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.
> 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).
It struck me as odd how the blog post waxed lyrical about "second brains" but the description of the notes seemed to point at mostly to-do lists. That's not what I would call a second brain. The definition of "second brain" is in line with the old tradition of engineering logs, where engineers write down things they did, measurements they took, and observations they did. On the other hand, to-do lists is just work you assign to yourself.
No wonder those notes caused anxiety. I would also be anxious if I was faced with a log with 7-years worth of chores that are both late and stale.
Logs are logs. You write down what you feel is important, and forget about them. After some time, you can delete them without a second thought. You write down stuff today because you feel it will help you in the future. If what you wrote down today is not a present from your past to your present, and instead is causing you grief, then just remove it from your notes.
As all things in life, you need to preserve the things that cause joy and push away those that cause grief. Your second brain is no different.
I'd hate to lose the ability of just going back 20 years later and read my own thoughts and ideas, to meet the person I was at that point.
I have a project/idea journal that I've had for over 10 years, and going through it sometimes is really fun. I remember being so proud about my code-generation tool that allowed me to quickly start a new html+css project that I was doing that work as a freelancer. Seeing that page in my journal brings up a smile.
> I'd hate to lose the ability of just going back 20 years later and read my own thoughts and ideas, to meet the person I was at that point.
Yeah, my "second-brain" doubles as a journal too, and I have written notebooks from when I first arrived in my "real home country" with basically nothing, and it's always a pleasure to go back to read through and realize (again) how different my life is now.
It's really easy to lose track of our own progress day-to-day, and being able to analyze your past perspectives and situations is like a hack to instant happiness.
I recently recovered about 3TB of data from over 15 years ago. It was just on a hard drive with a friend that we thought was lost. I dont really miss the data, but oh it was nice to see some old photos and notes!!
So what I recoomend is put on a hd and hide it some where. Go check it in 15 years
It is a question of failure mode. If your hard drive motor dies, if the heads fail, if the electronics fail, if the sealing fail (in some cases it can be repaired by specialists but that's not easy and much more expensive than a tape reader)... lots of things can go wrong that are not related with the media itself. The advantage of tape is that the device that reads it is separate from the mechanically simple tape. It comes at a cost but that's for hedging against a different risk.
LTO-9 drives are expensive, but the media is around $90 for an 18TB (pre-compression) tape. That’s a pretty good price if you make lots of backups for work. They also offer append-only mode, which is awesome for archives where you want it to be essentially impossible to delete a backup without physical access.
But the tape itself has a great reputation for being physically robust. There are fewer parts to break than in an HDD, too. If your tape drive dies, you can replace it and keep using the same media. That’d be like having hard drive platters you could swap into another HDD later on.
Tape media doesn't last forever. I suppose that tapes specifically meant for archiving are better, but I have old audio tapes from the 1970s and 80s that are just falling apart.
Mylar audio tape of that vintage had longevity problems. I remember reading about an audio archive that thought they had done the right thing by preserving onto high quality tape of the time and then they found their archives disintegrating. I think they got lucky and moved things to new media before losing everything.
This is always the risk. Longevity testing is often done at high temperatures or other artificial means but cannot exactly simulate 30-50 years of storage. If something is important, it's best to use two different media, and check them over the years.
I believe it is cost per unit density that allows magnetic tape to be more suitable for archival storage than HDD, which surpasses it in I/O speeds. Magnetic tape storage is still usually in RAID-like configurations and while tape only survives for 15-30 years, data survival by migration is typically done well before medium degradation.
What you've built sounds more like an external memory prosthetic than a second brain - grounded, functional, and geared toward real-world utility, not aspirational insight-hoarding. I think that's the key difference: your system serves your life, not the other way around
I also follow this philosophy. I also have an anxious brain, though. To manage the clutter, I zip up old notes & projects by date and put them in an archive folder. They're always there if I need to reference them, but I have a clean workspace too. I include file trees in those archives for easy reference. Very easy to script with a cron job.
Personally, I don't "get myself" to do anything, I just do it for fun.
The usual cycle is that I start hacking on some fun thing like an implementation of rules for a board game or trying to work out how some library I use works. Eventually I write down where I am then stop, maybe because I got bored or it was too hard.
Then I forget that the project was hard, become convinced that it was easy, then spend an evening hacking away again.
It's just leisure. Like putting a bookmark in a novel.
Somewhat related I have a little script that shows me three notes at random everyday. If they’re stale or no longer needed I delete the note. This helps keep it relatively fresh over time.
I have a tag “#noreview” for notes that are evergreen that don’t need to be reviewed. Example of that might which bus to take from Heathrow when visiting friends in London
I don't really like this. I think the author let their own personal issues lead to the destruction of knowledge. I relate to the issues, but the nuclear option seems extreme.
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.
The problem with hoarding is that, on the whole, the hoarded items are worthless. There’s too much noise and too little signal. Finding the gems takes an active effort, which author found daunting. Hoarders usually need help from the outside, and if they don’t get that help, it’s IMO fair to throw it all out.
> Finding the gems takes an active effort, which author found daunting.
Who knows what are gems are what are not? I scan tons of stuff related to my children's school/activities etc. One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them and find some things they will call gems and lots of other junk. Or maybe they will consider it all junk and just get rid of it. But I can't be the judge of that now, I can only be the custodian.
You are perfectly describing the issue when sorting out a hoarder‘s stuff. There‘s no way of knowing what‘s precious and what not for most of the things. There might be some obvious things (wooden furniture / ISO documents that are still relevant), but the rest goes in the trash usually.
> One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them
My mother used to say the same thing. But I‘m not looking at that old stuff, ever. Maybe your kids will. It’s your decision whether it’s worse to be false negative or false positive here. If the stuff is not taking up too much space, it’s probably a good idea to keep it. Hoarding is something else though.
It's a hundred times easier to search a digital hoard and you can fit a very big one inside a single hard drive.
So the idea that most of it is worthless is far far less justification to toss the entire pile. The cost to benefit ratio is shifted by more than 1000x.
And even then, while cleaning out a physical hoard you'll take time to look through things.
I'll take my chances on the off chance that my child will see their primary 2 report card scan after many years and say "oh my god I can't believe it..."
My mom kept everything like that. The structured stuff like baby books and photo albums with labels and stories are great. The boxes of report cards from when I was 7 were a momentary amusement before they were recycled. The school work and random other things were just annoying to have to sort through.
I would have been stoked to see the evidence of her sentimentality if that was my mother (my dad kept my stuff and I liked that very much). I guess we are all different people will different emotional reactions. Also I know nothing about you or your life so maybe your reaction is totally warranted.
I would enjoy a digital hoard of stuff like that, but not a physical hoard. I have since digitized all of the stuff my parents hoarded and got rid of a lot of the physical items.
It doesn't really cost me anything on an ongoing basis to have this huge digital dump of files sitting around. It was a one time effort to scan everything. If my parents had done that and just left a huge archive of digital files, that would be fine.
If people feel neutrally about digital hoards, that makes sense.
If it were me, I would indeed think “oh my god I can't believe it”, followed immediately by “why did my parents save this worthless junk? I have no interest in this. How much more garbage is in here? I’m definitely not going to look through it all to find two important things buried in hundreds of trivialities. And now I have to go through the trouble of throwing it away myself. I’d rather be doing anything else”.
Maybe your kids will enjoy it, though. But that feeling is far from universal.
> If it were me, I would indeed think “oh my god I can't believe it”, followed immediately by “why did my parents save this worthless junk? I have no interest in this. How much more garbage is in here? I’m definitely not going to look through it all to find two important things buried in hundreds of trivialities. And now I have to go through the trouble of throwing it away myself. I’d rather be doing anything else”.
Sure, we are all different people. I was super happy to find my childhood class photo and marksheets that my dad had saved - it just underlined what I already knew, that he cared. I shared it with my children and we bonded over the exams where I didn't fare well.
> But that feeling is far from universal.
I know that the level of sentimentality isn't a universal thing.
I'm not going to hold them to cherishing this stuff and ask them to explain themselves if they just delete it. I just want them to have a chance at looking at small parts of their childhood. It is done without expecting gratitude or reciprocal emotions in return, which I guess, is part of being a parent.
> I scan tons of stuff related to my children's school/activities etc. One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them and find some things they will call gems and lots of other junk.
My sister and I have an agreement to trash my mom’s hoard of our school stuff she refuses to get rid of that we don’t want. All it does is bring us stress. If they made physical art like clay pots in a kiln, keep it for yourself if they don’t want it. If it’s something you can scan, I doubt it’s worth keeping and makes it much harder to find signal in the noise when too much is scanned.
When my mother passed and we had to clean out my parent's house, she had boxes of the same kinds of things. Old report cards, drawings and school work from 40+ years ago. It was nice to see that she cared to save it but it was of no interest beyond that. And it was pretty clear that she herself never looked at it, as the boxes were packed away in closets and obviously hadn't been touched since they were put there.
Stuff causes stress. It's really true. Even if it's mostly out of the way, every time you see it it will cause some stress about whether it should be moved, reorganized, saved, or thrown away. The house I grew up in was always cluttered and I'm bad about it myself. Every once in a while I will order a roll-off dumpster to the house and get rid of things that have accumulated over the past 10 years or so. It's a relief but then it starts over again.
If there's one habit I wish I had it would be to regularly and ruthlessly get rid of stuff that I don't use anymore.
You can ask your kids what those gems are. My dad ask me this a few months ago. I brought up some knick knacks he had in his office when I was growing up. I'm not sure if he still has them or not, but if he does, if he ever goes through his hoard, he'll know to send those my way instead of getting rid of them.
> You can ask your kids what those gems are. My dad ask me this a few months ago. I brought up some knick knacks he had in his office when I was growing up. I'm not sure if he still has them or not, but if he does, if he ever goes through his hoard, he'll know to send those my way instead of getting rid of them.
He can't give them to you if he threw it away. Also, he can ask that question to you because your choices and preferences are, to a large extent, set.
The same stuff, that my child would throw away without hesitation few years ago, is now "precious memories" and not to be disturbed. The emotional value of things doesn't follow much logic and has massive volatility until adulthood.
I mean I totally understand that me keeping bunch of stuff isn't a guarantee that they will find what they value at that point of time. Maybe the lego-shaped eraser would be the most interesting piece of stationary they will remember; doesn't mean I can hoard every piece of stationary. Digital stuff is different though - my SSD doesn't bulge just because I'm putting more files holding snippets of life on it.
> In this case, the author wrote the notes. If they say it has no value, they probably know what they’re talking about.
Well, yeah, if they say it has no value, then obviously it has no value to them, no one could claim otherwise.
I guess the context in this thread kind of shifted to it might still be valuable to someone, even if it isn't valuable to them. There been a lot of cases in history where very smart people judged their own journals to not be very valuable (to them) so they think nothing of it, then 100 years later someone discovers the journal together with a ton of valuable (to the world) nuggets in it.
Counterpoint: data hoarding is not like physical hoarding (or at least, it hasn't been up to this point), because we've lived through an era of exponentially increasing storage capacity (with file sizes to match, in many cases).
I still have a folder full of notes from several of my university courses, grouped by course. Some of it is source code (either the lecturer's or my own); some is assignment text (in a mixture of plain text, PDF, legacy .doc, etc.). There aren't any repositories because this was many years before Git existed and professors back then apparently didn't think we needed to be taught about the systems that did exist.
But why not keep it? The whole collection is smaller than, say, the OpenBLAS shared library that comes with a NumPy installation. It's maybe 1% of the size of the ISO for a modern desktop Linux distribution.
It's part of a folder with even older stuff - all the way back to toy Turing programs I wrote as a child. There are countless random files that are probably poorly organized internally, that I'll likely never revisit with any good reason. But the whole thing is less data than I'd likely end up downloading if I spent an hour on YouTube or Twitch. The ability to store it permanently costs me literally pennies, amortized over the cost of the drive.
... And yet, the size of modern applications still bothers me. It feels almost disrespectful, somehow. Old habits die hard, I guess.
I don't disagree with anything you're saying apart from the last few words.
The solution to this problem is the same it has been for literally centuries: archiving.
The whole point of an archive is that it's out of the way and takes no effort, even more so a digital one. But if you have/need/want the time/space, you or someone else can check it, and find a gem.
As someone who by now has decades of nested digital archives of archives, those still have a psychological weight that sometimes surfaces when I am reminded of their existence. It’s not clear to me they really constitute a net benefit.
I find it wild to suggest an LLM would be better at scouring data for gems than the person who wrote them. LLMs are better than us at going through large amounts of data, and that's it. They have no idea what is valuable there.
> I find it wild to suggest an LLM would be better at scouring data for gems than the person who wrote them
I mean, "an out there" idea sure, but wild? There are plenty of cases where people underestimated their own worth and value, and the potential impact of their ideas.
Sometimes it's valuable to have outsiders perspective on things. Old war veterans might not think twice about their love-letters between them and their partner, but taken together with a large collection of letters, historians can build new perspectives that we weren't able to see before.
> They have no idea what is valuable there.
Of course an LLM wouldn't know what is "valuable". It would require a person to have an idea of what could be valuable, and program the LLM to surface based on that, together with more things.
For example, I could imagine if I setup an LLM with the prompt "Highlight perspectives that you think are conflicting with other stated perspectives" to go through my own second-brain, it could reveal something I haven't considered before, granted it'll be able to freely query the db and so on.
With respect to knowledge and notes, I would say that the knowledge (gems) may not be worthless in an absolute sense but its relevance may no longer be worth the cost of keeping said knowledge organized under a given person’s organization scheme.
For what it is worth, I still find it frustrating when I cannot find a certain piece of information that I am looking for but I know exists because I came across it before but didn’t record it at the time. However, I also appreciate being able to forget distressing events that would find ways to remind me about their existence.
I guess all of this may depend on the exact definitions of knowledge, data, and memory, and how an individual reckons with acquiring, organizing, and forgetting information.
> The problem with hoarding is that, on the whole, the hoarded items are worthless. There’s too much noise and too little signal.
I don't think that's a problem. What turns logs into a problem is misplaced expectations on what is their purpose and how you should use them.
Logs are collected with the express purpose of being ignored, and as a safeguard in case in the future you need to check an audit trail of what you were doing. After a while, once the odds of those logs providing any value drops enough, you can safely delete them.
Your tool is only as good as you make it out to be.
It’s the thought organization equivalent of the Britany Spears head shaving. It’s a mental breakdown and the person suffering from the mental health issue at its root is processing their behavior by writing about it. It’s mental illness.
> I think the author let their own personal issues lead to the destruction of knowledge.
Conversely, I think you’re letting your own personal views stand in the way of empathy and recognising what is best for another.
There was no “destruction of knowledge”. It was a collection of notes which was never going to be looked at again and was causing stress to the author. Written knowledge which isn’t read is as useless at that which isn’t written in the first place. Would you also decry someone for not having written the note in the first place?
> They could have just left their library for a bit, there was no need to burn it to the ground.
It was not a library. I bet that for the author it felt closer a hoarder’s house with stacks of scattered newspapers.
> "I've just lobotomised myself and I look forward to having to relearn everything and doing it all again".
Absurd. Deleting written notes does not make you immediately forget everything that was written on them. The lessons they needed, they internalised. The ones they didn’t weren’t important anyway. Sure, there may have been some good notes in there, but not in enough quantity and quality to warrant wading though them all and justify the extra anxiety the existence of these lists caused.
> If nothing else, in 7 years time, they'll regret
No, they will not. Signed, someone who learned to delete relentlessly and is much happier for it.
Maybe you would regret it. That says nothing about other people. If anything, I’d regret the years when I didn’t delete stuff.
> There was no need to do this.
Yes, there was. The author needed it for their mental well-being and development. Let them be. Everyone copes with life in different ways. We’re all going to die, all your notes will be meaningless in the end.
> 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.
No, everyone should do what makes sense for them personally.
Having the thing “out of the way” is not the same as having it gone. It’s a very different feeling, like saving a memento from an unhealthy relationship VS throwing it away. There is freedom in deciding to let go without recourse.
I for one applaud the author and wish them the best. I’m sure they struggled with the decision and it took some courage to go through with it. They did the right thing for themselves and that’s what matters.
We're not going to agree here, we're going to descend into stupid walls of texts. I'll give you one more, but I probably wont respond. It's not personal, it's just not valuable for either of us.
> There was no “destruction of knowledge”. It was a collection of notes which was never going to be looked at again and was causing stress to the author. Written knowledge which isn’t read is as useless at that which isn’t written in the first place. Would you also decry someone for not having written the note in the first place?
I disagree that there was no destruction of knowledge. Even if the author is just copy/pasting from random sources, the link and choice of putting those 2 copies in the same folder is a bit of knowledge, a link solidified with an action. We have different ideas of what constitutes knowledge, I think you know you're being ridiculous if you're sincerely trying to argue that 7 years worth of notes doesn't have a single new contribution of any value to anything or anyone at all.
I do decry people who don't take personal notes.
> It was not a library. I bet that for the author it felt closer a hoarder’s house with stacks of scattered newspapers.
I totally agree that's how the author felt - they let their own negative feelings towards what they've created destroy something which could be valuable to others.
> Absurd. Deleting written notes does not make you immediately forget everything that was written on them. The lessons they needed, they internalised. The ones they didn’t weren’t important anyway. Sure, there may have been some good notes in there, but not in enough quantity and quality to warrant wading though them all and justify the extra anxiety the existence of these lists caused.
What's even your point here? You start saying how notes aren't even needed and are pointless to be written down, then you argue that maybe there is some value in them written down, and then come back to support my argument that the author's own personal feelings have lead to the destruction of something valuable.
