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Comment by nicbou | Hacker News Reader

At some point, organisation can become a form of procrastination. Building a second brain is not Doing The Thing.[0]

A note is not an intention. It commits to memory, not to action. I really don't care about having a whole searchable, tagged database; I hardly ever look at those notes again.

At work I have topic-based Markdown notes. Sometimes I collect information about a topic for a few weeks or months, and eventually turn it into a proper guide (making guides is my job).

I also LOVE paper notebooks, because they become a beautiful timeline of sketches, to-do lists, thoughts and plans. When I finish a notebook, I scan it then throw it in a drawer.

I also use Obsidian daily notes to journal, mostly because it's easier to open an app than to write in a notebook. I don't do anything special with those notes, unless I'm trying to "debug" something happening in my life.

[0] https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-...

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+1 to “organization as procrastination”. I’m trying to avoid making the archive more “beautiful” and instead make it more actionable.

It seems you're more accustomed to treating stored information as memories rather than a knowledge base. That's perfectly fine. However, I personally believe that the progress humans and AI have made to reach our current stage likely stems largely from the accumulation of knowledge, combined with the evolution driven by new challenges!

It's just information. Even calling it knowledge is a stress because it more closely reflects my emotional state than actual truth.

It's only useful in the context of understanding myself.

I get that, and I think that distinction is healthy.

“Knowledge base” can imply objective truth and completeness, which creates pressure. For a lot of us, what we store is really a snapshot of attention, curiosity, anxiety, and identity at a moment in time — more like a personal log than a database.

One framing that helps me is: the archive isn’t “truth”, it’s “evidence of what I cared about”, and it’s only useful when it reduces friction for a real moment (re-entry, reflection, or a concrete next step). Otherwise it’s just noise.

Do you find it more useful as a mirror (patterns about yourself), or as a tool (helping you make decisions / take action)?

Sometimes the writing itself is useful, like when I realise that I've been stressing about something minor for a few days, or when I hesitate to write down how I _really_ feel about something. In other cases it forces me to actually understand what I'm feeling in order to put it into words. In a sense those notes could be write-only and still be useful.

In other cases these notes are a complement to my photos. They show a different aspect of my life at a given moment. My photos don't show that on September 4, 2015, I had a massive crush on someone. I have built a timeline that combines my journals, photos, sketches, geolocation, Google searches and other things. It reveals a far more nuanced picture of me at a given time.

I also have more technical notes. Those are a bit of a "collection of facts". It's a bit like putting all the parts on the table, and slowly organising them into a coherent structure. This is how I approach bigger topics before I understand them fully. Then my notes act as a sort of medium-term memory. When I finish a project, I usually have a bunch of leftover notes and todos that I don't intend to ever finish. That's why I say that notes are not an obligation.

That’s a really thoughtful distinction. I like how you separate “write-only but still valuable” (emotional clarity / self-understanding) from “collection of facts” (laying pieces on the table until a structure emerges).

The “notes aren’t an obligation” line also resonates — treating them as medium-term memory rather than a forever archive removes a lot of pressure.

When you finish a project and you have leftover notes/todos you don’t intend to finish, do you actively prune/close them (mark done/obsolete), or do you just let them fade and trust that what matters will resurface naturally?

hahaha man, a disclaimer that you're using ChatGPT to write your answers would be nice ;)

Please respect the HN community and kindly disclose when you are using an LLM to respond to user feedback.

I also recommend reading this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46747998

Me too, I already exported my data from all platforms including HN and indexed them in a RAG database but I don't feel like using them much. They are past oriented and I need present oriented stuff. With LLMs I noticed I don't like when they use chat history search or memory functions, it makes them fall into a rut and become less creative.

I even got to a point where I made an "anti-memory system" - a MCP tool that just calls a model without context from the full conversation or past conversations, to get a fresh perspective. And I instruct the host model to reveal only partially the information we discussed, explaining that creativity is sparked when LLMs get to see not too much, not too little - like a sexy dress.

"anti-memory system" Cool~！

When it comes to stimulating AI creativity, it may indeed be better to impose fewer constraints. However, in most scenarios, problems are likely still solved through simple information aggregation, refinement, analysis, and planning, right?

I put my data on a timeline because I find it interesting, but I rarely check it.

> Building a second brain is not Doing The Thing.

I hate the concept of a “second brain” but this isn’t necessarily true. Those guides you make at work seemingly precede the action of someone else, right? And even if the notes you write for yourself aren’t needed afterwards, don’t they contribute to “doing the thing”?

I think “second brain isn’t doing” is a good antidote to procrastination-by-organization, but it’s not universally true. Guides/runbooks are clearly “doing” because they enable action by others. Even personal notes can be “doing” if they change decisions, reduce re-entry cost, or prevent repeating mistakes. The failure mode is when system-building becomes a substitute for output, not a support for it.

These notes are explicitly part of the process, but they're just markdown files in a folder.

That’s quite like how I see my own system.

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