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.

> 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.

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.

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 not ever deleting my personal knowledge base. I might rework parts of it in the future...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

> 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...

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).

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

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 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?

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

Well

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.

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!"

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.

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.

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

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!