I’ve spent my twenties desperately looking for a second brain. With a long track record of corporate jobs, and a billion different personal projects to delve in, I found myself really, really needing a solution that would help bring forward all the information that I hog my own brain with.
So I tried everything – an analogue notebook, OneNote, EverNote, Notability, GoodNotes, Notion, Trello. Everything, everywhere, all at once.
And then brought to me by a corporate Jesus, there stood the ONE who gathered them all (thoughts) and made them organized and nice and tidy and better than in my own head: Obsidian.
It took me about a year of consistent note taking to actually build a system that mostly works for me. The issue is that a lot of times it makes me work for it, which let me be perfectly honest: not fun, I already have a boss, don’t need a direct reporting line to Obsidian.
So here I find myself, late afternoon after late afternoon, sifting through notes, tagging, linking, cleaning up, trying to keep up with all to dos. So my second brain eats up a lot of resources from my first brain (the one that really needs protecting). 

The Promise

The idea is simple: find an external system to which you can offload your thinking, such that you free up space to…create? Ideate? All the juicy stuff.
In theory the idea is perfect. The problem comes from the fact that without a neuralink implant (which I wouldn’t get in a million years, stop trying to poke stuff in my head), there’s no way to swiftly off-load your thinking. It’s work, and a lot of active decisioning and effort to kick it off and keep it updated.
Even with that, when it feels like the alternative is to accept being overwhelmed by information, I’d argue the effort it takes to keep my Obsidian up and running and SUPPORTIVE is worth. It’s just annoying that like, I can’t be even more lazy. 

The Part Where It Gets Complicated

Because, you see, that’s where it kinda breaks. It needs my effort to be built, and to be linked and tagged and formatted in a way in which it actually creates space for more creative thinking. Do you see the problem there? Yeah, I’m gonna spend a lot of time creatively thinking of better, more efficient and optimal ways to organize my second brain, instead of letting it off-load me of boring information storage. What a bore, what a waste.
But I cannot help myself. Organization does feel like progress to me. Being able to sift through big amount of information at once is sexy. So what if that means I spend less time actually documenting information, thus creating some output to feed the vault? It has colorful tags and my graph view looks like a beautiful firework show. 

The Industry Built Around Not Working

Obsidian, Notion and all their PKM cousins have attracted a lot of attention because they are fantastic tools that promise, and a lot of the time deliver, in making your thinking less…painful. But with attracting interest, and users, this created a content creation niche: from YouTube tutorials to course creators and template sellers, these fantastic tools have a fantastic ecosystem of support around them. The problem is that if, in the beginning, this content was serving the idea of making your life easier, the more the market evolved, the more it turned from a discussion about the work they can do for you, to how you can better utilize the tools themselves. 

The Question I Keep Not Answering

Working in a somewhat IT related medium, I always said that we need to build technology that works for humans, and not nudge humans to feed into technology. As I’m more and more entranced by my Obsidian Vault, I wonder how much it’s helping me, vs how much I’m catering to the tech, trying my best to build the most perfect pristine system. Does my setup serve my work and needs, or did I build this setup instead of work? Painful question, I know.
Some other painful questions are: how many notes do I have that I haven’t even opened in over 6 months? When’s the last time that I actually finished something – and allowed it to sit finished instead of rethinking the way it was structured.
I’ll gladly choose to avoid thinking of those questions, if I can. 

Full Disclosure

Look, I’m hooked on Obsidian. I use it for everything I can think of, with separate systems for my professional and personal life. I write my blog in Obsidian and then plonk it in WordPress because it just feels so much easier to keep on changing one little tag, or one formatting rule, such that it’s the prettiest, most useful (LIE) thing I ever did.
It’s very easy to get over excited about the limitless capabilities of my second brain, and to try to keep on tailoring it and put more little ribbons on it until it’s absolutely perfect. It’s a fine line, and I do be loving jumping ropes with really fine lines.
So I do have rules. I do need to actively stop myself from making it “better and better” and instead just…use it. Write the blog post, put the thoughts on paper (or in an .md file), worry about frilly things later, or even never.

I’m never going to say a lot of bad stuff about PKM tools. Obsidian is probably my favourite piece of software that I ever got the tips of my fingers on. But I do need to make sure that I consistently audit my first instinct when I open the app: am I here to be more creative, or am I here to be as organized as humanly possible about not creating.
To cut a long yap short, is my second brain just a steroid fed procrastination method?
I’d leave that question open, and for you to ask yourselves as well. As mentioned, I’m in an avoidant mood towards my own questions.