Some (to me) interesting thoughts on the whole second brain thing (and why, perhaps, it’s never resonated with me) from someone for whom it hasn’t worked.
And a Youtube video
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Wow …that really resonated with me. I can feel myself falling into the abyss that he mentions when management of the PKM begins to unduly shape my present and anticipatory behaviors. I’ll need to assess where my comfort zone exists with regards to freely purging data (weeding) so that the flowers can grow larger.
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The garden metaphor works well for me, because, while I like (some) gardens, I really don’t like gardening. Letting a thousand flowers bloom means an awful lot of weeding.
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Not to sound judgmental or hypocritical, I think that all of these apps and systems can be misused. We forget that they are just tools to help us with whatever project we are working on. Sometimes, we get caught up in the hype of the latest shiny app. (guilty of this)
I take a step back and evaluate birds-eye view, reflective time. It’s so easy to get caught up in this person’s workflow, setup, new app, new device, etc. that we get stuck in that and don’t move forward. I recently went through this when I was evaluating my credit card setup, realized I wasn’t getting my max rewards for the card use. I went on a rabbit hole of 3 months researching which card, which duo, trifecta or quadfecta was the best, only to also realize that 3 months of researching was also 3 months of not getting any rewards.
At the end of the day, PKM if left unchecked and unmanaged just turns into ‘hoarding’. We wouldn’t (hopefully) hoard random stuff in our own homes.
I wonder if there’s a link between a person’s PKM strategy and decision-making style.
- Decisive but Erratic (Impulsive) - big decisions quickly, changing course often when not going your way
- Cautious and Deliberate - wait, analyze, gather data, rinse repeat until a decision is made (sometimes this can cause into a stale waiting period of years) ‘never ready’
- Committed / Flexible - (adaptable) - Make a decision, stick to it, make minor adjustments without overhauling things
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I have followed this writer for a certain period of time, starting from only Apple default apps for productivity, to trying iA Writer, to Obsidian and starting over again. Always changes tools.
He didn’t give up Obsidian but will use again from scratch.
Not to say he is not trustworthy but doesn’t need to be serious about someone’s actions.
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From the linked article:
The premise [of PKM]: capture everything, forget nothing.
“Capture everything.” Well, there’s the problem.
To borrow from the advice of professional organizers re decluttering: If you hear yourself say “I might need this someday!” you should dispose of whatever it might be, asap.
I’m a digital hoarder in recovery. If I adopted a “No system” approach, I’d have filled up 100TB of external storage by now. I have an Obsidian vault, a collection of notes in Noteplan, and multiple Devonthink databases—and very strict rules about what I’m allowed to put in each of them.
I do have a “junk drawer” read-it-later respository. Every six months or so, I declare RIL bankruptcy and delete everything in there without looking.
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With physical stuff, I always suggest the follow-up question - “what might you need it for?” That usually sorts out the good from the bad.
Bringing it back to PKM, that’s the part where everything goes straight to hell. You capture any neat idea that you think you might want to remember. But later, you have to go back over what you captured and determine what to do with it - otherwise you have a rat’s nest of unorganized files that aren’t good for anything.
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These are always great articles for food for thought, and I agree with @FrMichaelFanous about misuse of these apps. Additionally, I’m sensitive to content-creators’ lust for evergreen topics to discuss, which may be what is going on here as noted by @alvinc. But I just want to take this at face value for the moment.
The idea of Second Brains and Commonplace Books, journals, logging systems, etc., when taken to extremes can be just as debilitating and useless as throwing it all away. The right balance depends on the domain of information and the personality of the curator. But if the idea is to “capture it all,” I think most of us would just be swallowing a lot of noise and losing the signal.
I dealt with this back when I was on Evernote. I just collected things and organized it. But I never got anything out of it. I changed my approach and it enabled me to be a master over the information I was collecting rather than a slave to it. Here is what I did, which I offer just as an example of how you can work with these concepts in ways that work for you.
First, I wanted to be able to capture information easily. I didn’t want a system that did a lot of busy work.
Second, I wanted to make sure that the information was processed not just collected. That way I’ve extracted what I need from the information and can easily digest it next time around.
Third, I have a good memory so the purpose of much of what I capture is to trigger my memory rather than re-write everything I read, watched, etc.
Fourth, I want the system to be organized so that things I may need to find are efficiently searchable. (See @webwalrus’s great post above mine on this point.) This is one of the reasons that I abandoned Evernote and “everything buckets” and replaced it (as necessary) with specialized databases, or more commonly, with just the file system. My recipes and cooking technique instructions and howtos go in PaprikaApp. My writing is organized in my file system. I use Apple Notes a lot which is somewhat of an everything bucket, but I use it in a well-defined way (for me) so that it does not become that.
Fifth, I like linking notes and find it useful for efficiently getting to information. Nevertheless, the idea of a highly networked, hyper-interconnected, spiderweb of notes never seemed to me to be that useful or worth the effort of creating and maintaining.