> No, they will not. Signed, someone who learned to delete relentlessly and is much happier for it.
> Maybe you would regret it. That says nothing about other people. If anything, I’d regret the years when I didn’t delete stuff.
Ignorance is bliss: you can't get upset about the things you don't know any more. Knowledge is hard.
Your position about not regretting throwing away potential personal knowledge and memories isn't a position I've heard from anyone over (*edited typo) the age of 50. You don't regret it just like the author doesn't, I think you have a future of denial or upset.
> Yes, there was. The author needed it for their mental well-being and development. Let them be. Everyone copes with life in different ways. We’re all going to die, all your notes will be meaningless in the end.
There's other ways to deal with information overload, like proper archiving. We're all going to die, and the only reason why have a culture or knowledge as a species is because everyone else hasn't done what this person is doing.
> No, everyone should do what makes sense for them personally.
> Having the thing “out of the way” is not the same as having it gone. It’s a very different feeling, like saving a memento from an unhealthy relationship VS throwing it away. There is freedom in deciding to let go without recourse.
Congratulations with the individualism, you made yourself feel free by burning books. If that makes you happy - you do you, I don't care - but don't act like it's benefit anyone else other than the person struggling with the feeling of information overload.
> I'll give you one more, but I probably wont respond. It's not personal, it's just not valuable for either of us.
Then why did you bother responding in the first place, and why should anyone bother reading beyond that point? If you’re not interested in discussing, don’t. Throwing a bunch of words at someone and then going closing your ears singing “la la la” is worse than not being valuable, it has negative value for the discussion.
Frankly, that made me only skim the rest of your post instead of engaging properly. It was still pretty obvious you lack real empathy for the author, their needs, and are unable to understand people who have a different view of the issue than you do.
Here‘s the thing: The author isn’t making a general commentary or recommendation, they are recounting their own personal experience. Pretending you know what makes sense for them is arrogant and misguided. That you are unable to understand other people have different needs and ways of approaching life is a you problem.
> Then why did you bother responding in the first place, and why should anyone bother reading beyond that point? If you’re not interested in discussing, don’t. Throwing a bunch of words at someone and then going closing your ears singing “la la la” is worse than not being valuable, it has negative value for the discussion.
I didn't mean to imply I wasn't going to read, it's just that disagreeing so vehemently on a sentence by sentence basis - like we're both clearly prone to do - isn't always fun or productive. Neither of us is going to change our mind with the depth and detail at which we're disagreeing. You're completely fair to see it as me sticking my fingers in my ears, sorry, because that's disrespectful of me.
My intent was to give you the respect of responding in a similar level of detail to address your points, since you gave the time for me, but prevent the need for either of us to have to keep doing it...
> Here‘s the thing: The author isn’t making a general commentary or recommendation, they are recounting their own personal experience. Pretending you know what makes sense for them is arrogant and misguided. That you are unable to understand other people have different needs and ways of approaching life is a you problem.
I never claimed to know what's best for them, I would even go as far as saying I don't care what's best for them, I was speaking from a position of what I think's best for human knowledge. Fundamentally, if you agree burning books - metaphorically - is a bad thing, then you agree deleting second brains instead of just archiving is a bad thing.
Here's the thing: I'm not making a general commentary or recommendation, I'm recounting my own _personal_ view of what's best for human knowledge and what I think of the authors article. Pretending that me having a different view is "absurd", is arrogant and misguided. That you are unable to understand that I have different needs and ways of approaching life is - apparently - a problem...:P
Let alone the fact that he could have fed an assistant with that information in 3 or 5 years, and would never have had to bother with that information again, but would be able to talk about it and ask in huge detail about things that were once relevant. The AI would have enough information on how he wants the data to be structured, it could have kept doing it for him.
I have a simple philosophy in how I approach everything:
Too much of anything is bad.
When I started taking notes with obsidian I almost fell into this trap of over-analysing everything in terms of what should go into a note, making folders and sub-folders. It became quickly obvious to me that the mental burden of this can accumulate quickly.
These days I store most of my notes in one folder. The only times I now make a note are:
1. When I'm reading.
2. Very rare these days, but sometimes I still have nagging thoughts that wants to be written down.
3. When I have important information that needs to be stored, like IP address, things like this.
I've found that not thinking about notes obsessively like this helps me better, most thoughts are useless and fleeting, they're not worth writing down imo. Best to be in your mind in those.
The outcome of this is that my vault has remained simple and small even after a year, and when I search it for information it is almost always for some important detail I knew I wrote down, I don't get overloaded with junk.
To keep my notes space clean I also regularly move things to archive, which I rarely check.
I’ve also struggled with over-analyzing where stuff should go. I’ve restarted a new Obsidian vault based on PARA [1], and am experimenting with using LLMs (both Cursor and Claude Code) to help me decide where stuff should go. Been a big help so far.
I've started seeing a number of people talk about using Claude Code for searching, writing, and organising text documents. It is an interesting trend to me. I tried it out with my non-technical girlfriend and she really liked using it for helping with analysing interview transcripts. It seems like that agentic workflow is really effective outside of coding as well.
I just hope non-technical people that pick this up also pick up version control. Or, is there a better alternative to Claude Code that can accomplish a similar thing while being more friendly to non-technical people?
My notetaking has devolved in much the same way. Nowadays I pretty much just have one big "Work" note, and then occasional smaller temporary notes for specific things (planning a trip, shopping list, etc).
PKM can often turn into a form of procrastination (it's more fun to make lists and folders and grand archives, than to work on your actual projects). I decided to cut all that off and do the bare minimum instead.
Interesting to think about if finding a database dump of messages 30 years from now would bring back the same nostalgia. I would think that the tangible aspect would have a more profound impact.
> I still love Obsidian. And I’m planning on using it again. From scratch. And with a deeper level of curation and care - not as a second brain, but as a workspace for the one I already have.
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 never deleting my personal knowledge base. I might rework parts of it in the future...
Organizing your stuff means starting a big unpleasant task today. Starting a new knowledge base lets you have fun today, and you cross your fingers that future you will eat their vegetables and diligently keep it up to date forever.
I spent half of last week updating an old guide and dokumentation page for an internal product. 20 people have used this guide and noticed the factual errors. Nobody wanted to make the edits.
> 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 could blame the idea of moving to a new knowledge base here, or say it was a waste of time, but instead I'm going to blame a stark refusal to make a schedule for a simple job and then follow it. "Discard it and create a better one" is very easy to understand. If you still have two after a few weeks you failed at a fundamental level. The problem wasn't the idea.
I'll double down: yes, the initial idea is the problem. In a large organization, you can never discard the old knowledge base because you do not understand it well enough. No one does. No one knows which pieces of the old knowledge base are useful to whom. So it sticks around indefinitely.
The best you can do as an individual is to gradually improve your corner of the knowledge base. The idea that "we'll create a new one and it'll be up-to-date forever" is unrealistic, it's wishful thinking. If we weren't able to do it with the old one, why think we'll be able to do it with the new one?
> I delete what I don’t need. I don’t capture everything. I don’t try to. I read what I feel like. I think in conversation, in movement, in context. I don’t build a second brain. I inhabit the first.
This is a really important insight especially today. There is a ton of pressure to move faster, produce, consume, be the absolute best. Use AI to do things you’d never be able to before. Build a zettlekasten that insights will fall out of. Give up your attention to the next big thing.
For some I’m sure that’s fulfilling and I do not mean to say to stop. But for those whom it brings anxiety, a feeling they can never have or be enough, that meaning is just around the corner this is an important insight.
It reminds me of a favorite quote of mine from Emerson’s Self Reliance: Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes; for that for ever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside.
I have been enamored with developing a second brain and other productivity hacks, but have recently been turned off to them, because I believe the benefits are over-promised. Similar to OP, I haven’t been able to achieve the clarity of mind and creative thoughts that are promised by a second brain.
While I do think that deleting the whole thing is extreme, I can imagine that there is a level of catharsis experienced by that.
Lately I have subscribed to Oliver Burkeman’s (author of “4,000 Weeks”) line of thinking where life, and subsequently thoughts, are more meant to be experience rather than optimized. For me, I have seen a negative drop in “life enjoyment” when I have tried to capture everything, and have yet to realize the results and even stick with it consistently (which may be the reason for not seeing the positives).
Part of the problem with these collections of notes, whether you call them Zettelkasten, Second Brain, PKM or whatever, is the expectation that something unique, amazing, or earth-shattering emerge from the process of using it. The expectation is strongest in the Zettelkasten community where they trot out the story of some academic sociologist of old who invented the system and cranked out tons of publications. Never mind that those publications have practically zero impact on the field currently. There is also the apparent expectation that you follow a specific and arcane method, with specific types of notes that evolve in a certain prescribed way. I’m a reasonably smart person and the ZK ontology perpetually escapes me. Maybe because it’s needlessly reductive. Yes maybe Luhmann used the system to generate a lot of publications. But the academics I know have never even heard of this. My spouse has a few hundred published papers and her process is nothing like this.
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.
Performances and symbols are meaningful; the way you act influences the way you think. It is pretty well known that an effective way to enact change in your life is to act as if your goal was already true and it will change your mindset to actually make it so. As a small example, forcing (i.e. performing) a smile can improve your mood.
> I don’t see the point in destroying one’s notes. (…) if that helps you get past a block of some sort, more power to you.
Looks to me like you do see the point. Maybe it’s not something you’d need personally, but everyone is different.
> Luhmann is still one of the most cited, grappled-with and thought-about sociologist across a number of disciplines.
Unfortunately (though I think this is a regional thing also - Luhmann's still pretty strong in Europe, especially in Germany where "systems theory" has become synonymous with Luhmann's systems theory, but not so much in the USA, I think).
One of the problems with Luhmann stems directly from his Zettelkasten: His tendency to tear citations out of their original contexts and name drop witnesses for his own point of views where the original text did not support his view at all.
You can see the system at work actually: He truly made a lot of stuff his own in ways never intended by the original authors - boon and bane at same time.
It reminded me of my own habit of logging my pour-over coffee brews. For months I saved every variable about every cup, imagining that one day I'd analyze that data and arrive at the perfect recipe.
I never once looked at the data. Eventually I realized that I'd rather learn by just paying close attention to this cup, and using it to change my approach for the next cup.
Overanalyzing everything loses some of the "magic". I drink tea, but I assume there's a similar sort of zen-like ritual to the whole process. That's somewhat it odds with turning the whole thing into a science experiment.
Granted, some of that is a projection of positivity onto what is just another simply addictive substance, but I digress.
A lot of tasks in life have elements of this though, including creative thinking and flow-state work which continually logging and categorizing can somewhat interrupt.
In your case I'd consider doing a 1-off analysis of "the perfect cup", with full data collection for a couple of weeks. Then analyze it, distill it down, and extract the lesson and conclusions. Then go back to the more organic method, and hopefully the cup is a little better. Win win.
As some other comments have mentioned, there's a streak of obsessiveness and anxiety in the original piece. Everything doesn't need to be extensively logged, and it doesn't necessarily need to be something you do everyday. A lot of the "burden" aspect seems to be from some internal issues that the author needs to work on.
All of these approaches are just tools. They can be used with a light touch approach (maybe only very complex projects need a vigorously searchable and indexed "second brain", and most of the time a .txt file in a simple daily log that takes no more than 2 minutes per day is more than enough, etc). And I know, those two approaches don't perfectly interface with one another, but creating an all-encompassing perfect system is an exercise and futility, and if that's the goal, then no wonder it's a massive cause of anxiety.
I don't know about everyone, but I found the whole PKM/second brain "industry" a bit much, I was never able to stick to complex rules and things like atomic notes.
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.
> I don't know about everyone, but I found the whole PKM/second brain "industry" a bit much, I was never able to stick to complex rules and things like atomic notes.
I agree. I think that ultimately their product is not a note-taking tool but a vague promise of structure that solves whatever issues the user has in keeping something organized.
I’m a cable hoarder. It’s pretty bad. I have cables for tech that’s been dead for a couple of decades. “Just in case.” Need a FireWire 400 hub? Got you covered. Even better, how about SCSI?
Every now and then, I go through them, and toss out a few, but many remain.
I’ve also been in Recovery for a while. Suspect the Venn diagram overlaps a bit.
I'm in a similar spot to the author. I have a stack of notes curated over years. Got hooked on the whole Second Brain thing. But I think it's time to trash the lot.
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.
Intentionally wiping almost all of my obsidian vaults and accidentally wiping my 2TB HDD was the most freeing thing.
I'd amassed so many books and papers and notes and half-finished projects over a frenzied couple of years where the main drivers were stimulant abuse and low self-worth.
It turns out that the excitement of finding some resource that's perfectly fit for your requirements is it's own rare pleasure, and it can be harmful to make them a demand on yourself in their own right, and especially harmful to try and catch'em all
I think I'd decided to grind my way out of my situation and channelled that energy into the most elaborate resource-hoarding and procrastination. I did genuinely learn a lot but very, very inefficiently, and in such a way I was sick of computers and self-motivated learning for a couple years.
Second-brain culture definitely provides an open door to hoarding (and stimulant users). I still like using obsidian but I don't care for the various "methods", I just do what makes sense. It turns out when I enjoy the process of doing/learning things, I remember stuff about them pretty well.
This is like the personal version of shapeup's reasoning to get rid of backlogs and there's a little nod to it. But yes, a backlog is a list of tasks not a second brain.
I never understood the large browser tab list. Though I am the kind of person that typically keeps only one to two buffers open in my editor. I must have a mild allergy to visual noise or something.
Very much the same. I almost never have more than half a dozen browser tabs open. They are always ephemeral. I don't save browser history or cookies either. Dispite all technology advances, a person's short-term memory can still only actively handle to four to seven things at a time. I'm probably on the low side of that. Having 30 browser tabs open is utterly pointless as I won't have any idea what 25 of them are for.
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.
One senior researcher I know, though an extremely early user of computers and Emacs, still uses basic paper notebooks for writing things down. The system is not searchable, not hyperlinked - but he still finds things almost effortlessly even though he hasn't been young for a long time.
So if the only habit that sticks is Apple notes - keep doing that. At least in my experience hyperlinking was never that useful, because the act of remembering what to hyperlink where was about as difficult as just remembering the what other notes exist - in which case, what do I need hyperlinking for? I also find hyperlinked text hard to read because you end up in Wikipedia style 3 pages deep hyperlink hell - a fun way to spend an afternoon, a terrible way to work and understand.
I find with physical objects I can better remember where it was spatially. I know that note was about 3/4 of the way through the green notebook, on the right-side of the spread, near the bottom of the page. Or something to that effect. I find the same thing with physical books over ebooks.
The act of physically writing things down commits the event to incidental memory. The more effort it took to concert all your neurons into outputting an action, the less easily it fades from your impression.
I use Obsidian for two reasons - I'm across OSs and I like it as plain files. That said, the Apple Notes UX (especially search) is absolutely incredible. If I was all Apple, I'd use it in a heart beat
My solution is to make various capture methods. I use Apple Notes for personal notes and Obsidian at work.
With Apple Notes, I used the Shortcuts app to append some text with a timestamp to a note where I log those random thoughts. I use this shortcut on my phone to type stuff, I use it with Siri via CarPlay to capture stuff while driving, and it works decently well. I have a list in Reminders I can easily throw stuff into as well, via Siri or whatever else. It looks like iOS 26 will make some of this better as well.
With Obsidian, I do something similar. I currently also do it with Shortcuts, but have made similar solutions in bash, Hammerspoon (lua), and AppleScript. I have a daily note in Obsidian, and while I always have that open, I also have a keyboard shortcut (and desktop widget) where I can quickly bring up a text prompt, write something, and have it go into my daily note (or a shared log like I do with Apple Notes). I mostly use this to keep track of what I actually did each day so I have a record of it. I need that to be low friction or I won't do it.
It actually works a little better with Obsidian, because it's simply appending to a text file, so I can use markdown really easily to format things. I'm hoping the better markdown support in Tahoe will allow for me to add some better formatting to Apple Notes. Shortcuts has a markdown to rich text converter in it already, but it didn't work for what I was trying to do (or I did something wrong). Shortcuts has a way to add to a list in Apple Notes, so that way can look a little cleaner than raw text, given there is no formatting. I swear I got formatting to work once before, but I deleted the Shortcut, so I don't know... maybe it was in Obsidian and I migrated the note back to Apple... I spent way too long messing with it.
Apple Notes also has various other capture methods, live OCR from the cameras, speech to text, etc. I don't use this that often, but I try to remember they exist for when they would be useful.
I've gone back and forth between Apple Notes and Obsidian for personal notes, and I've told myself I'm going to stop this. The draw of Obsidian is having plain text notes that are effectively future proof. However, dealing with media is very annoying. I don't have a lot of images in my notes, but with Apple Notes it's easy to just drop something in (and I can search/copy text in the images). With Obsidian I usually end up trying to distill whatever information was in the image into text, so I can search it, and I also don't have to deal with coming up with a system to manage how and where images are stored, so they can be referenced, that won't be a nightmare in the future. These are things I don't need to think about in Apple Notes.
If Apple Notes works for you and has been the only thing that has stuck, stick with it. Getting into the game of trying to find the "perfect" note app will send you on a path to madness. The perfect app doesn't exist; they are all a collection of trade offs. I once watched an Ali Abdaal video on his note taking system and it was insane. He convinced himself that it was a good idea to have 4 different apps for 4 different kinds of notes, or something to that effect. This is not a place anyone really wants to end up.
I think it's important to acknowledge everyone's mind works differently, and something different works for everyone.
For me, I've found once I start trying to follow a system, like PARA or zettelkästen or whatever else, it just becomes tedious and time consuming and I feel like a slave to the system.
After going through 3-4 cycles of this, I came to feel like the main point of these systems is to sell books to people like me, who's brain craves structure yet struggles to create it :).
I also came to realize most of my notes are write once, read never.
I now just make quick and dirty notes and throw them in an "archive" folder once they are not active (one "inbox" folder for active ones), and rely on search.
No system, no curation.
Same strategy for email.
I do find the notes useful to keep; e.x. "when was the last time I got bloodwork done at the doctor" or "what command did I run to get the debugger to hit the right symbol server for that old old project", but I spend basically 0 thought cycles on them now.
I also find plaintext or markdown to be the ideal format for these notes.
There's a whole other category of notes, where you want to share information with others or teach. This is documentation. It is best suited to a wiki format with rich text.
I think a lot of people end up making wiki-style notes, but really they are never going to look at them again or share them and they could have just hacked up a quick text file and then archived it, instead of making something pretty no one will ever care about afterwords (including themselves). It's really hard to admit this though.
I have one note per topic. I write down in summary when I'm activity studying something. Most of it i end up remembering but its nice knowing where to look when i forget. (Especially a link to what i used to study it last time). Some of them could probably be printed as a compendium at this point.
I have one note per project, running as a log of quick paste dump or thoughts when i leave for the day. Usually never revisited.
I have some journal notes. But they're rare and only written for larger events (trips, holidays).
I was all-in on backlings and atomic notes for a while, but it ended up being unsearhable. The current method could survive without backlings at all.
I can’t count the number of times my notes have saved me or my team some serious grief. I don’t have to keep everything in my head. I can offload my brain into notes.
Godspeed, but there’s no way I’d give any of that up.
Possibly because a large number of organisations don't really have a good system for capturing somethings as "messy" as notes.
I'm not big on note taking myself, but when I do, the things I capture is very different from the version I put into the official documentation.
There is a good article: A rational design process, how and why to fake it.[1] Basically how we reach our goal and how we present them are two different things. The personal notes have the details on failures, wrong turns and alternative ideas, the official documentation won't have that.
> Possibly because a large number of organisations don't really have a good system for capturing somethings as "messy" as notes.
To build upon this point, there's a problem that writing docs is a thankless job: those who benefit from it do so silently, whereas those who selflessly shared notes later can find themselves involved in issues they have no involvement.
Confluence search is very good.... At finding stuff in PDFs. Search in Confluence is bonkers. Super easy to locate term, know to only exist in one document, and Confluence will return that one PDF that someone uploaded, which for some reason also have that term. It's odd that the search is so poor at searching Confluence pages, yet so good at searching PDFs.
Because it's less friction to put it there? Because only he can find it in the sparse context it lives in? Because he can use it then for multiple projects, and might he change, multiple companies? Because that way it's his and not the companies? Imagine leaving a job and all you learned stays at that job instead of with you?
I started doing this, because my company goes through too many re-orgs and tool changes. If I capture it in my personal notes, I don't have to worry about re-doing everything when the org changes, or losing something I may need if I'm moves away from the area where those notes were kept.
I'd love to have a universal shared notes system for the whole team, but it's proven unrealistic when seeing how things work over decades.
With my former team I wrote 90% of the documentation. A while after I left they had to migrate their docs to a new system, and used it as an opportunity to clean up. I went back to try and reference a 20 page doc I wrote, going very in depth on a topic during a period where I was deep into it. Gone. I wish I had kept my own copies instead of relying on the shared platform. There was still a lot of good and relevant information in that document, but the people going through it lacked the knowledge and context to see it. There have been many examples like this.
There are also things that don't seem like they deserve a note in a formal system. One day thing X broke and we found out we had to talk to person Y to fix it. No one else thought to write it down, but I did. It broke again yesterday, and I was able to quickly bring up the name of who to talk to, while everyone else just tried to remember and hunted through their chat history. Search of my local notes (in Obsidian) works much better than Confluence. The low friction also means it's easy to drop stuff in, even if it might not be that useful. The friction on Confluence is higher. I tried keeping all my notes in there once, so I could easily share them with others if/when needed, but it was too much effort, and only a matter of time before it goes away and we move to something else (that's happening to some degree right now).
Because then it spares you the maintenance of bullshit? The moment you put something public, there are 10 wise-asses that will start bikeshedding about MD flavor, where to put it, who maintains it, can we automate it, can you update this, can we expand it, etc.
Where do people draw the line between a PKM (which is yours) and team documentation (which belongs, presumably to your team to which you have a transient relationship with)?
personal notes become cryptic team notes when you leave. If something ought to be team knowledge before that, it needs to get translated into a form that more people can easily read.
That was an interesting read. Even more if you take a look into another of the author's text on the decline of personal thought [1]. I believe the author is engaging with very interesting questions: what is knowledge? How can I achieve it? How does it feel during the pursuit?
Of course the answer is deeply personal. My take is that I agree with the author on that knowledge should be inhabited, as I quoted Arendt on a former blog entry of mine [2] "For memory and depth are the same, or rather depth can only be reached by man through remembrance.".
If your journey using whatever tool du jour helps you, more power to you! But if it feels like a burden, drop it and adapt. In my process, I tried many different methods of note taking, but the one I haven't dropped is pen and paper. The act of writing is thinking to me. I do not have a plan to go through what I have written and treat them as a fortuitous encounter rather than having a procedure/method in place. But I still find the idea of having digital notes somewhat appealing, luring even.
Damn. My notes over the years are the only that gives me insight into who I was and what I cared about back then.
Every once in a while I boot up a 15 year old Evernote archive or scroll through my Notes.app to get a new glimpse into the things my younger me was up to. It's often endearing, and it also reminds me of how much I will forget about myself in another 10 years, yet these were the things that I spent my free time doing, and this person used to exist. I feel like an archaeologist into my own life.
Even my most technical notes are laced with the residue of my character that I can see myself in.
I'm super sentimental though. I could scroll back to an ancient journal entry and probably make myself tear up if I consider it long enough.
I feel like this too. I remember one time I came across a stack of notes (the throwaway kind I just write to help me learn) from school and I read through them, it made me very nostalgic. Especially reading homework set by teachers who have since died.
It actually did make me tear up a bit.
I even feel nostalgic and tearful looking at random doodles on a piece of paper that I did during my first job many years ago.
That feeling of being an archaeologist in your own life really resonates, like rediscovering forgotten versions of yourself, preserved in the syntax of old thoughts
I use org-roam for looking up a topic, adding a note, and then forgetting about it.
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.
Linking notes enables note-taking to become a full-time hobby. It’s effortless to waste hours in Notion, Obsidian, Vimwiki, etc. creating MOCs, unused links, nice little home pages, and creating and recreating structures and systems.
I switched to a directory of unlinked, tagged notes and I’ve yet to have an issue just searching for a specific note. I spend a fraction of the time I used to thinking about notes at all.
Everyone has different needs and things that work for them, but some of these productivity gurus have 100,000s atomic notes, each note being like a single quote from a book, and you realize that taking and organizing notes is the only thing they do.
I was elated when obsidian came out, because it brought to reality exactly what I thought I had wanted for a few years prior - ability to link, especially graphically, all of my notes.
But I quickly realised what you described - it's a futile effort to maintain such a thing, and that the only people who do it are absolute slaves to the systems they've created.
Worse, they surely don't really generate truly unique insights from it all because the insights don't really come from addition and interconnection, but instead from subtraction and refinement. The cultivation of wisdom, in other words - which is the opposite of accumulation. I've seen various versions of this chart and I think it summarizes the situation well - though I'd go further and be culling the noise from it all. https://magniapartners.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Magnia...
I still use obisidan, as it's just great software. And mybnotes could absolutely benefit from better structure and discipline in filing them - I do almost none of what I mentioned above. Though, perhaps I'm just mentally doing the culling and just focusing on what actually matters. Full text search usually finds me what I need quickly enough.
I always used and use paper notes. Computer files are mostly downloads, and saved articles for better search (ahem) than DDG or Google because their results are almost entirely name matches with movies or shit to buy.
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.
Throughout my 20’s I’ve accumulated a huge amount of mental models, diary entries, ambitions, goals, knowledge, thoughts, interests and everything in-between.
It helped me a lot and truly let me excel in some things – surprisingly enough.
Since I turned 30 last year I’ve almost sort of been afraid to look into that repository whatsoever. It’s a mix of amusement and anxiety. What felt like unlimited potential and a nearing of the “apex”, my motivation is still there somewhere in my head, but I’ve suppressed it and opened my eyes to almost half of my life being lived.
Sometimes I’m even afraid to stop and think deeply like I tended to do before. I distract myself.
Was that a some sort of a religion carrying me week by week month to month?
I take it step-by-step, day by day now and try to worry less while bringing back the focus of what I’d want to achieve. I calm myself down and work on things more gradually, cutting myself some slack.
Nonetheless, I wouldn’t just delete it all.
Instead I’m just using it less and less, only adding some truly profound things and thoughts when I come across them. My reading list keeps filling up… I fulfill some of my ambitions, but also leave many of them undone by the time I thought I should’ve been done with them trying not to not feel bad about it.
This techno-masochistic models-oriented mega-productive way of living is already perhaps disillusioning a lot of people out there, and we are entering the next stage.
Feels like end of an era, at least for me personally.
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).
I interpret this as humanity's struggle to get back to its habitat, real world and fall back to keep pace with much slower biological evolution. Tools - all the way from stone tools used for hunting, to the AI assistants - are compensation for the desired extra pace in evolution. We can't grow horns over night and grow large in size to rule the jungle, so we got our hunting tools.
But then we let the tools and thought dictate the biological human. Mind has always been a slave of the body, serving just enough intelligence as commanded by the body. But then mind grew to be the master, commanding the body and demanding faster evolution. When body could not deliver to the demands, mind went ahead and created artificial extensions to the body using tools, technologies and science. Mind no longer responds to the body signals leading to suppressed senses, unmet bodily needs, lack of intimacy with the ongoings of the body and total lack of basic understanding of purpose and function of body.
I can absolutely relate to this. I had similar feelings for the last year or so - although I couldn't express these thoughts as well as the author did.
I've developed this weird addiction to making notes in Obsidian. It wasn't really about learning or understanding anything. I bought into the illusion that having notes in my PKM meant I had actual knowledge. Bigger graph = smarter me, or so I thought. I even started reading books just to feed the system: Look at me with my 3,587 notes this year - aren't I clever!"
Currently, I am just taking notes where it really matters: Readme, documentation and some loosely organised markdown files
I understand the sentiment, but disagree with the solution. PKMs can be overwhelming if someone nerdy enough to use one ends up using it ineffectively.
The way I do it that I find works well is to have the following:
1. each day, have a journal page for a given day. Content only happens in the journal pages
2. have a series of topics that you tag. This system is up to you, but I usually find something with a hierarchy that is <=3 levels deep is best, e.g. I have "Job Search/2025/Company"
3. for each of the relevant tag pages, have those have some sort of "query" that will pull in all relevant tasks from all the journal pages, sort them by priority / state / deadline so you can see this all in one place (e.g. "What's the next step I have to do for my Nvidia application?" -> easy to answer with this system). Depending on your PKM, the hierarchy enables you to easily answer that question at a higher level, e.g. "What's the next steps I have to do for ALL of my applications?".
In each journal page, you can also write down a "task backlog" so minor tasks that you remember don't take up headspace while you intend to work on other major tasks (e.g. write down "get back to Joel about the Nvidia referral").
Regarding a point other folks have made: treat the journal and these tags as more of a "stream" of things you're doing in your life, instead of a collection of every-expanding obligations or a mausoleum of unexplored ambition.
I built this in Logseq, which seems to be the only one that has an advanced-enough query language to do this in that is possible to do local-only (no mandatory cloud data) in text files. If anyone knows how to build such a system in a different application, I'd be happy to learn! Logseq has been stale for a year or 2 as the authors are working on a much needed near-total rewrite which I'm not sure is ever going to arrive at this point.
This matches my experience as well. I have been journalling on and off for 4-5 years. It's a way for me to process my thoughts. But I never look back it, I don't feel the need to. The writing is the important bit, not the resulting output.
My personal website acts as my second brain in the sense that it helps me remember important events in my life and tracks my personal projects. I started it around 1995.
That is pretty impressive. I skimmed through the site, and was wondering what your thought process was when putting your life in the open vs. keeping it on a local disk?
Good question. Through the years, I have become more restrictive about what I write especially with respect to others. I am aware of the fact that I am more open to share about my personal life than many people around me. Maybe it is related to fact that I want to have some, hopefully positive, effect on the world. (Maybe one day in the future it might become material for some historic research.)
There is also a lot, I do not share. I keep a personal diary and since 2010, I am recording my daily activities in Moleskin daily planners (the only planners I have found that have the same space for Saturdays and Sundays as for working days).
This seems like a particular curse of having an indexable, easily searchable journal.
I use a paper notebook, which comes with the built in assumption that most of your notes are going to be permanently put on the shelf and forgotten. A couple pages can be marked somehow or another if anything really useful somehow ends up on them.
Writing things out is an important part of the process… I’d be a bit worried about obtaining a default assumption where those notes become anything other than ephemera.
Of course if you store “7000 notes” in a PKM you should expect most of them to be useless, unless you’re doing science and most of them are literature notes or something (remember the guy who “invented” zettelkasten worked as a researcher). Ordinary mortals can get by with a lot less.
I have maybe a few hundred notes on the handful of topics that matter to me and that’s it.
> I started reading to extract. Listening to summarize
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?
This article is visibly, annoyingly, distractingly in threes.
> 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.
I'm starting to notice this style a lot. Apparently there's a formal term for it, but I didn't begin to notice it until I started using ChatGPT regularly.
Granted, there are people who didn't notice the utility of the em dash until it became apparent in ChatGPT's responses, but aside from either device there is a certain vibe I'm starting to pick up from a lot of writing online that mirrors AI writing although you can't just call it that, especially if people enjoy it.
A kind of abstract solipsism that only resonates unless you consent to a platonic relationship with the author through their writing. About as close as you can get to reading something written with the aid of AI, I'd imagine.
I choose to think optimistically, in the same way as I did when smartphones put a camera in everyone’s pocket: suddenly, “bokeh” is a term with purchase in the mainstream! “Portrait mode” for every adorable baby pic! A ring light in every makeshift bedroom-dresser studio!
Everybody’s participating now, and taking pride in using more of the visual language of photography for themselves. That makes us all richer!
Now, then, that the language-bots have sensitized our collective ear to the hypnotic rhythm of a parallel-constructed triplet, the drama of a “—“, and the muscular power of a strong active voice (…that’s three, right?)—aren’t we all richer for it?
I think you raise a valid point, but I would argue that in your photography example, the content is very much still human - portrait mode and ring lights are tools that improve the output but a human framed the picture, and pressed the button.
LLM generated writing doesn't quite feel the same for me, the words are the content but they lack human touch, context, intention. The equivalent would be the photographer uploading their photo to ChatGPT and asking it to regenerate the image. The output wouldn't feel right, it is more like losing something than gaining.
I feel that your optimism is great but that the example you provided is not the same.
Everyone had the ability to write before chatgpt, they had the ability to get their thoughts across if they so wished, whereas with photography it lessened the burden of having to buy an entirely seperate device.
if I move myself into the shoes of a photographer or someone with an affinity towards photographing I kind of get that when taking pictures is a big part of your life the camera starts to get ingrained with that but for others it wasnt just a step from camera to more frictionless camera it was a step from nothing to camera.
Whereas everyone has a brain to think things and to try to communicate what they are thinking and feeling, large language models did not enable that, they did however enable lazy people to swap out the work with a robots response or malicious people to spam the internet
> Now, then, that the language-bots have sensitized our collective ear to the hypnotic rhythm of a parallel-constructed triplet, the drama of a “—“, and the muscular power of a strong active voice (…that’s three, right?)—aren’t we all richer for it?
> Every note in Obsidian. Every half-baked atomic thought, every Zettelkasten slip, every carefully linked concept map. (4, though I suppose you could argue it's 1 + 3)
> But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. (2, albeit with a 3 inside)
> Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories. (2)
> The inhabitants of the library, cursed to wander it forever, descend into despair, madness, and nihilism. (2 with a 3 inside again)
> It is associative, embodied, contextual, emotional. We do not think in folders. We do not retrieve meaning through backlinks. Our minds are improvisational. They forget on purpose. (4, 2, 2)
I think the author (either in person, or via some LLM that did much of the actual writing) is just fond of this sort of rhetorical repetition, and it happens that if you're doing that then 3 is often the best number. (Because 2 may not be enough to establish the rhythm, and 4 may be enough to feel overdone.)
I do think there's too much of it here, and specifically too many threes, but I think the underlying fault is "too much parallelism" and the too-many-threes are a symptom.
That quote doesn’t apply at all. Verbose writing doesn’t immediately indicate a lack of skill, otherwise every fiction book would’ve been reduced to a pamphlet of a summary.
If you are writing to explain, being concise is a useful asset. If you are writing to entertain, or for pleasure, verbosity and flair can be better.
I don’t get the feeling the author is trying to convince anyone of doing anything. They are sharing their experience, probably writing for themselves above everyone else. They should do it however they prefer.
I'm fascinated by all these comments I see on HN and elsewhere where people will deny that a blatantly LLM-written article was not LLM-written, including cases where people praise it for not being LLM-written (eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44384138 ). Like, leave aside the issue of whether it's a good or bad thing (I've been doing generative text NNs since 2015, so I'm mostly for it, when done well), I'm just interested in the inability to notice.
Skimming your comments, you, for example, do not seem to be illiterate or a bad writer at all despite being ESL (although you overuse the double-sentence structure in your comments), but you describe this as being 'stream of consciousness' (it is not even close to that, look at an actual example like Joyce) and seem to think it is fine.
So I'm puzzled how. Why isn't it obvious to you that the style is so mode-collapsed ( https://gwern.net/doc/reinforcement-learning/preference-lear... )? Do you also not notice how all the ChatGPT images are cat-urine yellow? (I've been asking people in person whether they have noticed this in the Bay Area and I'd say <20% of enthusiastic generative AI users have noticed.) What are you thinking when you read OP? Does it all just round off to 'content', and you don't notice the repetition because you treat it all as a single author? Are you just skimming and not reading it?
I remember reading the compendium of human-interface writings Apple put together in the 1990s. There was an exploration of ways to show age in software. They were changing the color and adding other aging effects to old files in the Finder.
I think part of that thought has stuck with me. I like storing things in directories by year. It is a structural reminder that a lot of the value of what I'm doing is tied to this moment in time. I can search back through "over the years" to find things, and it addresses this question of guilt.
> The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it - and move on. But the insight was never lived. It was stored. Like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away.
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.
I don’t understand why so many people on this thread feel the need to prescribe to the author what would’ve been better for them.
You don’t know the author, don’t know their mind, and clearly do not understand their thought process.
This post is a personal reflection. The author’s actions affect exactly one person: themselves. The “better answer” is unambiguously the one which works out best for the author. Period. They are better equipped than any of us to know what that is.
There’s something freeing about admitting that you won’t capture everything. I still write stuff down, but I stopped trying to build the “perfect” system. Life’s messy. Notes can be, too.
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.
I don't really use any PKM tools outside of an instance of Kanboard and OpenProject for tracking the stuff I want to do in the future, but because of my mTLS setup and limited hardware in my homelab, using them ends up feeling slow and sluggish (Kanboard is okay except for mTLS, whereas OpenProject is just unbearably slow all the time).
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.
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?
And instead of just logging off, the dramatic deletion. He frames this as the end of a phase but I suspect he's still in the middle of something. I wish him luck and strength.
Do you know that this person was writing the opposite ten years ago? And even if they did, people can’t try something and then change their mind? Is that worthy of ridicule now?
Frankly, making fun of someone for being “hipster” says more about the person doing the comment than the target of it. It’s a basic, meaningless insult.
Throwing notes away is not growing. Growing is understanding that inanimate things don't have control over your life.
This whole "philosophical" article that basically says "I've removed my notes because they were giving me anxiety" is a confirmation that this is just yet another phase in author's life.
You don’t get to define that. The author does, it’s their life.
The action taken here was not just the deletion, it was the reflecting, the identification of a problem, the thinking of a solution, the courage to follow through with something irreversible, the willingness to try something.
I would have zipped it and put it into long term storage. Now that I can run llms locally and train them with my notes, I’d never have to organize or revisit old notes and could still get value out of them.
I find it interesting, that some (many? most?) people develop anxiety about the stash of never-read but captured content in their note-taking apps.
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.
> But what got me sober, what got me through the first one, two, three hard years - none of it was in those 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...
Notes should be for things you can’t remember. How long did I bake that loaf of bread that turned out great? I’m not carrying that detail around in my mind with me unless I’m a baker and baking thirty loaves a day. Only then does become a permanent resident in my brain through pure repetition.
Thinking and processing and making connections is a dynamic and amorphous experience that can’t be put into static notes. It’s always changing, based on your mood, recent experiences, and new knowledge acquired.
Write down things you can’t remember, but keep the thinking in your head.
>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.
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 enjoyed reading this but it also made me think I must be a bit weird. Depending on what I'm working on and where I'm at, I keep notes in Apple notes or obsidian, extended descriptions on bookmarks, physical sticky notes, an actual journal and pages files on desktop - barely any of it is tagged and I'd call it 'notes' rather than a 2nd brain but i go through it all every eight-12 weeks, cull what now seems irrelevant and try to act on the rest of it. I should probably learn how to actually use obsidian properly but I still don't get the 'second brain'
terminology.
i like this. complexity bad, delete it! Most pkm, tools for thought, second brain apps confuse me. I drank the coolade with roam research but it drove me kinda nuts I've spent almost 3 years making my own tool. I mostly use it as a paste-bin, todos, lists -- and for the only thing i would never delete, voice notes on funny sayings or interactions with my 3 y/o daughter. my project is over at https://grugnotes.com if anyone else fits the anti note app vibe i'm kinda leaning into.
the thing with such a system is keeping it up to date
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.
I did the same thing recently, excluding quotes from books. Every other note, How To, and To Do gone. It provided tremendous relief. The vast majority of the stuff may as well have been written by a complete stranger. But, again, I kept my book quotes and notes as that is something I reference regularly. I guess the main thing was the realization that I literally don’t access 90% of my notes and they were of no value other than making me feel something about myself.
I don't take long-term notes at all, only quick notes on paper of thing I need to do. I tried to collect all thoughts, notes etc. but I would never read them again. Most of it would be outdated anyways. So I understand that these kind of notes might feel like ballast and might be a reason to not be able to close with things.
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'd like a digital reset - like starting a new play-through in a game.
I don't know how exactly? Buy a new PC, maybe I should jump platforms, a new email address, no past bookmarks, some deliberate avoidance of things I know by memory.
The old stuff will always be there, but I feel like a fresh opportunity to explore the digital world could be nice. Or maybe not?
I think this is not the time to delete an old archive of personal data, it feels like someone who deleted his bitcoin in 2010.. Data is eating the world.
It's baffling to me that anyone would do this in the age of LLMs. All of the author's concerns could've been solved or greatly mitigated by loading her PKM into a model as context. The article doesn't mention that she even considered this as an option. I hope the files can be recovered when she realizes this possibility.
>All of the author's concerns could've been solved or greatly mitigated by loading her PKM into a model as context
No, because the correctly identified concern by the author is much deeper. Knowledge isn't some repository of data, or some solipsistic LLM simulacrum of it, it's practiced, social, contextual. A real brain, unlike the "second brain", intentionally forgets.
To have agency is to purposefully erase, cut through BS, and start from a clean slate. Any person who has done anything meaningful starts with an empty sheet of paper. There's a reason all these note taking gurus have exactly zero actual work to their name, it's just productivity LARPing. Every single time you see one of these "productivity" advocates you try to look up if they've build something that has helped even one person with all their productivity, nothing. They just keep yapping about their notes.
I keep mine but archived as git history. I don't return to it but in critical moment I can come back to some obscure information I recorded years ago - useful for legal or insurance.
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.
If it wasn't for the compulsive authoring, storing, organizing, accessing, discarding, archiving, indexing and retrieving of notes and related data I wouldn't know what a computer was good for.
But the whole "second brain" trend always made my stomach turn and the surrounding culture of productivity/personal knowledge management is a tarpit.
I enjoyed the piece, but wonder if the author could have found some benefit if they used the corpus to train an (ideally locally-run (for privacy)) ai - so that questions could be asked of it and some value extracted..
I deleted all my gchats over 10
Years ago and it was the most freeing thing I did in my digital life.
I realized they were absolutely useless but carried a weird weight for me.
“What if I need something important from them?” Nope. If there’s something important then I can ask whomever again.
“What if I want to go through them?” Nope. Never even thought about it since I deleted them. Not even the first times I chatted with my now-wife.
Once I realized they were useless it helped me never save my WhatsApp messages and I turned on disappearing messages as soon as the feature appeared. I have another friend I’ve known for 20+ years, we set messages to 8 hours disappearing. If we miss a message or forget what we talked about, so be it.
It’s all so freeing, I never realized what a burden it could be, worrying about what if I lost something. I delete everything now except my photos which have more value.
I maintain a very simple system a folder my ideas, another for my projects and one for thoughts I think that with the current search tools at our disposal there is no need to set up a complex system
Don't mean at all to discredit what the author's done - it's their life and seems to have been helpful to them and for that I'm very glad.
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!"
I know what you mean. It's not just notes. I had shelves full of trinkets and books that I never looked at. I threw them all way to "unclutter my life". I realize now, even though I never picked them up or read the books they triggered memories. When I bought them, what I was into at the time, things like that. I don't know how much I wish I still had them all.
I'm going though something kind of similar now in that there are several boxes of stuff of mine in my parent's storage. I haven't looked in them in 20+ years. I basically told them to just chuck them in the trash. I haven't seen them, I don't want to see them. If I see them I'll just end up keeping them for another 20+ years without looking at them.
Yes, they will trigger memories. Things I made in high school, elementary school, college, etc.... There's at least 3 journals. But, do I really care? If they had just thrown them away with out telling me or if the storage and burnt down I'd have no idea what was in them and I certainly don't miss the contents or even think about them except when my parents mention, "you know, we still have your boxes in our storage"
I don't know how to choose between keeping them and getting rid of a pile of trash haha. I'm choosing to throw them away. I'd prefer not to know what's in them so I don't know what I don't know. I guess partly I just want to detach from the past. Others certainly make different choices.
That's what I feel after finding "Desktop" backup folders from years ago after refreshing my Windows installations. Each computer had their unique desktop and documents folder with bunch of software, games, half written plugins / codes.
When people discard something and Chesterton's fence doesn't come around to bite them in the back, I assume that the something was a bunch of rubbish in the first place.
Word of advice: don't do what the author has done. He has gone from one extreme (categorizing all notes obsessively) to the other extreme (wiping all notes, to start fresh).
The answer, as usual, is in the middle: keep all notes, archived. Feel free to restart old projects/ideas by archiving old projects to old/2024/legacy, and starting with a fresh page/folder, occasionally looking back at archived notes, if needed.
> He has gone from one extreme (categorizing all notes obsessively) to the other extreme (wiping all notes, to start fresh).
No, he went from extreme to "in the middle", if you find yourself in their place you should do EXACTLY what he did.
> I’m planning on using it again. From scratch. And with a deeper level of curation and care - not as a second brain, but as a workspace for the one I already have.
You can't categorize a gazillion notes you obsessively picked up over years. Do anything required to become functional again, in this case, delete it all if it is psychologically weighing on you
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.
I only keep my own thoughts in my 2nd brain, mostly daily journals. To see how my thinking evolves over time. Helped me to develop my unique theory on human behavior.
Why not just start a new notebook/vault? Notetaking systems are all imperfect and it's best not to throw a fit every time you run into those imperfections.
What if you change your mind again a year later? Couldn't you achieve exactly the same by simply archiving everything and starting from scratch without big data loss?
> Couldn't you achieve exactly the same by simply archiving everything and starting from scratch without big data loss?
No. The act of irreversible deletion is meaningful and has a real effect, archiving is not at all the same thing. It’s like moving houses and carrying all the junk you had in your attic to a new garage: all the crap is still there, you still think about it, getting rid of it is liberating. Even if you discover you needed something you threw away, having to redo it from scratch will require doing it differently, with fresh insights.
The analogy doesn't make sense since you can't avoid physical things you moved, they still take space and you see it every time you visit the garage.
> has a real effect
Sure, and I've mentioned one such effect - inability to access knowledge when you change your mind later.
And redoing doesn't require doing anything differently, you could end up doing exactly the same thing finding that useful info, just wasting more time in the process.
> they still take space and you see it every time you visit the garage.
And the digital things take space in your disk and, more importantly, the mind.
> inability to access knowledge when you change your mind later.
If you change your mind later. I’m an avid deleter, have been for years, and have never regretted it. It won’t happen, the upside of deletion is just too good.
That regret is a you thing (shared by many others), not a universal human characteristic. You’re not the author of the post, so your feelings don’t apply to them and their decision.
> you could end up doing exactly the same thing finding that useful info
Yes, you could. That is extremely unlikely, but you could.
> just wasting more time in the process.
And it still wouldn’t have been a waste of time. Not only would you have confirmed everything, which is extremely useful, it is very unlikely you wouldn’t have thought of new ideas or gained new insights in the process.
> take space in your disk and, more importantly, the mind.
They don't, your mind isn't big enough to worry about everything you store digitally. You need to at least try to state the actual issues with just knowing that your archive exists. The article at least established personal issues with maintaining the notes, but you failed to even try!
> I’m an avid deleter, have been for years, and have never regretted it.
How is it relevant when "your feelings don’t apply to them and their decision."?
> It won’t happen, the upside of deletion is just too good.
What crystal ball with the perfect visibility into the rest of your life have you glanced this certainty from?
> That regret is a you thing (shared by many others)
No, that's just an ~ad hominem you've made up. I didn't talk about regret. The issue could just be a waste of time later without any feeling of regret involved.
> Not only would you have confirmed everything
You don't have the old version, so you wouldn't know whether you've confirmed or rejected anything.
> which is extremely useful
Don't stop here, what's the usefulness?
> it is very unlikely you wouldn’t have thought of new ideas or gained new insights in the process.
You could say exactly the same thing about reading your old notes since new insight isn't banned there. The only more certain difference is the extra effort required to recreate.
> They don't, your mind isn't big enough to worry about everything you store digitally.
Patently incorrect. I did worry. Not about the contents of every little thing, but the fact that they existed. Some unmanaged, some improperly categorised, some perfectly triaged but no longer useful…
> The article at least established personal issues with maintaining the notes, but you failed to even try!
What does that even mean, “failed to even try”? Did you fail to even try to give me a recipe for chocolate cake? I didn’t think that would be relevant, so I didn’t mention it. But alright, I gave you some details in the rest of the post. All you had to do was ask, no need to criticise others for not doing something they didn’t even knew you wanted.
> How is it relevant when "your feelings don’t apply to them and their decision."?
That’s not the jab you seem to think it is. It is relevant precisely as way of example of something similar to the author. It is precisely so I don‘t speak for them that I gave you a personal example that is close enough. It presents “the other side” (people who delete) in a way we can engage without assuming anything about the author.
First you complain that I “failed to even try” to talk about my experience, then you complain when I talked about my experience in that very same post. Please make up your mind.
> What crystal ball with the perfect visibility into the rest of your life have you glanced this certainty from?
Do you not see how this counter argument is counter productive? By the same token, I could ask you by what crystal ball do you know neither I nor the author are better off by the deletion of material. The answer is: you don’t. And maybe I can’t know for certainty either, but I sure as hell know myself better than you know me. And I do know what I threw away in the past, and the things I lost accidentally (tangential issue), and I know what my attitude and life repercussions have been. And for that, I can say with certainty I prefer things as they are, with the deletion.
> I didn't talk about regret.
Changing your mind about something you did isn’t regret? Alright then, let’s forget the word, replace it instead of “that feeling of wasted time”. Doesn’t really change the argument (because, crucially, that’s not what an ad hominem is).
> You don't have the old version, so you wouldn't know whether you've confirmed or rejected anything.
Deleting a digital file doesn’t erase your memory. But either way, I meant confirmation in the sense of reasserting the research. Doesn’t matter what the old version said, only that the new one is correct. Also, crucially, if in your scenario you can’t be sure of what the old version said, then you also don’t know if the time was wasted or not.
> Don't stop here, what's the usefulness?
It’s in that exact same sentence you quoted. It’s literally all the rest of it that you cut from the quote.
> You could say exactly the same thing about reading your old notes
With the monumental difference that in this case the old notes were a cause of stress. In hundreds of notes, maybe you’ll have to recreate one or two. Or maybe none. Yet not having all the other cruft is absolutely worth the trade off. Maybe not for you, but certainly for me, and probably the author of the post.
Sometimes I remember a particular line from a particular article and wish I had kept the links.
But I have learnt that things should go away permanently and it's normal to never get to read it again. "Life is like that"
I had around 3.8k collected over the span of 4 years
I don't get this. I have a megabyte or two of plain-text notes, and going through them and maintaining them and extending them is fun (apologize to the person who doesn't like threes). There are notes for a novel, ideas for future personal projects (way too many to do in my remaining lifetime), attempts at capturing my understanding of great scientific and philosophical problems, weird things I invented in my dreams, various ideas which didn't fit anywhere else. Guess what, the novel will probably never get written, projects will never get done, I will not make a philosophical breakthrough. So what?
Some ideas on how am I supposed to start hating my notes:
* They grow to 100MB, then it starts to be a burden
* I switch from notepad.exe to a dedicated application which somehow exploits my hobby of writing notes
* I develop OCD or something else
None of this seems very relatable. At this point, I might be writing a new note with these ideas, updating it when I get more ideas or when the one, most plausible explanation jumps out at me. Then I would read it years later and have something to think about before bed and have a good feeling that I didn't lose something and I am not left with thougths about the last episode of a TV show. Or is that supposed to be a bad feeling?
> going through them and maintaining them and extending them is fun
It’s fun for you, not for everyone else. There, it’s as simple as that. All you need to understand is different people enjoy different things.
> Or is that supposed to be a bad feeling?
It’s not “supposed” to be anything. It will be good for some, bad for others, neutral for others still. There’s no objective right answer. If you enjoy something and it doesn’t harm anyone, do it. If you don’t enjoy it and it isn’t necessary, don’t do it. Other people will have different preferences.
Oh, the OP pretty much told me that they didn't like taking notes. I am trying to understand why, what is the mechanism? Is it like burning out? Can it happen to me and my notes when I start doing something wrong? Why is "just do less of it" not a solution? Why is "just expect less from it" not a solution? Am I an exception? If so, why?
