aspirational insight-hoarding. I think that's the key difference: your system serves your life, not the other way around

This comment you wrote sounds a lot like an LLM, FYI. Not saying you are

I've used AI a lot and completely disagree.

It’s the last sentence that makes it sound like Claude, to me

As a non native English speaker, this would be a compliment.

Far too dense and insightful for an LLM, in my opinion.

That voice - antithesis - is straight out of ChatGPT, like the sibling comment says.

It’s funny how ChatGPT writes like a first-year in an MFA writing program. Its style is often too elegant for its substance.

OpenAI is not good at matching form to function in text or voice.

I noticed this too, just recently, with their voice update. I was asking about the war and she just sounded bored. Very inappropriate for the subject matter

> For the author, their system served as a way of dealing with anxiety over self-improvement, it seems.

"Capture what resonates.." is my take away from reading "Building a Second Brain" by Tiago Forte

if I'm consciously looking something that resonates with me for everything that I consume, i'd be anxious too.

> current state for personal projects I rotate in and out of over years

How do you get yourself to rotate back in?

Personally, I don't "get myself" to do anything, I just do it for fun.

The usual cycle is that I start hacking on some fun thing like an implementation of rules for a board game or trying to work out how some library I use works. Eventually I write down where I am then stop, maybe because I got bored or it was too hard.

Then I forget that the project was hard, become convinced that it was easy, then spend an evening hacking away again.

It's just leisure. Like putting a bookmark in a novel.

Somewhat related I have a little script that shows me three notes at random everyday. If they’re stale or no longer needed I delete the note. This helps keep it relatively fresh over time.

I have a tag “#noreview” for notes that are evergreen that don’t need to be reviewed. Example of that might which bus to take from Heathrow when visiting friends in London

I took some blurbs from your comment and added it to my…life/career notes. (: