{"id":66992,"date":"2023-02-01T00:01:09","date_gmt":"2023-02-01T05:01:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/world.edu\/?p=66992"},"modified":"2023-02-01T00:01:09","modified_gmt":"2023-02-01T05:01:09","slug":"building-a-second-brain-for-writing-with-obsidian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/building-a-second-brain-for-writing-with-obsidian\/","title":{"rendered":"Building a second brain for writing \u2013 with Obsidian"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Writing a thesis or book is an enormous task that takes years and involves reading hundreds, sometimes thousands, of books, papers and articles. At the same time, you must produce your own words and make sure you don\u2019t accidentally plagiarise other people.<\/p>\n

People end up with all kinds of home-brew solutions to solve this epic information management problem. Just like hooch, the quality of the home-brew information management solutions can vary enormously \u2013 either bringing joy or slowly killing you.<\/p>\n

As Peg Boyle Single wisely said<\/a>\u00a0\u2018Collect notes, not articles\u2019. I try to concentrate less on filing PDFs and books, and more on making and formatting my own notes. For years I\u2019ve been using a combination of\u00a0Zotero<\/a>,\u00a0Pocket<\/a>,\u00a0Evernote<\/a>, and, more recently, a hand written\u00a0Bullet Journal<\/a>\u00a0to organise and transform information and ideas from other people into my own words. It\u2019s not an easy task, so I\u2019m always\u00a0looking for ways to improve my systems, as I wrote about here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Last year I wrote a post inspired by the new book by Tiago Forte called\u00a0Building a second brain for academic writing<\/a>\u00a0which, in part, documented the way I kept my writing notes tidy using Evernote. Although my system kind of worked (I\u2019ve produced seven books in eight years), I\u2019ve long been dissatisfied with Evernote as a solution because it\u2019s a subscription service that can lock your notes away if you don\u2019t keep paying.<\/p>\n

Other than being a subscription service,\u00a0Evernote<\/a>\u00a0is a great tool. It\u2019s basically an online database that enables you to add your own notes to bits of text taken from other\u2019s work. When you think about it, this practice of annotating other people\u2019s work is the essence of academic writing. I write around the quotes I extract, adding and extending the thoughts of others. I also write around data in the form of images and tables. This is the \u2018writing chunks, not chapters\u2019 or \u2018starting in the middle\u2019 approach, advocated by\u00a0Pat Thompson<\/a>,\u00a0Howard Becker<\/a>\u00a0and other writing gurus.<\/p>\n

Writing in chunks is a great way to beat perfectionism and avoid an enormous \u2018write up\u2019 at the end of a project. But when you write in chunks, you need a digital warehouse or \u2018Second Brain\u2019 to keep all the chunks while you decide where they fit in your draft.<\/p>\n

Forte\u2019s book is great and helped me reassess my note taking strategies. I realised Evernote is more like an ideas deep freeze than a Second Brain. Endless \u2018upgrades\u2019 to the Evernote interface made it really cluttered, so it was not a nice place to write. As my database got bigger and bigger, the search function didn\u2019t work as efficiently. For the last four books at least, I gave up on the idea of having a notes warehouse and wrote them directly into my drafts instead. This approach is fine if you have the overall structure of the book hashed out, but a nightmare if you don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m edging towards a new book, which is pretty formless at the moment, so I need a better solution for keeping my writing \u2018chunks\u2019 organised. I started playing around with a new piece of database software called\u00a0Obsidian<\/a>\u00a0after recording\u00a0an episode about it for the On The Reg podcast<\/a>\u00a0with my co-host Dr Jason Downs.<\/p>\n

Obsidian makes your notes more useful by \u2018linking your thinking\u2019. Basically, any word in an Obsidian note can become a link to another note, so, over time, your notes become like your own personal wikipedia.<\/p>\n

Obsidian also makes a cool visualisation of all the links between your notes, so you can surf through them, visually. Pages are represented as nodes; pages which have a lot of incoming links become bigger in the visual graph, literally showing you where an idea is \u2018growing\u2019:<\/p>\n

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After a bit of tinkering, I think I have a better system than my previous Evernote-dependant workflow. My system works on the principle that the original information is always \u2018re-findable\u2019 on the web, but the notes and highlights I make are irreplaceable and need careful storage.<\/p>\n

The rest of this post documents my home-brew information management \u2018hooch\u2019, with some links out to explanatory videos or articles. I\u2019ve documented it in some detail as people who have seen my system have asked for an explainer, but you may use it as inspiration for designing your own home-brew system.<\/p>\n

To capture and store information you will need:<\/strong><\/p>\n