With that, here is how use it. I learned Greek. So, I created a notebook in Apple notes that captures notes on morphology topics, phonology, and syntax. Those notes look like a table of contents to a grammar reference. But I have probably 7,000 pages of Greek reference material. It would not be helpful to capture it all. For crying out loud, I already have the books. So, my material is highly distilled and tuned to what i need. I don’t have lists of every Greek word, I have a lexicon for that. But I have lists of all the prepositions and all the pronouns because of how frequently they come up. When I’m parsing words to translate, I can quickly get to my notes with that information. If I need a fully nuanced explanation of a grammar point, I go back to the source material.
My notes take almost no more time to capture than it took to take in the material to begin with. I’ve even begun experimenting with dictating my notes in to Voice Memos, taking the transcript to Apple Notes, and then having Apple Intelligence summarize them into an outline and bullet points.
Is it perfect? Nope. Don’t need it to be. I have the book. The notes just need to be good enough to have the information at my fingertips.
Anyway, I like the idea of a second brain. I just treat mine like a GPU and keep my real brain as the CPU.
It’s fun for me to do this; so, that’s a plus. It’s more fun to be able to pull something out a moment’s notice because I know how to navigate my system quickly.
These things don’t have to be frustrating and the most basic tools in the world can work to implement the system for most of us.
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Now THAT resonated as I am a data hoarder.
I need help! #twentycharacters
I’ve looked at all this with bewilderment over the last decade +. 2nd brain’s the wrong concept. cognitive productivity and meta-effectiveness are better.
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I save and capture the things that are important to me (not work or anyone else). It offers a cleaner, more limited and enjoyable second brain experience. Scans of magazines, hacks, tips, tricks, how-tos, etc. etc. The only tools I use for it are Devonthink, ScanSnap at home, Greg’s Simple Scan on the go.
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I think that AI is going to eliminate the need for a lot of the complication with second brains. Its still helpful to have a curated source of content you collect over time, and of course if you’re collecting your own insights and opinions, you still have to generate and capture those.
But a lot of the legwork on 2nd brain or PMS type systems simply comes from the need to structure that content in such a way that its organised and easily recoverable. AI heuristic search is a killer feature already with AIs and will only get better. We already have one on my company’s internal wiki, which works wonderfully well.
I don’t think the tools are readily available yet to search and index the volume of documents that many people have. I am working with a non-profit that uses a customised AI has the ability to review and compare thousands of health studies at a time at affordable cost, but this is very much a specialised tool that not everyone has.
But I imagine in the near future we’ll see second brain tools with the ability to do global AI search of content based on running through the entire index. At which point your content can quite happily sit in a single large flat folder for all anyone cares.
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My name is krocnyc and I’m a digiholic … SQUIRREL!!
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You’d have to define near future as the hardware requirements to run local AI are beyond the hands of most. Even a Mac with 64GB isn’t going to run more than about 40-50B parameters in a performant way. That’s a low-mid sized model. Better than 8B, sure but still limited compared to what commercial AI can do. I’m not sure how “soon” hardware limitations could be overcome broadly.
The model doesn’t need to run locally
Well, that depends on your stance on data privacy and your level of trust with the AI providers. But in a purely technical sense, you are correct.
I think some of us (looking at myself 
) may have a tendency to collect things. I’m sure there are clinical diagnoses for this, but I’m not going there.
When I was a teenager, I collected vinyl records. It wasn’t just about the music, I recall it became about the collecting. Some of those records never got played.
Some of my friends collected football cards, and no, it was not about the chewing gum which was pretty awful.
My son collected Pokemon cards.
My dad used to cut articles out of newspapers with scissors and collect them in large archive boxes, filling his cupboards.
There’s something about a drive for “collecting”.
These days I collect interesting articles. I guess it doesn’t hurt anybody and storing them doesn’t take much space, thanks to DEVONthink!
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BS
There are too many times in my lifetime where I saved significant time and money and yes, that is even counting the time, money and hassle of maintaining and keeping the “stuff” to believe that is anything but clickbait to get folks to consume more.
My favorite fence tool is over 100 years old. It was rusty and “trash” but was resurrected and serves me well to this day and will serve someone well beyond my lifetime.
I have prevailed in legal issues by having detailed time stamped digital and paper archives going back 20-30 years of “useless” stuff that proved their worth.
I have saved scientific papers and books from the late 1800’s to mid 1900’s and the data there are no longer readily available in any form but yellowing, aged, crumbling printed copies. Those data are more applicable to farming in a small holding in the face of pervasive climate change than much of the more recent research paid for by big corporations.
The key to the pack rats among us is to catalog, document, and verify accuracy and consistency across storage media each time things change. I have a recurring project when each new digital media comes along to evaluate, decide on when to adopt and what media to convert to and move to the new system everything I have saved from the old ones. That includes file formats and in some cases re-scanning originals if I still have them
I will never give up my hoarding ways because I have never had an issue or problem with it and it’s been far to useful over time to risk losing that advantage.
Yep and as your archive grows that can become a significant task. But the up side is you have a nice curated set of potentially useful stuff you know intimately. And the constant re-reading, relining, reevaluating lets you distill your archive to the core concepts and information you personally need.
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Agree. In your case and mine I think we can safely say “it sparks joy!” to quote one of those famous declutterers.
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