I understand this and I have done similar a few times (e.g. deleting all old emails, deleting all notes, deleting a tonne of old files etc.). It's quite freeing. We do hoard a lot of digital stuff that we really don't need. Saying that, there are a few times over the years I've needed somethings, realised I deleted it and regretted it. That feeling passed quickly though and I soon realised it probably didn't matter.
I used Obsidian 2 yrs. ago for almost 2 weeks and I quit. I did not know why - until this post. I felt missing s.th. or left myself behind by not using s PKMs. Now I feel calm after reading this post. It seems that my subconsciousness alredy knew, that (to me) a PKM would never reach a break even point...
i will just give a fresh counterargument I encountered yesterday.
when trying to reset my Passat service warning, you got to press a combination of button, hold a few seconds, etc.
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.
Thanks for sharing, it was an interesting read that made me introspect on my usage of Obsidian too.
I think there's a couple of points during his journey the author could've came to a more balanced conclusion than deleting his "second brain" (obsidian folder).
First is ofc the tool-creep that he mention. It was supposed to be a support tool, to make you reach a goal or solve a problem. Yet it become a goal in itself. A classic Goodhart's law. This should've led him to realize that he need to limit what context the Second brain idea is applied to. Luhmann, the Zettlekasten guy kept in his physical office, segregating his "thinking & writing, work" with the rest of his life. The authors case is the classic "Todolist trap". If he could've identified that early, he could've maybe siloed it better to the useful part.
Second, The "Unread list". One of the first things even in the Zettlekasten ideal (which spanned the entire second brain idea) is to never put in anything unprocessed. Everything, new idea to new reading, should be first processed, thought of, and then written down in your own word. When you break this principle, your second brain is not a brain, it's a todo list.
The third is to humanize it. This also affect point 2. If you properly review your second brain, you'll notice that great insight or ideas you wrote down doesn't seem so great anymore, or lacking. It's also hard to recount why you considered this thing great, or worth writing down. That's when you realize that sometimes, the detail of the idea doesn't matter as much as why/when and how you came up with it. You more often can come up with same idea, hopefully even more refined, if you just remember the context of it.
This should transform your "second brain" from not merely being a list of connected ideas, but with contexts. Who did you share that idea with? Where you sad/mad/angry? what did you do the day you got that idea? Those are all ques your brain can use to reconstruct the entire picture, wayyy better than just words. People that wrote diaries have known this since forever. It's not the ideas you want to keep, but the mental state that reached you to that idea. New, future you, can take that idea way way further, given the same mental state. This insight alone should delete all unread lists. At best it should be delegated to a reference/archive "folder" disconnected from your second brain.
Second brain is not an archive, it's a process. When you misunderstand that, often because you're attached (ego) to the ideas you generate, you fall for the trap the author did.
Edit:
I realized that the author is from the rationalist movement. That kinda figures.
This resonates with me, I’ve never considered knowledge as something you can live.
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.
The main problem of notes is that most tools are bad, Emacs/org-mode outshine the others, still having it's own hiccups (for instance a very limited transclusion support so far with org-transclusion and delve at the best).
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!
I started building the second brain a while ago but I quickly started to feel like I was trying to dance while wearing a straitjacket so I stopped doing it.
> I don’t want to manage knowledge. I want to live it.
This is the essence!
Very good post. I think the nuclear action was perfect, it was neede to get out of the loop.
You should write your thoughts, not copy paste others'. This way you help reorganise your brain to adapt to the subject. Some thoughts should be written as a tool and then thrown away, others (more important) should be kept
,.............the ancient greeks, correctly identified nostalgia as a disease.That said ,deap personal memories do serve a central place is familial and tribal/cultural knowledge, but the ......."insignificant bits (and bobs)" are poison
this is something that I have experienced on a number of occasions when knowledge keepers have......inserted, very short statements that serve to turn a great deal of other myth and trivia into a cohearant whole containing actionable instructions.
a list can never,ever, serve this function
Having went through similar deletions before the important takeaway is that the reason the author felt relief is that deleted things that were weighing them down.
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.
I'm not sure I can relate to the author. My Zettelkasten is not a todo list or project binder or whatever personal life management function they use it for.
Mine is for consolidation of knowledge. For instance, when I study math and I write a pen and paper proof as an exercise I then write a clean note from scratch and link to other theorems or corollary notes I have etc. Similar stuff for computer science or programming. I find out that this process solidifies the work I'd already done and make it less likely to forget.
I also think people get a bit too dogmatic about the ways to use technology to help improve your life. Like, what the heck complex rules about Zettelkasten? I don't know what kind of expectations they have going into this. Do these "influencers" telling you how to use it sell the promise of the ultra-intelligent god from the popular meme? Just open the damn editor and write, you will find what works for you through tinkering and iteration.
Yeah, it seems like they were writing massive volumes of useless ephemeral to-do lists and throwing them away was easy.
Maybe they were doing it wrong and should've been writing down durable knowledge that has lasting value.
I write down guides to do things, explanations of how things work that make sense to me, information that I know will be useful at some time but will be accessed infrequently (e.g. information about people or projects).
A 7,000 book reading list seems useless if your goal is to read all of them. But if it's just a bank of interesting books to pull from when you want something to read on the beach or on a sunny weekend, that doesn't cause me stress at least. I'm adding to the bank, not adding items to do. Like my list of board games to try.
Digital notes take an insignificant amount of space, you can just keep them and ignore them, use them when you need to. Deleting them seems to me like neuroticism. Some kind of symbolic gesture for emotional relief. There are a lot of productivity gurus online that will try to sell you a course on the best way to take notes, and perhaps the author has fallen into one of those traps, taking notes of things they don’t have interest in. in a way that does not feel natural and satisfying. I only take notes when I am compelled to. It’s a gut feeling that I rely on. It’s effortless for me to take notes because of it. It provides me comfort and relief knowing that my memories are accessible, and I gladly write them. The author makes some grandiose assumptions that we have to forget. You don’t have to, and neither do you have a choice in it. It’s some kind of idealist way of thinking to justify the author's actions. Seems misguided. Memorization plays an extremely important role in learning, but for those of us with executive function problems, using our notes augments our life for the better. Just as the author talks about how memories work, my notes are just like my thoughts, webs of interlinked notes strung together. A lot of times, I just remember what tags and backlinks I can use to find the information I am looking for in my notes.
> Some kind of symbolic gesture for emotional relief.
Calling someone neurotic and insinuating they are doing this for symbolism instead of having a real, tangible effect on their life is rather narcissistic, don't you think?
These sort of comments always baffled me; they read as if you've never taken the time to talk to someone who lives or operates differently than you, and don't consider any way but yours a valid worldview and lifestyle.
I feel like someone who never struggled with mental health will never get someone who did.
I dealt with anxiety, it certainly sounds like something I'd do. It's not that it's digital notes, that I can leave - no, my mind would be occupied with them. When I was younger, I would throw my stuff away, hoping that it will help me get more disciplined.
> Calling someone neurotic and insinuating they are doing this for symbolism instead of having a real, tangible effect on their life is rather narcissistic, don't you think?
No? Even if you think it's wrong I don't see what's self-important about that claim. Maybe there's lack of empathy but that's only a small part of narcissism. And saying something is done for emotional relief doesn't sound like lack of empathy to me.
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.
I understand what the author deleted and why.
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.
> 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).
It struck me as odd how the blog post waxed lyrical about "second brains" but the description of the notes seemed to point at mostly to-do lists. That's not what I would call a second brain. The definition of "second brain" is in line with the old tradition of engineering logs, where engineers write down things they did, measurements they took, and observations they did. On the other hand, to-do lists is just work you assign to yourself.
No wonder those notes caused anxiety. I would also be anxious if I was faced with a log with 7-years worth of chores that are both late and stale.
Logs are logs. You write down what you feel is important, and forget about them. After some time, you can delete them without a second thought. You write down stuff today because you feel it will help you in the future. If what you wrote down today is not a present from your past to your present, and instead is causing you grief, then just remove it from your notes.
As all things in life, you need to preserve the things that cause joy and push away those that cause grief. Your second brain is no different.
I'd hate to lose the ability of just going back 20 years later and read my own thoughts and ideas, to meet the person I was at that point.
I have a project/idea journal that I've had for over 10 years, and going through it sometimes is really fun. I remember being so proud about my code-generation tool that allowed me to quickly start a new html+css project that I was doing that work as a freelancer. Seeing that page in my journal brings up a smile.
> I'd hate to lose the ability of just going back 20 years later and read my own thoughts and ideas, to meet the person I was at that point.
Yeah, my "second-brain" doubles as a journal too, and I have written notebooks from when I first arrived in my "real home country" with basically nothing, and it's always a pleasure to go back to read through and realize (again) how different my life is now.
It's really easy to lose track of our own progress day-to-day, and being able to analyze your past perspectives and situations is like a hack to instant happiness.
> I'd hate to lose the ability of just going back 20 years later and read my own thoughts and ideas, to meet the person I was at that point.
The author mentions being sober for 6 years. Chances are she's not terribly interested in meeting her past self.
Sometimes it's nice to remind yourself how far you've come.
I recently recovered about 3TB of data from over 15 years ago. It was just on a hard drive with a friend that we thought was lost. I dont really miss the data, but oh it was nice to see some old photos and notes!!
So what I recoomend is put on a hd and hide it some where. Go check it in 15 years
An HDD (or tape if you really want want it to stick around), not an SSD.
TIL that tape storage exists with density competitive with HDDs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open
but I still don't understand what supposedly makes it more reliable long-term as storage.
It is a question of failure mode. If your hard drive motor dies, if the heads fail, if the electronics fail, if the sealing fail (in some cases it can be repaired by specialists but that's not easy and much more expensive than a tape reader)... lots of things can go wrong that are not related with the media itself. The advantage of tape is that the device that reads it is separate from the mechanically simple tape. It comes at a cost but that's for hedging against a different risk.
LTO-9 drives are expensive, but the media is around $90 for an 18TB (pre-compression) tape. That’s a pretty good price if you make lots of backups for work. They also offer append-only mode, which is awesome for archives where you want it to be essentially impossible to delete a backup without physical access.
But the tape itself has a great reputation for being physically robust. There are fewer parts to break than in an HDD, too. If your tape drive dies, you can replace it and keep using the same media. That’d be like having hard drive platters you could swap into another HDD later on.
Tape media doesn't last forever. I suppose that tapes specifically meant for archiving are better, but I have old audio tapes from the 1970s and 80s that are just falling apart.
Mylar audio tape of that vintage had longevity problems. I remember reading about an audio archive that thought they had done the right thing by preserving onto high quality tape of the time and then they found their archives disintegrating. I think they got lucky and moved things to new media before losing everything.
This is always the risk. Longevity testing is often done at high temperatures or other artificial means but cannot exactly simulate 30-50 years of storage. If something is important, it's best to use two different media, and check them over the years.
I believe it is cost per unit density that allows magnetic tape to be more suitable for archival storage than HDD, which surpasses it in I/O speeds. Magnetic tape storage is still usually in RAID-like configurations and while tape only survives for 15-30 years, data survival by migration is typically done well before medium degradation.
What you've built sounds more like an external memory prosthetic than a second brain - grounded, functional, and geared toward real-world utility, not aspirational insight-hoarding. I think that's the key difference: your system serves your life, not the other way around
This comment you wrote sounds a lot like an LLM, FYI. Not saying you are
It’s the last sentence that makes it sound like Claude, to me
I've used AI a lot and completely disagree.
That voice - antithesis - is straight out of ChatGPT, like the sibling comment says.
It’s funny how ChatGPT writes like a first-year in an MFA writing program. Its style is often too elegant for its substance.
OpenAI is not good at matching form to function in text or voice.
I also follow this philosophy. I also have an anxious brain, though. To manage the clutter, I zip up old notes & projects by date and put them in an archive folder. They're always there if I need to reference them, but I have a clean workspace too. I include file trees in those archives for easy reference. Very easy to script with a cron job.
> current state for personal projects I rotate in and out of over years
How do you get yourself to rotate back in?
Personally, I don't "get myself" to do anything, I just do it for fun.
The usual cycle is that I start hacking on some fun thing like an implementation of rules for a board game or trying to work out how some library I use works. Eventually I write down where I am then stop, maybe because I got bored or it was too hard.
Then I forget that the project was hard, become convinced that it was easy, then spend an evening hacking away again.
It's just leisure. Like putting a bookmark in a novel.
Somewhat related I have a little script that shows me three notes at random everyday. If they’re stale or no longer needed I delete the note. This helps keep it relatively fresh over time.
I have a tag “#noreview” for notes that are evergreen that don’t need to be reviewed. Example of that might which bus to take from Heathrow when visiting friends in London
I took some blurbs from your comment and added it to my…life/career notes. (:
[dead]
I don't really like this. I think the author let their own personal issues lead to the destruction of knowledge. I relate to the issues, but the nuclear option seems extreme.
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.
The problem with hoarding is that, on the whole, the hoarded items are worthless. There’s too much noise and too little signal. Finding the gems takes an active effort, which author found daunting. Hoarders usually need help from the outside, and if they don’t get that help, it’s IMO fair to throw it all out.
> Finding the gems takes an active effort, which author found daunting.
Who knows what are gems are what are not? I scan tons of stuff related to my children's school/activities etc. One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them and find some things they will call gems and lots of other junk. Or maybe they will consider it all junk and just get rid of it. But I can't be the judge of that now, I can only be the custodian.
You are perfectly describing the issue when sorting out a hoarder‘s stuff. There‘s no way of knowing what‘s precious and what not for most of the things. There might be some obvious things (wooden furniture / ISO documents that are still relevant), but the rest goes in the trash usually.
> One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them
My mother used to say the same thing. But I‘m not looking at that old stuff, ever. Maybe your kids will. It’s your decision whether it’s worse to be false negative or false positive here. If the stuff is not taking up too much space, it’s probably a good idea to keep it. Hoarding is something else though.
It's a hundred times easier to search a digital hoard and you can fit a very big one inside a single hard drive.
So the idea that most of it is worthless is far far less justification to toss the entire pile. The cost to benefit ratio is shifted by more than 1000x.
And even then, while cleaning out a physical hoard you'll take time to look through things.
Discarding the hoard has mainly psychological upsides in this case.
I'll take my chances on the off chance that my child will see their primary 2 report card scan after many years and say "oh my god I can't believe it..."
My mom kept everything like that. The structured stuff like baby books and photo albums with labels and stories are great. The boxes of report cards from when I was 7 were a momentary amusement before they were recycled. The school work and random other things were just annoying to have to sort through.
I would have been stoked to see the evidence of her sentimentality if that was my mother (my dad kept my stuff and I liked that very much). I guess we are all different people will different emotional reactions. Also I know nothing about you or your life so maybe your reaction is totally warranted.
Of course you would have been m stoked, hoarders enjoy hoards. It's a tautology.
What you fail to understand is the vast majority of people are not hoarders and don't enjoy hoards.
I would enjoy a digital hoard of stuff like that, but not a physical hoard. I have since digitized all of the stuff my parents hoarded and got rid of a lot of the physical items.
It doesn't really cost me anything on an ongoing basis to have this huge digital dump of files sitting around. It was a one time effort to scan everything. If my parents had done that and just left a huge archive of digital files, that would be fine.
If people feel neutrally about digital hoards, that makes sense.
If it were me, I would indeed think “oh my god I can't believe it”, followed immediately by “why did my parents save this worthless junk? I have no interest in this. How much more garbage is in here? I’m definitely not going to look through it all to find two important things buried in hundreds of trivialities. And now I have to go through the trouble of throwing it away myself. I’d rather be doing anything else”.
Maybe your kids will enjoy it, though. But that feeling is far from universal.
> If it were me, I would indeed think “oh my god I can't believe it”, followed immediately by “why did my parents save this worthless junk? I have no interest in this. How much more garbage is in here? I’m definitely not going to look through it all to find two important things buried in hundreds of trivialities. And now I have to go through the trouble of throwing it away myself. I’d rather be doing anything else”.
Sure, we are all different people. I was super happy to find my childhood class photo and marksheets that my dad had saved - it just underlined what I already knew, that he cared. I shared it with my children and we bonded over the exams where I didn't fare well.
> But that feeling is far from universal.
I know that the level of sentimentality isn't a universal thing.
I'm not going to hold them to cherishing this stuff and ask them to explain themselves if they just delete it. I just want them to have a chance at looking at small parts of their childhood. It is done without expecting gratitude or reciprocal emotions in return, which I guess, is part of being a parent.
> I scan tons of stuff related to my children's school/activities etc. One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them and find some things they will call gems and lots of other junk.
My sister and I have an agreement to trash my mom’s hoard of our school stuff she refuses to get rid of that we don’t want. All it does is bring us stress. If they made physical art like clay pots in a kiln, keep it for yourself if they don’t want it. If it’s something you can scan, I doubt it’s worth keeping and makes it much harder to find signal in the noise when too much is scanned.
When my mother passed and we had to clean out my parent's house, she had boxes of the same kinds of things. Old report cards, drawings and school work from 40+ years ago. It was nice to see that she cared to save it but it was of no interest beyond that. And it was pretty clear that she herself never looked at it, as the boxes were packed away in closets and obviously hadn't been touched since they were put there.
Stuff causes stress. It's really true. Even if it's mostly out of the way, every time you see it it will cause some stress about whether it should be moved, reorganized, saved, or thrown away. The house I grew up in was always cluttered and I'm bad about it myself. Every once in a while I will order a roll-off dumpster to the house and get rid of things that have accumulated over the past 10 years or so. It's a relief but then it starts over again.
If there's one habit I wish I had it would be to regularly and ruthlessly get rid of stuff that I don't use anymore.
