Day 22 — Note to Self: Build a Second Brain
Dear reader, what is your relationship with notes?
Do you make perfectly crafted entries in a journal that you hold dear to your heart? Maybe you scribble them down on scraps of paper that soon get lost in the æther. Maybe you use Org-mode in your text editor. Or maybe you don’t really take notes at all.
What I’ve written here are some incoherent ramblings — some meandering thoughts about the journey I have taken with notes throughout my life and some recent discoveries that I have made.
I’ve always been pretty keen about writing things down. I went through a number of ‘rough books’ at school, in which I would doodle throughout my classes. These days I have a couple of treasured journals.
I use these for a bunch of different things, mainly in an attempt to organise my life — to-do lists, budgeting and expenses, planning trips and events, and some gratitude journalling.
I also tend to use a small journal when travelling, as I’ve found that writing the names of the places I plan on going to helps me build up recognition of the names. This is especially useful for foreign place names that use an unfamiliar combination and order of letters. I also get to spend less time looking things up on my phone when I’m trying to preserve my battery life or limited mobile data capacity.
There are some issues with physical notes, and I think this blog post on paper notes sums up a lot of them. I completely understand the feeling of buying nice books and not making much progress in them! It made me rethink some of the ways I take notes, but the fact of the matter is that despite having fond memories of putting pen to paper and planning out my days on the way home, I tend to use my smartphone and laptop for note-taking these days.
Digital Notes
Every day that I work on the PC, I make a daily note file. This file contains the things that I have coming up in the day, a to-do list, as well as notes taken while completing tasks. When I write up longer comments and discussions, I usually like to write them up in my text editor before posting them to GitHub or Slack or wherever.
In general, I use this approach as it helps me process information. I also appreciate that my thoughts are stored somewhere. I can often search for a keyword or term and find what I was working on a few months ago. But the system isn’t perfect — I have many unconnected notes, and sometimes I don’t know what words I need to search to find what I’m looking for.
Roam Research
Being a member of HENNGE, I think it goes without saying that I am always looking for ways to liberate and improve my daily life with technology. In March of this year, I came across a new tool called Roam Research, which had some unique features.
In Roam, you create a note with a title, and all mentions of that title within other notes will be picked up by Roam and displayed at the bottom of the mentioned note. On top of this, you can explicitly link to a note with special bidirectional links that are similar to the wiki-links of sites like Wikipedia. This creates a web of connections between all of your notes, and you can see a visualisation of this on Roam’s Graph Overview page.
As you might have gathered, Roam doesn’t have a traditional hierarchical folder organisation of notes. This is meant to help people organise their ideas better. Ideas and information are not siloed into neat little folders in our brain — it is more of a network of interconnected and associated fluid thoughts, which Roam looks to mimic.
I thought these features were pretty cool, and while looking into how best to use Roam, I came across two related methods.
Zettelkasten and building a second brain
The first of these was the Zettlekasten method, which is “a knowledge management and note-taking method used in research and study”. Zettalkasten literally means “slip box” or “note box”. One prolific German scholar, Niklas Luhmann, built up a Zettelkasten of over 90,000 cards and attributed his success in writing to it — in his eyes, it allowed him to write his works of over 70 books and 400 scholarly articles.
Roam and Zettelkasten are alike in the way that they both do away with the traditional file and folder hierarchy and instead create a network of notes. The modern Zettelkasten method now has a passionate following that suggests using various knowledge management software, but what’s amazing is that Luhmann managed to create his personal Zettelkasten with a system of physical drawers of notes!
One of the method’s strengths that is touted by its enthusiasts today is that the more you add to a Zettelkasten, the better it becomes. As you add more information to the system, more connections spring up and you can see things in a different light. It’s a big web of data similar to the information in your brain, but instead of spending the effort on trying to remember everything, you create a knowledge base — an external second brain, if you will.
Building a Second Brain is a costly course by Tiago Forte, a productivity expert, and is something that comes up a lot in conversations about Roam. I haven’t looked at the course in detail, but he writes about productivity on his blog. He champions a system called the PARA method for general life organisation that I intend on taking some ideas from. Here’s a link to some nice illustrated notes by Maggie Appleton summarising the course and the PARA method.
I was sold on the idea of building a personal knowledge base in a better way, but I was conflicted on what tool to use. Roam is good, but there are some issues. There is only a web app and no native app, but this isn’t a deal-breaker for me as it works well on both desktop and mobile. One of the bigger issues was the fact that I would probably be locked into Roam if I went with it. I was eyeing the 5-year believer subscription that had a price tag of 500 USD, but I thought I’d look at some alternatives before committing.
Alternatives to Roam
The first alternative I came across was Obsidian. With Obsidian, notes are stored in the markdown format, which is the format I already keep my notes in. This was perfect in my mind, as I thought it would mean that my notes would not be tied to a particular software. Obsidian adds in a lot of similar features to Roam, such as wiki-links and a graph view.
It’s free for personal use and the editor is pleasant enough, but I realised that despite being in markdown, the additional features would tie me to Obsidian to a certain degree. I thought that if this was the case, I might as well look at other tools that worked with markdown.
I found a couple of tools that are built on top of Visual Studio Code, the text editor I use right now for notes and coding. These were Dendron and Foam, and interested me as I enjoy working in the editor and am very used to manipulating markdown within it. I intend on looking into Dendron in more detail, and it has already introduced me to some useful plugins for VS Code such as Markdown Notes. This introduces wiki-links, backlinks, and tags for markdown files. The downside with working with these tools is that they are not compatible with mobile, something I am still conflicted about.
I looked at Notion and Evernote as they have mobile apps that would provide a way for me to update my notes from wherever I might be. Notion recently added a feature to show backlinks at the top of each page — showing what pages link to the page you are on — bringing it one step closer to the other options. I’m a fan of Notion’s aesthetics and other features but the performance on mobile still leaves something to be desired. Evernote didn’t capture my attention and I soon dismissed it.
Takeaway points
So far I’ve talked a lot about the specific tools that I tried out, but I didn’t really want to focus on that.
One of the main ideas of Zettelkasten is that you look for discrete ideas in the content you consume. You can pick out ideas from books and articles you read or videos that you watch and turn them into notes. For me, I’ve started to try and be more present while watching and reading content and reflecting on it afterward. I will try to write a little bit about how it made me feel or summarise the ideas that resonated with me. I believe it’s helped me focus and take in ideas, turning a viewing of a YouTube video into something productive rather than a fleeting moment that I’ll forget about by the end of the week. I can engage in a more meaningful way with content and it’s reassuring to know that my thoughts are recorded for my future self.
On top of this, the idea of building a personal knowledge base is something that I am looking to pursue. While writing this, I had someone buy something from me on Mercari for the first time in a while. I had forgotten what kind of phrases to use to thank the buyer and convey when I intended to send the item, but it’s something I’ve definitely had come up with before. It should already have been in my personal knowledge base.
I’ve been taking some atomic notes regarding the front-end technologies that I work with on a daily basis. When I look up an answer on StackOverflow, I can summarise it in my own words, create a note, and put a link to the question. I’m trying to build up a library of my own understanding and I’m optimistic about the long-term benefits.
It’s a process I’ve only started recently, but I’m looking forward to the lifelong adventure of building my own knowledge base, my personal Wikipedia— my own second brain. Will you join me?
This article is part of the HENNGE Advent Calendar 2020. An Advent calendar is a special calendar used for counting down the days till Christmas. HENNGE Advent Calendar 2020 presents one article by one HENNGE member per day for 25 days until Christmas, 2020.