You can ask your kids what those gems are. My dad ask me this a few months ago. I brought up some knick knacks he had in his office when I was growing up. I'm not sure if he still has them or not, but if he does, if he ever goes through his hoard, he'll know to send those my way instead of getting rid of them.
> You can ask your kids what those gems are. My dad ask me this a few months ago. I brought up some knick knacks he had in his office when I was growing up. I'm not sure if he still has them or not, but if he does, if he ever goes through his hoard, he'll know to send those my way instead of getting rid of them.
He can't give them to you if he threw it away. Also, he can ask that question to you because your choices and preferences are, to a large extent, set.
The same stuff, that my child would throw away without hesitation few years ago, is now "precious memories" and not to be disturbed. The emotional value of things doesn't follow much logic and has massive volatility until adulthood.
I mean I totally understand that me keeping bunch of stuff isn't a guarantee that they will find what they value at that point of time. Maybe the lego-shaped eraser would be the most interesting piece of stationary they will remember; doesn't mean I can hoard every piece of stationary. Digital stuff is different though - my SSD doesn't bulge just because I'm putting more files holding snippets of life on it.
> Who knows what are gems are what are not?
In this case, the author wrote the notes. If they say it has no value, they probably know what they’re talking about.
> In this case, the author wrote the notes. If they say it has no value, they probably know what they’re talking about.
Well, yeah, if they say it has no value, then obviously it has no value to them, no one could claim otherwise.
I guess the context in this thread kind of shifted to it might still be valuable to someone, even if it isn't valuable to them. There been a lot of cases in history where very smart people judged their own journals to not be very valuable (to them) so they think nothing of it, then 100 years later someone discovers the journal together with a ton of valuable (to the world) nuggets in it.
Realistically they will use an AI to find the gems.
I'll be happy if they atleast try, AI or no AI :) And if they don't, thats ok too!
OMG, this is so dumb, your children don't want your hoard; at least admit your hoarding for yourself, not them.
Counterpoint: data hoarding is not like physical hoarding (or at least, it hasn't been up to this point), because we've lived through an era of exponentially increasing storage capacity (with file sizes to match, in many cases).
I still have a folder full of notes from several of my university courses, grouped by course. Some of it is source code (either the lecturer's or my own); some is assignment text (in a mixture of plain text, PDF, legacy .doc, etc.). There aren't any repositories because this was many years before Git existed and professors back then apparently didn't think we needed to be taught about the systems that did exist.
But why not keep it? The whole collection is smaller than, say, the OpenBLAS shared library that comes with a NumPy installation. It's maybe 1% of the size of the ISO for a modern desktop Linux distribution.
It's part of a folder with even older stuff - all the way back to toy Turing programs I wrote as a child. There are countless random files that are probably poorly organized internally, that I'll likely never revisit with any good reason. But the whole thing is less data than I'd likely end up downloading if I spent an hour on YouTube or Twitch. The ability to store it permanently costs me literally pennies, amortized over the cost of the drive.
... And yet, the size of modern applications still bothers me. It feels almost disrespectful, somehow. Old habits die hard, I guess.
I don't disagree with anything you're saying apart from the last few words.
The solution to this problem is the same it has been for literally centuries: archiving.
The whole point of an archive is that it's out of the way and takes no effort, even more so a digital one. But if you have/need/want the time/space, you or someone else can check it, and find a gem.
As someone who by now has decades of nested digital archives of archives, those still have a psychological weight that sometimes surfaces when I am reminded of their existence. It’s not clear to me they really constitute a net benefit.
We just entered the era where LLMs could mine his gems for him though.
I find it wild to suggest an LLM would be better at scouring data for gems than the person who wrote them. LLMs are better than us at going through large amounts of data, and that's it. They have no idea what is valuable there.
Agreed. LLMs have no taste.
> I find it wild to suggest an LLM would be better at scouring data for gems than the person who wrote them
I mean, "an out there" idea sure, but wild? There are plenty of cases where people underestimated their own worth and value, and the potential impact of their ideas.
Sometimes it's valuable to have outsiders perspective on things. Old war veterans might not think twice about their love-letters between them and their partner, but taken together with a large collection of letters, historians can build new perspectives that we weren't able to see before.
> They have no idea what is valuable there.
Of course an LLM wouldn't know what is "valuable". It would require a person to have an idea of what could be valuable, and program the LLM to surface based on that, together with more things.
For example, I could imagine if I setup an LLM with the prompt "Highlight perspectives that you think are conflicting with other stated perspectives" to go through my own second-brain, it could reveal something I haven't considered before, granted it'll be able to freely query the db and so on.
With respect to knowledge and notes, I would say that the knowledge (gems) may not be worthless in an absolute sense but its relevance may no longer be worth the cost of keeping said knowledge organized under a given person’s organization scheme.
For what it is worth, I still find it frustrating when I cannot find a certain piece of information that I am looking for but I know exists because I came across it before but didn’t record it at the time. However, I also appreciate being able to forget distressing events that would find ways to remind me about their existence.
I guess all of this may depend on the exact definitions of knowledge, data, and memory, and how an individual reckons with acquiring, organizing, and forgetting information.
> The problem with hoarding is that, on the whole, the hoarded items are worthless. There’s too much noise and too little signal.
I don't think that's a problem. What turns logs into a problem is misplaced expectations on what is their purpose and how you should use them.
Logs are collected with the express purpose of being ignored, and as a safeguard in case in the future you need to check an audit trail of what you were doing. After a while, once the odds of those logs providing any value drops enough, you can safely delete them.
Your tool is only as good as you make it out to be.
That's an effort that can be handled by an AI.
If they’re worthless then give them away
It’s the thought organization equivalent of the Britany Spears head shaving. It’s a mental breakdown and the person suffering from the mental health issue at its root is processing their behavior by writing about it. It’s mental illness.
Deleting notes to mental illness is quite the leap.
So you didn’t actually take the time to read the article.
> I think the author let their own personal issues lead to the destruction of knowledge.
Conversely, I think you’re letting your own personal views stand in the way of empathy and recognising what is best for another.
There was no “destruction of knowledge”. It was a collection of notes which was never going to be looked at again and was causing stress to the author. Written knowledge which isn’t read is as useless at that which isn’t written in the first place. Would you also decry someone for not having written the note in the first place?
> They could have just left their library for a bit, there was no need to burn it to the ground.
It was not a library. I bet that for the author it felt closer a hoarder’s house with stacks of scattered newspapers.
> "I've just lobotomised myself and I look forward to having to relearn everything and doing it all again".
Absurd. Deleting written notes does not make you immediately forget everything that was written on them. The lessons they needed, they internalised. The ones they didn’t weren’t important anyway. Sure, there may have been some good notes in there, but not in enough quantity and quality to warrant wading though them all and justify the extra anxiety the existence of these lists caused.
> If nothing else, in 7 years time, they'll regret
No, they will not. Signed, someone who learned to delete relentlessly and is much happier for it.
Maybe you would regret it. That says nothing about other people. If anything, I’d regret the years when I didn’t delete stuff.
> There was no need to do this.
Yes, there was. The author needed it for their mental well-being and development. Let them be. Everyone copes with life in different ways. We’re all going to die, all your notes will be meaningless in the end.
> 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.
No, everyone should do what makes sense for them personally.
Having the thing “out of the way” is not the same as having it gone. It’s a very different feeling, like saving a memento from an unhealthy relationship VS throwing it away. There is freedom in deciding to let go without recourse.
I for one applaud the author and wish them the best. I’m sure they struggled with the decision and it took some courage to go through with it. They did the right thing for themselves and that’s what matters.
We're not going to agree here, we're going to descend into stupid walls of texts. I'll give you one more, but I probably wont respond. It's not personal, it's just not valuable for either of us.
> There was no “destruction of knowledge”. It was a collection of notes which was never going to be looked at again and was causing stress to the author. Written knowledge which isn’t read is as useless at that which isn’t written in the first place. Would you also decry someone for not having written the note in the first place?
I disagree that there was no destruction of knowledge. Even if the author is just copy/pasting from random sources, the link and choice of putting those 2 copies in the same folder is a bit of knowledge, a link solidified with an action. We have different ideas of what constitutes knowledge, I think you know you're being ridiculous if you're sincerely trying to argue that 7 years worth of notes doesn't have a single new contribution of any value to anything or anyone at all.
I do decry people who don't take personal notes.
> It was not a library. I bet that for the author it felt closer a hoarder’s house with stacks of scattered newspapers.
I totally agree that's how the author felt - they let their own negative feelings towards what they've created destroy something which could be valuable to others.
> Absurd. Deleting written notes does not make you immediately forget everything that was written on them. The lessons they needed, they internalised. The ones they didn’t weren’t important anyway. Sure, there may have been some good notes in there, but not in enough quantity and quality to warrant wading though them all and justify the extra anxiety the existence of these lists caused.
What's even your point here? You start saying how notes aren't even needed and are pointless to be written down, then you argue that maybe there is some value in them written down, and then come back to support my argument that the author's own personal feelings have lead to the destruction of something valuable.
> No, they will not. Signed, someone who learned to delete relentlessly and is much happier for it.
> Maybe you would regret it. That says nothing about other people. If anything, I’d regret the years when I didn’t delete stuff.
Ignorance is bliss: you can't get upset about the things you don't know any more. Knowledge is hard.
Your position about not regretting throwing away potential personal knowledge and memories isn't a position I've heard from anyone over (*edited typo) the age of 50. You don't regret it just like the author doesn't, I think you have a future of denial or upset.
> Yes, there was. The author needed it for their mental well-being and development. Let them be. Everyone copes with life in different ways. We’re all going to die, all your notes will be meaningless in the end.
There's other ways to deal with information overload, like proper archiving. We're all going to die, and the only reason why have a culture or knowledge as a species is because everyone else hasn't done what this person is doing.
> No, everyone should do what makes sense for them personally.
> Having the thing “out of the way” is not the same as having it gone. It’s a very different feeling, like saving a memento from an unhealthy relationship VS throwing it away. There is freedom in deciding to let go without recourse.
Congratulations with the individualism, you made yourself feel free by burning books. If that makes you happy - you do you, I don't care - but don't act like it's benefit anyone else other than the person struggling with the feeling of information overload.
> I'll give you one more, but I probably wont respond. It's not personal, it's just not valuable for either of us.
Then why did you bother responding in the first place, and why should anyone bother reading beyond that point? If you’re not interested in discussing, don’t. Throwing a bunch of words at someone and then going closing your ears singing “la la la” is worse than not being valuable, it has negative value for the discussion.
Frankly, that made me only skim the rest of your post instead of engaging properly. It was still pretty obvious you lack real empathy for the author, their needs, and are unable to understand people who have a different view of the issue than you do.
Here‘s the thing: The author isn’t making a general commentary or recommendation, they are recounting their own personal experience. Pretending you know what makes sense for them is arrogant and misguided. That you are unable to understand other people have different needs and ways of approaching life is a you problem.
> Then why did you bother responding in the first place, and why should anyone bother reading beyond that point? If you’re not interested in discussing, don’t. Throwing a bunch of words at someone and then going closing your ears singing “la la la” is worse than not being valuable, it has negative value for the discussion.
I didn't mean to imply I wasn't going to read, it's just that disagreeing so vehemently on a sentence by sentence basis - like we're both clearly prone to do - isn't always fun or productive. Neither of us is going to change our mind with the depth and detail at which we're disagreeing. You're completely fair to see it as me sticking my fingers in my ears, sorry, because that's disrespectful of me.
My intent was to give you the respect of responding in a similar level of detail to address your points, since you gave the time for me, but prevent the need for either of us to have to keep doing it...
> Here‘s the thing: The author isn’t making a general commentary or recommendation, they are recounting their own personal experience. Pretending you know what makes sense for them is arrogant and misguided. That you are unable to understand other people have different needs and ways of approaching life is a you problem.
I never claimed to know what's best for them, I would even go as far as saying I don't care what's best for them, I was speaking from a position of what I think's best for human knowledge. Fundamentally, if you agree burning books - metaphorically - is a bad thing, then you agree deleting second brains instead of just archiving is a bad thing.
Here's the thing: I'm not making a general commentary or recommendation, I'm recounting my own _personal_ view of what's best for human knowledge and what I think of the authors article. Pretending that me having a different view is "absurd", is arrogant and misguided. That you are unable to understand that I have different needs and ways of approaching life is - apparently - a problem...:P
I guess sometimes people just need to get a thought out. At least that note saved us the time of reading the comment in full.
That’s a lot of words to say “I know what’s best for you and you don’t.”
I mean most of us don’t keep any organized notes and are fine. I can giggle sometimes when I find old notepads from the past but nothing I’d miss.
Sounds like the author for sure made an obvious choice even if that doesen’t mean you have to do the same.
It's a commitment. Note that the author also struggled with sobriety.
Likely, this whole "library" was causing unhealthy behavior.
Commitments are important.
Let alone the fact that he could have fed an assistant with that information in 3 or 5 years, and would never have had to bother with that information again, but would be able to talk about it and ask in huge detail about things that were once relevant. The AI would have enough information on how he wants the data to be structured, it could have kept doing it for him.
Her. Her name is in the goddamn URL. Joan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_(given_name)
It’s not knowledge unless they actually know it. It’s just a collection of information.
I have a simple philosophy in how I approach everything: Too much of anything is bad.
When I started taking notes with obsidian I almost fell into this trap of over-analysing everything in terms of what should go into a note, making folders and sub-folders. It became quickly obvious to me that the mental burden of this can accumulate quickly.
These days I store most of my notes in one folder. The only times I now make a note are: 1. When I'm reading. 2. Very rare these days, but sometimes I still have nagging thoughts that wants to be written down. 3. When I have important information that needs to be stored, like IP address, things like this.
I've found that not thinking about notes obsessively like this helps me better, most thoughts are useless and fleeting, they're not worth writing down imo. Best to be in your mind in those.
The outcome of this is that my vault has remained simple and small even after a year, and when I search it for information it is almost always for some important detail I knew I wrote down, I don't get overloaded with junk.
To keep my notes space clean I also regularly move things to archive, which I rarely check.
I’ve also struggled with over-analyzing where stuff should go. I’ve restarted a new Obsidian vault based on PARA [1], and am experimenting with using LLMs (both Cursor and Claude Code) to help me decide where stuff should go. Been a big help so far.
[1] https://fortelabs.com/blog/para/
I've started seeing a number of people talk about using Claude Code for searching, writing, and organising text documents. It is an interesting trend to me. I tried it out with my non-technical girlfriend and she really liked using it for helping with analysing interview transcripts. It seems like that agentic workflow is really effective outside of coding as well.
I just hope non-technical people that pick this up also pick up version control. Or, is there a better alternative to Claude Code that can accomplish a similar thing while being more friendly to non-technical people?
> am experimenting with using LLMs (both Cursor and Claude Code) to help me decide where stuff should go.
Can you elaborate on this?
My notetaking has devolved in much the same way. Nowadays I pretty much just have one big "Work" note, and then occasional smaller temporary notes for specific things (planning a trip, shopping list, etc).
PKM can often turn into a form of procrastination (it's more fun to make lists and folders and grand archives, than to work on your actual projects). I decided to cut all that off and do the bare minimum instead.
My mother found a pike of letters from 30 years ago. Mondane conversations that we today would carry out over message apps.
It made her very emotional and nostaligic. Ended up much more precious than she thought when she wrote them.
Interesting to think about if finding a database dump of messages 30 years from now would bring back the same nostalgia. I would think that the tangible aspect would have a more profound impact.
> I have a simple philosophy in how I approach everything: Too much of anything is bad.
This. Everything in moderation, including moderation.
> I still love Obsidian. And I’m planning on using it again. From scratch. And with a deeper level of curation and care - not as a second brain, but as a workspace for the one I already have.
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 never deleting my personal knowledge base. I might rework parts of it in the future...
Organizing your stuff means starting a big unpleasant task today. Starting a new knowledge base lets you have fun today, and you cross your fingers that future you will eat their vegetables and diligently keep it up to date forever.
I spent half of last week updating an old guide and dokumentation page for an internal product. 20 people have used this guide and noticed the factual errors. Nobody wanted to make the edits.
> 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 could blame the idea of moving to a new knowledge base here, or say it was a waste of time, but instead I'm going to blame a stark refusal to make a schedule for a simple job and then follow it. "Discard it and create a better one" is very easy to understand. If you still have two after a few weeks you failed at a fundamental level. The problem wasn't the idea.
> The problem wasn't the idea.
I'll double down: yes, the initial idea is the problem. In a large organization, you can never discard the old knowledge base because you do not understand it well enough. No one does. No one knows which pieces of the old knowledge base are useful to whom. So it sticks around indefinitely.
The best you can do as an individual is to gradually improve your corner of the knowledge base. The idea that "we'll create a new one and it'll be up-to-date forever" is unrealistic, it's wishful thinking. If we weren't able to do it with the old one, why think we'll be able to do it with the new one?
> I delete what I don’t need. I don’t capture everything. I don’t try to. I read what I feel like. I think in conversation, in movement, in context. I don’t build a second brain. I inhabit the first.
This is a really important insight especially today. There is a ton of pressure to move faster, produce, consume, be the absolute best. Use AI to do things you’d never be able to before. Build a zettlekasten that insights will fall out of. Give up your attention to the next big thing.
For some I’m sure that’s fulfilling and I do not mean to say to stop. But for those whom it brings anxiety, a feeling they can never have or be enough, that meaning is just around the corner this is an important insight.
It reminds me of a favorite quote of mine from Emerson’s Self Reliance: Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes; for that for ever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside.
I have been enamored with developing a second brain and other productivity hacks, but have recently been turned off to them, because I believe the benefits are over-promised. Similar to OP, I haven’t been able to achieve the clarity of mind and creative thoughts that are promised by a second brain.
While I do think that deleting the whole thing is extreme, I can imagine that there is a level of catharsis experienced by that.
Lately I have subscribed to Oliver Burkeman’s (author of “4,000 Weeks”) line of thinking where life, and subsequently thoughts, are more meant to be experience rather than optimized. For me, I have seen a negative drop in “life enjoyment” when I have tried to capture everything, and have yet to realize the results and even stick with it consistently (which may be the reason for not seeing the positives).
Part of the problem with these collections of notes, whether you call them Zettelkasten, Second Brain, PKM or whatever, is the expectation that something unique, amazing, or earth-shattering emerge from the process of using it. The expectation is strongest in the Zettelkasten community where they trot out the story of some academic sociologist of old who invented the system and cranked out tons of publications. Never mind that those publications have practically zero impact on the field currently. There is also the apparent expectation that you follow a specific and arcane method, with specific types of notes that evolve in a certain prescribed way. I’m a reasonably smart person and the ZK ontology perpetually escapes me. Maybe because it’s needlessly reductive. Yes maybe Luhmann used the system to generate a lot of publications. But the academics I know have never even heard of this. My spouse has a few hundred published papers and her process is nothing like this.
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.
> It seems performatively symbolic
Performances and symbols are meaningful; the way you act influences the way you think. It is pretty well known that an effective way to enact change in your life is to act as if your goal was already true and it will change your mindset to actually make it so. As a small example, forcing (i.e. performing) a smile can improve your mood.
> I don’t see the point in destroying one’s notes. (…) if that helps you get past a block of some sort, more power to you.
Looks to me like you do see the point. Maybe it’s not something you’d need personally, but everyone is different.
> some academic sociologist of old
> Never mind that those publications have practically zero impact on the field currently
You‘re so cool and edgy.
Luhmann is still one of the most cited, grappled-with and thought-about sociologist across a number of disciplines.
> Luhmann is still one of the most cited, grappled-with and thought-about sociologist across a number of disciplines.
Unfortunately (though I think this is a regional thing also - Luhmann's still pretty strong in Europe, especially in Germany where "systems theory" has become synonymous with Luhmann's systems theory, but not so much in the USA, I think).
One of the problems with Luhmann stems directly from his Zettelkasten: His tendency to tear citations out of their original contexts and name drop witnesses for his own point of views where the original text did not support his view at all.
You can see the system at work actually: He truly made a lot of stuff his own in ways never intended by the original authors - boon and bane at same time.
Most people I know doing meaningful work have cobbled-together systems that reflect how they actually think, not some idealized process
What a well-written piece.
It reminded me of my own habit of logging my pour-over coffee brews. For months I saved every variable about every cup, imagining that one day I'd analyze that data and arrive at the perfect recipe.
I never once looked at the data. Eventually I realized that I'd rather learn by just paying close attention to this cup, and using it to change my approach for the next cup.
It feels like a more human, living knowledge.
Overanalyzing everything loses some of the "magic". I drink tea, but I assume there's a similar sort of zen-like ritual to the whole process. That's somewhat it odds with turning the whole thing into a science experiment.
Granted, some of that is a projection of positivity onto what is just another simply addictive substance, but I digress.
A lot of tasks in life have elements of this though, including creative thinking and flow-state work which continually logging and categorizing can somewhat interrupt.
In your case I'd consider doing a 1-off analysis of "the perfect cup", with full data collection for a couple of weeks. Then analyze it, distill it down, and extract the lesson and conclusions. Then go back to the more organic method, and hopefully the cup is a little better. Win win.
As some other comments have mentioned, there's a streak of obsessiveness and anxiety in the original piece. Everything doesn't need to be extensively logged, and it doesn't necessarily need to be something you do everyday. A lot of the "burden" aspect seems to be from some internal issues that the author needs to work on.
All of these approaches are just tools. They can be used with a light touch approach (maybe only very complex projects need a vigorously searchable and indexed "second brain", and most of the time a .txt file in a simple daily log that takes no more than 2 minutes per day is more than enough, etc). And I know, those two approaches don't perfectly interface with one another, but creating an all-encompassing perfect system is an exercise and futility, and if that's the goal, then no wonder it's a massive cause of anxiety.
I don't know about everyone, but I found the whole PKM/second brain "industry" a bit much, I was never able to stick to complex rules and things like atomic notes.
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.
> I don't know about everyone, but I found the whole PKM/second brain "industry" a bit much, I was never able to stick to complex rules and things like atomic notes.
I agree. I think that ultimately their product is not a note-taking tool but a vague promise of structure that solves whatever issues the user has in keeping something organized.
Sounds like Hoarder’s Syndrome, but digitally.
I’m a cable hoarder. It’s pretty bad. I have cables for tech that’s been dead for a couple of decades. “Just in case.” Need a FireWire 400 hub? Got you covered. Even better, how about SCSI?
Every now and then, I go through them, and toss out a few, but many remain.
I’ve also been in Recovery for a while. Suspect the Venn diagram overlaps a bit.
I'm in a similar spot to the author. I have a stack of notes curated over years. Got hooked on the whole Second Brain thing. But I think it's time to trash the lot.
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.
Intentionally wiping almost all of my obsidian vaults and accidentally wiping my 2TB HDD was the most freeing thing.
I'd amassed so many books and papers and notes and half-finished projects over a frenzied couple of years where the main drivers were stimulant abuse and low self-worth.
It turns out that the excitement of finding some resource that's perfectly fit for your requirements is it's own rare pleasure, and it can be harmful to make them a demand on yourself in their own right, and especially harmful to try and catch'em all
I think I'd decided to grind my way out of my situation and channelled that energy into the most elaborate resource-hoarding and procrastination. I did genuinely learn a lot but very, very inefficiently, and in such a way I was sick of computers and self-motivated learning for a couple years.
Second-brain culture definitely provides an open door to hoarding (and stimulant users). I still like using obsidian but I don't care for the various "methods", I just do what makes sense. It turns out when I enjoy the process of doing/learning things, I remember stuff about them pretty well.
That "little voice" you mention is so real
> I'll probably keep some of the how-tos and syntax reminders for various tools -- looking at you, ffmpeg and defaults
or maybe just ask an LLM for the exact command each time you need it.
> or maybe just ask an LLM for the exact command each time you need it.
And deal with slow response, a copious anount of verbiage, and possibly wrong answers?
I backup my etc folder, my bash history and write small scripts for the snippets to not hunt for answers again.
This is like the personal version of shapeup's reasoning to get rid of backlogs and there's a little nod to it. But yes, a backlog is a list of tasks not a second brain.
https://basecamp.com/shapeup/2.1-chapter-07
For a similar reason I kill all my unpinned tabs automatically every 24 hours. If I didn't do/read it, it means there are more important issues.
I never understood the large browser tab list. Though I am the kind of person that typically keeps only one to two buffers open in my editor. I must have a mild allergy to visual noise or something.
Very much the same. I almost never have more than half a dozen browser tabs open. They are always ephemeral. I don't save browser history or cookies either. Dispite all technology advances, a person's short-term memory can still only actively handle to four to seven things at a time. I'm probably on the low side of that. Having 30 browser tabs open is utterly pointless as I won't have any idea what 25 of them are for.
I delete my tabs at shutdown. If its an important resource ut should be in the documentation for the project.
So...
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.
One senior researcher I know, though an extremely early user of computers and Emacs, still uses basic paper notebooks for writing things down. The system is not searchable, not hyperlinked - but he still finds things almost effortlessly even though he hasn't been young for a long time.
So if the only habit that sticks is Apple notes - keep doing that. At least in my experience hyperlinking was never that useful, because the act of remembering what to hyperlink where was about as difficult as just remembering the what other notes exist - in which case, what do I need hyperlinking for? I also find hyperlinked text hard to read because you end up in Wikipedia style 3 pages deep hyperlink hell - a fun way to spend an afternoon, a terrible way to work and understand.
I find with physical objects I can better remember where it was spatially. I know that note was about 3/4 of the way through the green notebook, on the right-side of the spread, near the bottom of the page. Or something to that effect. I find the same thing with physical books over ebooks.
The act of physically writing things down commits the event to incidental memory. The more effort it took to concert all your neurons into outputting an action, the less easily it fades from your impression.
I use Obsidian for two reasons - I'm across OSs and I like it as plain files. That said, the Apple Notes UX (especially search) is absolutely incredible. If I was all Apple, I'd use it in a heart beat
My solution is to make various capture methods. I use Apple Notes for personal notes and Obsidian at work.
With Apple Notes, I used the Shortcuts app to append some text with a timestamp to a note where I log those random thoughts. I use this shortcut on my phone to type stuff, I use it with Siri via CarPlay to capture stuff while driving, and it works decently well. I have a list in Reminders I can easily throw stuff into as well, via Siri or whatever else. It looks like iOS 26 will make some of this better as well.
With Obsidian, I do something similar. I currently also do it with Shortcuts, but have made similar solutions in bash, Hammerspoon (lua), and AppleScript. I have a daily note in Obsidian, and while I always have that open, I also have a keyboard shortcut (and desktop widget) where I can quickly bring up a text prompt, write something, and have it go into my daily note (or a shared log like I do with Apple Notes). I mostly use this to keep track of what I actually did each day so I have a record of it. I need that to be low friction or I won't do it.
It actually works a little better with Obsidian, because it's simply appending to a text file, so I can use markdown really easily to format things. I'm hoping the better markdown support in Tahoe will allow for me to add some better formatting to Apple Notes. Shortcuts has a markdown to rich text converter in it already, but it didn't work for what I was trying to do (or I did something wrong). Shortcuts has a way to add to a list in Apple Notes, so that way can look a little cleaner than raw text, given there is no formatting. I swear I got formatting to work once before, but I deleted the Shortcut, so I don't know... maybe it was in Obsidian and I migrated the note back to Apple... I spent way too long messing with it.
Apple Notes also has various other capture methods, live OCR from the cameras, speech to text, etc. I don't use this that often, but I try to remember they exist for when they would be useful.
I've gone back and forth between Apple Notes and Obsidian for personal notes, and I've told myself I'm going to stop this. The draw of Obsidian is having plain text notes that are effectively future proof. However, dealing with media is very annoying. I don't have a lot of images in my notes, but with Apple Notes it's easy to just drop something in (and I can search/copy text in the images). With Obsidian I usually end up trying to distill whatever information was in the image into text, so I can search it, and I also don't have to deal with coming up with a system to manage how and where images are stored, so they can be referenced, that won't be a nightmare in the future. These are things I don't need to think about in Apple Notes.
If Apple Notes works for you and has been the only thing that has stuck, stick with it. Getting into the game of trying to find the "perfect" note app will send you on a path to madness. The perfect app doesn't exist; they are all a collection of trade offs. I once watched an Ali Abdaal video on his note taking system and it was insane. He convinced himself that it was a good idea to have 4 different apps for 4 different kinds of notes, or something to that effect. This is not a place anyone really wants to end up.
I think it's important to acknowledge everyone's mind works differently, and something different works for everyone.
For me, I've found once I start trying to follow a system, like PARA or zettelkästen or whatever else, it just becomes tedious and time consuming and I feel like a slave to the system.
After going through 3-4 cycles of this, I came to feel like the main point of these systems is to sell books to people like me, who's brain craves structure yet struggles to create it :).
I also came to realize most of my notes are write once, read never.
I now just make quick and dirty notes and throw them in an "archive" folder once they are not active (one "inbox" folder for active ones), and rely on search.
No system, no curation.
Same strategy for email.
I do find the notes useful to keep; e.x. "when was the last time I got bloodwork done at the doctor" or "what command did I run to get the debugger to hit the right symbol server for that old old project", but I spend basically 0 thought cycles on them now.
I also find plaintext or markdown to be the ideal format for these notes.
There's a whole other category of notes, where you want to share information with others or teach. This is documentation. It is best suited to a wiki format with rich text.
I think a lot of people end up making wiki-style notes, but really they are never going to look at them again or share them and they could have just hacked up a quick text file and then archived it, instead of making something pretty no one will ever care about afterwords (including themselves). It's really hard to admit this though.
started with PARA, and ended up in PR.
I have one note per topic. I write down in summary when I'm activity studying something. Most of it i end up remembering but its nice knowing where to look when i forget. (Especially a link to what i used to study it last time). Some of them could probably be printed as a compendium at this point.
I have one note per project, running as a log of quick paste dump or thoughts when i leave for the day. Usually never revisited.
I have some journal notes. But they're rare and only written for larger events (trips, holidays).
I was all-in on backlings and atomic notes for a while, but it ended up being unsearhable. The current method could survive without backlings at all.
I can’t count the number of times my notes have saved me or my team some serious grief. I don’t have to keep everything in my head. I can offload my brain into notes.
Godspeed, but there’s no way I’d give any of that up.
Why do you keep what is clearly critical project documentation in your personal notes though?
Possibly because a large number of organisations don't really have a good system for capturing somethings as "messy" as notes.
I'm not big on note taking myself, but when I do, the things I capture is very different from the version I put into the official documentation.
There is a good article: A rational design process, how and why to fake it.[1] Basically how we reach our goal and how we present them are two different things. The personal notes have the details on failures, wrong turns and alternative ideas, the official documentation won't have that.
1) https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/david-parnas/fake...
> Possibly because a large number of organisations don't really have a good system for capturing somethings as "messy" as notes.
To build upon this point, there's a problem that writing docs is a thankless job: those who benefit from it do so silently, whereas those who selflessly shared notes later can find themselves involved in issues they have no involvement.
It's a lose-lose situation.
I'd posit a simpler explanation: most large orgs buy Confluence, and you cannot find anything in Confluence.
Confluence search is very good.... At finding stuff in PDFs. Search in Confluence is bonkers. Super easy to locate term, know to only exist in one document, and Confluence will return that one PDF that someone uploaded, which for some reason also have that term. It's odd that the search is so poor at searching Confluence pages, yet so good at searching PDFs.
Because it's less friction to put it there? Because only he can find it in the sparse context it lives in? Because he can use it then for multiple projects, and might he change, multiple companies? Because that way it's his and not the companies? Imagine leaving a job and all you learned stays at that job instead of with you?
[flagged]
The comment is replying to 'runjake'.
> An infrastructure engineer, programmer and BJJ guy. In a past life, I worked on interesting aircraft in the military.
> He
Abraham Lincoln
I started doing this, because my company goes through too many re-orgs and tool changes. If I capture it in my personal notes, I don't have to worry about re-doing everything when the org changes, or losing something I may need if I'm moves away from the area where those notes were kept.
I'd love to have a universal shared notes system for the whole team, but it's proven unrealistic when seeing how things work over decades.
With my former team I wrote 90% of the documentation. A while after I left they had to migrate their docs to a new system, and used it as an opportunity to clean up. I went back to try and reference a 20 page doc I wrote, going very in depth on a topic during a period where I was deep into it. Gone. I wish I had kept my own copies instead of relying on the shared platform. There was still a lot of good and relevant information in that document, but the people going through it lacked the knowledge and context to see it. There have been many examples like this.
There are also things that don't seem like they deserve a note in a formal system. One day thing X broke and we found out we had to talk to person Y to fix it. No one else thought to write it down, but I did. It broke again yesterday, and I was able to quickly bring up the name of who to talk to, while everyone else just tried to remember and hunted through their chat history. Search of my local notes (in Obsidian) works much better than Confluence. The low friction also means it's easy to drop stuff in, even if it might not be that useful. The friction on Confluence is higher. I tried keeping all my notes in there once, so I could easily share them with others if/when needed, but it was too much effort, and only a matter of time before it goes away and we move to something else (that's happening to some degree right now).
> Why do you keep what is clearly critical project documentation in your personal notes though?
a) how can you tell some random note you took today is critical project documentation?
b) why do you believe people read through project documentation?
Because then it spares you the maintenance of bullshit? The moment you put something public, there are 10 wise-asses that will start bikeshedding about MD flavor, where to put it, who maintains it, can we automate it, can you update this, can we expand it, etc.
Where do people draw the line between a PKM (which is yours) and team documentation (which belongs, presumably to your team to which you have a transient relationship with)?
personal notes become cryptic team notes when you leave. If something ought to be team knowledge before that, it needs to get translated into a form that more people can easily read.
Product focused (plans, documentation, snippets) notes for team, people focused (1-on-1, performance review, birthday) notes for personal.
That was an interesting read. Even more if you take a look into another of the author's text on the decline of personal thought [1]. I believe the author is engaging with very interesting questions: what is knowledge? How can I achieve it? How does it feel during the pursuit?
Of course the answer is deeply personal. My take is that I agree with the author on that knowledge should be inhabited, as I quoted Arendt on a former blog entry of mine [2] "For memory and depth are the same, or rather depth can only be reached by man through remembrance.".
If your journey using whatever tool du jour helps you, more power to you! But if it feels like a burden, drop it and adapt. In my process, I tried many different methods of note taking, but the one I haven't dropped is pen and paper. The act of writing is thinking to me. I do not have a plan to go through what I have written and treat them as a fortuitous encounter rather than having a procedure/method in place. But I still find the idea of having digital notes somewhat appealing, luring even.
[1]https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/cognitive-offshoring-and-th... [2]https://gtpedrosa.github.io/blog/on-taking-notes-and-learnin...
Damn. My notes over the years are the only that gives me insight into who I was and what I cared about back then.
Every once in a while I boot up a 15 year old Evernote archive or scroll through my Notes.app to get a new glimpse into the things my younger me was up to. It's often endearing, and it also reminds me of how much I will forget about myself in another 10 years, yet these were the things that I spent my free time doing, and this person used to exist. I feel like an archaeologist into my own life.
Even my most technical notes are laced with the residue of my character that I can see myself in.
I'm super sentimental though. I could scroll back to an ancient journal entry and probably make myself tear up if I consider it long enough.
I feel like this too. I remember one time I came across a stack of notes (the throwaway kind I just write to help me learn) from school and I read through them, it made me very nostalgic. Especially reading homework set by teachers who have since died.
It actually did make me tear up a bit.
I even feel nostalgic and tearful looking at random doodles on a piece of paper that I did during my first job many years ago.
That feeling of being an archaeologist in your own life really resonates, like rediscovering forgotten versions of yourself, preserved in the syntax of old thoughts
These types of impulsive grand swings ("Remember everything -> Delete everything") are in my experience always mistakes in the long run.
Would have been better to figure out how to prune 50% in a way that hits the right spots.
I use org-roam for looking up a topic, adding a note, and then forgetting about it.
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.
Linking notes enables note-taking to become a full-time hobby. It’s effortless to waste hours in Notion, Obsidian, Vimwiki, etc. creating MOCs, unused links, nice little home pages, and creating and recreating structures and systems.
I switched to a directory of unlinked, tagged notes and I’ve yet to have an issue just searching for a specific note. I spend a fraction of the time I used to thinking about notes at all.
Everyone has different needs and things that work for them, but some of these productivity gurus have 100,000s atomic notes, each note being like a single quote from a book, and you realize that taking and organizing notes is the only thing they do.
I was elated when obsidian came out, because it brought to reality exactly what I thought I had wanted for a few years prior - ability to link, especially graphically, all of my notes.
But I quickly realised what you described - it's a futile effort to maintain such a thing, and that the only people who do it are absolute slaves to the systems they've created.
Worse, they surely don't really generate truly unique insights from it all because the insights don't really come from addition and interconnection, but instead from subtraction and refinement. The cultivation of wisdom, in other words - which is the opposite of accumulation. I've seen various versions of this chart and I think it summarizes the situation well - though I'd go further and be culling the noise from it all. https://magniapartners.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Magnia...
I still use obisidan, as it's just great software. And mybnotes could absolutely benefit from better structure and discipline in filing them - I do almost none of what I mentioned above. Though, perhaps I'm just mentally doing the culling and just focusing on what actually matters. Full text search usually finds me what I need quickly enough.
I always used and use paper notes. Computer files are mostly downloads, and saved articles for better search (ahem) than DDG or Google because their results are almost entirely name matches with movies or shit to buy.
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.
Very nice article as I’ve felt the same.
Throughout my 20’s I’ve accumulated a huge amount of mental models, diary entries, ambitions, goals, knowledge, thoughts, interests and everything in-between.
It helped me a lot and truly let me excel in some things – surprisingly enough.
Since I turned 30 last year I’ve almost sort of been afraid to look into that repository whatsoever. It’s a mix of amusement and anxiety. What felt like unlimited potential and a nearing of the “apex”, my motivation is still there somewhere in my head, but I’ve suppressed it and opened my eyes to almost half of my life being lived.
Sometimes I’m even afraid to stop and think deeply like I tended to do before. I distract myself.
Was that a some sort of a religion carrying me week by week month to month?
I take it step-by-step, day by day now and try to worry less while bringing back the focus of what I’d want to achieve. I calm myself down and work on things more gradually, cutting myself some slack.
Nonetheless, I wouldn’t just delete it all.
Instead I’m just using it less and less, only adding some truly profound things and thoughts when I come across them. My reading list keeps filling up… I fulfill some of my ambitions, but also leave many of them undone by the time I thought I should’ve been done with them trying not to not feel bad about it.
This techno-masochistic models-oriented mega-productive way of living is already perhaps disillusioning a lot of people out there, and we are entering the next stage.
Feels like end of an era, at least for me personally.
I'd like to believe there is a happy medium.
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).
I like howm for this because it's designed around "writing notes fragmentarily". Or as their tagline says:
> Write fragmentarily and read collectively.
I felt a lot lighter just writing things without thinking about organization too heavily and howm gave nice tools to find/see what I needed.
https://github.com/kaorahi/howm/
I interpret this as humanity's struggle to get back to its habitat, real world and fall back to keep pace with much slower biological evolution. Tools - all the way from stone tools used for hunting, to the AI assistants - are compensation for the desired extra pace in evolution. We can't grow horns over night and grow large in size to rule the jungle, so we got our hunting tools.
But then we let the tools and thought dictate the biological human. Mind has always been a slave of the body, serving just enough intelligence as commanded by the body. But then mind grew to be the master, commanding the body and demanding faster evolution. When body could not deliver to the demands, mind went ahead and created artificial extensions to the body using tools, technologies and science. Mind no longer responds to the body signals leading to suppressed senses, unmet bodily needs, lack of intimacy with the ongoings of the body and total lack of basic understanding of purpose and function of body.
I can absolutely relate to this. I had similar feelings for the last year or so - although I couldn't express these thoughts as well as the author did.
I've developed this weird addiction to making notes in Obsidian. It wasn't really about learning or understanding anything. I bought into the illusion that having notes in my PKM meant I had actual knowledge. Bigger graph = smarter me, or so I thought. I even started reading books just to feed the system: Look at me with my 3,587 notes this year - aren't I clever!"
Currently, I am just taking notes where it really matters: Readme, documentation and some loosely organised markdown files
I understand the sentiment, but disagree with the solution. PKMs can be overwhelming if someone nerdy enough to use one ends up using it ineffectively.
The way I do it that I find works well is to have the following:
1. each day, have a journal page for a given day. Content only happens in the journal pages
2. have a series of topics that you tag. This system is up to you, but I usually find something with a hierarchy that is <=3 levels deep is best, e.g. I have "Job Search/2025/Company"
3. for each of the relevant tag pages, have those have some sort of "query" that will pull in all relevant tasks from all the journal pages, sort them by priority / state / deadline so you can see this all in one place (e.g. "What's the next step I have to do for my Nvidia application?" -> easy to answer with this system). Depending on your PKM, the hierarchy enables you to easily answer that question at a higher level, e.g. "What's the next steps I have to do for ALL of my applications?".
In each journal page, you can also write down a "task backlog" so minor tasks that you remember don't take up headspace while you intend to work on other major tasks (e.g. write down "get back to Joel about the Nvidia referral").
Regarding a point other folks have made: treat the journal and these tags as more of a "stream" of things you're doing in your life, instead of a collection of every-expanding obligations or a mausoleum of unexplored ambition.
I built this in Logseq, which seems to be the only one that has an advanced-enough query language to do this in that is possible to do local-only (no mandatory cloud data) in text files. If anyone knows how to build such a system in a different application, I'd be happy to learn! Logseq has been stale for a year or 2 as the authors are working on a much needed near-total rewrite which I'm not sure is ever going to arrive at this point.
This matches my experience as well. I have been journalling on and off for 4-5 years. It's a way for me to process my thoughts. But I never look back it, I don't feel the need to. The writing is the important bit, not the resulting output.
My personal website acts as my second brain in the sense that it helps me remember important events in my life and tracks my personal projects. I started it around 1995.
That is pretty impressive. I skimmed through the site, and was wondering what your thought process was when putting your life in the open vs. keeping it on a local disk?
Good question. Through the years, I have become more restrictive about what I write especially with respect to others. I am aware of the fact that I am more open to share about my personal life than many people around me. Maybe it is related to fact that I want to have some, hopefully positive, effect on the world. (Maybe one day in the future it might become material for some historic research.)
There is also a lot, I do not share. I keep a personal diary and since 2010, I am recording my daily activities in Moleskin daily planners (the only planners I have found that have the same space for Saturdays and Sundays as for working days).
https://www.iwriteiam.nl
This seems like a particular curse of having an indexable, easily searchable journal.
I use a paper notebook, which comes with the built in assumption that most of your notes are going to be permanently put on the shelf and forgotten. A couple pages can be marked somehow or another if anything really useful somehow ends up on them.
Writing things out is an important part of the process… I’d be a bit worried about obtaining a default assumption where those notes become anything other than ephemera.
Of course if you store “7000 notes” in a PKM you should expect most of them to be useless, unless you’re doing science and most of them are literature notes or something (remember the guy who “invented” zettelkasten worked as a researcher). Ordinary mortals can get by with a lot less.
I have maybe a few hundred notes on the handful of topics that matter to me and that’s it.
> I started reading to extract. Listening to summarize
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?
This article is visibly, annoyingly, distractingly in threes.
> 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.
I'm starting to notice this style a lot. Apparently there's a formal term for it, but I didn't begin to notice it until I started using ChatGPT regularly.
Granted, there are people who didn't notice the utility of the em dash until it became apparent in ChatGPT's responses, but aside from either device there is a certain vibe I'm starting to pick up from a lot of writing online that mirrors AI writing although you can't just call it that, especially if people enjoy it.
A kind of abstract solipsism that only resonates unless you consent to a platonic relationship with the author through their writing. About as close as you can get to reading something written with the aid of AI, I'd imagine.
I choose to think optimistically, in the same way as I did when smartphones put a camera in everyone’s pocket: suddenly, “bokeh” is a term with purchase in the mainstream! “Portrait mode” for every adorable baby pic! A ring light in every makeshift bedroom-dresser studio!
Everybody’s participating now, and taking pride in using more of the visual language of photography for themselves. That makes us all richer!
Now, then, that the language-bots have sensitized our collective ear to the hypnotic rhythm of a parallel-constructed triplet, the drama of a “—“, and the muscular power of a strong active voice (…that’s three, right?)—aren’t we all richer for it?
I think you raise a valid point, but I would argue that in your photography example, the content is very much still human - portrait mode and ring lights are tools that improve the output but a human framed the picture, and pressed the button.
LLM generated writing doesn't quite feel the same for me, the words are the content but they lack human touch, context, intention. The equivalent would be the photographer uploading their photo to ChatGPT and asking it to regenerate the image. The output wouldn't feel right, it is more like losing something than gaining.
I feel that your optimism is great but that the example you provided is not the same.
Everyone had the ability to write before chatgpt, they had the ability to get their thoughts across if they so wished, whereas with photography it lessened the burden of having to buy an entirely seperate device.
if I move myself into the shoes of a photographer or someone with an affinity towards photographing I kind of get that when taking pictures is a big part of your life the camera starts to get ingrained with that but for others it wasnt just a step from camera to more frictionless camera it was a step from nothing to camera.
Whereas everyone has a brain to think things and to try to communicate what they are thinking and feeling, large language models did not enable that, they did however enable lazy people to swap out the work with a robots response or malicious people to spam the internet
> Now, then, that the language-bots have sensitized our collective ear to the hypnotic rhythm of a parallel-constructed triplet, the drama of a “—“, and the muscular power of a strong active voice (…that’s three, right?)—aren’t we all richer for it?
That is yet be proven, comrade.
On the other hand:
> Every note in Obsidian. Every half-baked atomic thought, every Zettelkasten slip, every carefully linked concept map. (4, though I suppose you could argue it's 1 + 3)
> But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. (2, albeit with a 3 inside)
> Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories. (2)
> The inhabitants of the library, cursed to wander it forever, descend into despair, madness, and nihilism. (2 with a 3 inside again)
> It is associative, embodied, contextual, emotional. We do not think in folders. We do not retrieve meaning through backlinks. Our minds are improvisational. They forget on purpose. (4, 2, 2)
I think the author (either in person, or via some LLM that did much of the actual writing) is just fond of this sort of rhetorical repetition, and it happens that if you're doing that then 3 is often the best number. (Because 2 may not be enough to establish the rhythm, and 4 may be enough to feel overdone.)
I do think there's too much of it here, and specifically too many threes, but I think the underlying fault is "too much parallelism" and the too-many-threes are a symptom.
It’s called the Rule of Three. It’s a good writing practice, but it can be overdone.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(writing)
If she tended to have that rhythm in her notes, too, no wonder it was two-thirds hoarded junk.
SCNR
That’s because it’s LLM.
Verbose, literate writers wrote like LLMs long before LLMs existed.
We taught them.
One irony now being that that form of skilled writing is inevitably and sometimes falsely accused of being machine-written.
> "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." - Blaise Pascal
It takes much more skill to write concise than verbose.
That quote doesn’t apply at all. Verbose writing doesn’t immediately indicate a lack of skill, otherwise every fiction book would’ve been reduced to a pamphlet of a summary.
If you are writing to explain, being concise is a useful asset. If you are writing to entertain, or for pleasure, verbosity and flair can be better.
I don’t get the feeling the author is trying to convince anyone of doing anything. They are sharing their experience, probably writing for themselves above everyone else. They should do it however they prefer.
The rule of threes is a widely known rhetorical guideline. Some people do take it a bit far, though.
I don't understand why people are saying it's LLM.
To me it's more of a stream of consciousness style of writing.
I'm fascinated by all these comments I see on HN and elsewhere where people will deny that a blatantly LLM-written article was not LLM-written, including cases where people praise it for not being LLM-written (eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44384138 ). Like, leave aside the issue of whether it's a good or bad thing (I've been doing generative text NNs since 2015, so I'm mostly for it, when done well), I'm just interested in the inability to notice.
Skimming your comments, you, for example, do not seem to be illiterate or a bad writer at all despite being ESL (although you overuse the double-sentence structure in your comments), but you describe this as being 'stream of consciousness' (it is not even close to that, look at an actual example like Joyce) and seem to think it is fine.
So I'm puzzled how. Why isn't it obvious to you that the style is so mode-collapsed ( https://gwern.net/doc/reinforcement-learning/preference-lear... )? Do you also not notice how all the ChatGPT images are cat-urine yellow? (I've been asking people in person whether they have noticed this in the Bay Area and I'd say <20% of enthusiastic generative AI users have noticed.) What are you thinking when you read OP? Does it all just round off to 'content', and you don't notice the repetition because you treat it all as a single author? Are you just skimming and not reading it?
I remember reading the compendium of human-interface writings Apple put together in the 1990s. There was an exploration of ways to show age in software. They were changing the color and adding other aging effects to old files in the Finder.
I think part of that thought has stuck with me. I like storing things in directories by year. It is a structural reminder that a lot of the value of what I'm doing is tied to this moment in time. I can search back through "over the years" to find things, and it addresses this question of guilt.
> The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it - and move on. But the insight was never lived. It was stored. Like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away.
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 don’t understand why so many people on this thread feel the need to prescribe to the author what would’ve been better for them.
You don’t know the author, don’t know their mind, and clearly do not understand their thought process.
This post is a personal reflection. The author’s actions affect exactly one person: themselves. The “better answer” is unambiguously the one which works out best for the author. Period. They are better equipped than any of us to know what that is.
There’s something freeing about admitting that you won’t capture everything. I still write stuff down, but I stopped trying to build the “perfect” system. Life’s messy. Notes can be, too.
Well done.
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.
I don't really use any PKM tools outside of an instance of Kanboard and OpenProject for tracking the stuff I want to do in the future, but because of my mTLS setup and limited hardware in my homelab, using them ends up feeling slow and sluggish (Kanboard is okay except for mTLS, whereas OpenProject is just unbearably slow all the time).
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.
Is that a hipster thing?
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'd think so but then the mention of sobriety makes me think there are other reasons behind the note taking.
And instead of just logging off, the dramatic deletion. He frames this as the end of a phase but I suspect he's still in the middle of something. I wish him luck and strength.
Wrong pronoun. Joan Westenberg so "she".
It’s both
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_(given_name)
That is a judgemental and bad faith argument.
Do you know that this person was writing the opposite ten years ago? And even if they did, people can’t try something and then change their mind? Is that worthy of ridicule now?
Frankly, making fun of someone for being “hipster” says more about the person doing the comment than the target of it. It’s a basic, meaningless insult.
I think it's a phase he had to go through. The point is not to not have notes, but maybe it's time to reassess having them.
people change, people grow
I myself threw out about 3000 notes last year
Throwing notes away is not growing. Growing is understanding that inanimate things don't have control over your life.
This whole "philosophical" article that basically says "I've removed my notes because they were giving me anxiety" is a confirmation that this is just yet another phase in author's life.
> Throwing notes away is not growing.
You don’t get to define that. The author does, it’s their life.
The action taken here was not just the deletion, it was the reflecting, the identification of a problem, the thinking of a solution, the courage to follow through with something irreversible, the willingness to try something.
I would have zipped it and put it into long term storage. Now that I can run llms locally and train them with my notes, I’d never have to organize or revisit old notes and could still get value out of them.
I think the speed at which you can open previous notes matters.
If it takes you 1 minute of scrambling in a GUI to find a previous note, you are less likely to read previous notes.
And also less likely to write new ones as you know you’ll never visit it again.
I have an app built on the fzy CLI and Ghostty terminal for Apple Notes. It is working well for me:
https://github.com/emadda/hot-notes
I find it interesting, that some (many? most?) people develop anxiety about the stash of never-read but captured content in their note-taking apps.
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.
> But what got me sober, what got me through the first one, two, three hard years - none of it was in those 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...
Notes should be for things you can’t remember. How long did I bake that loaf of bread that turned out great? I’m not carrying that detail around in my mind with me unless I’m a baker and baking thirty loaves a day. Only then does become a permanent resident in my brain through pure repetition.
Thinking and processing and making connections is a dynamic and amorphous experience that can’t be put into static notes. It’s always changing, based on your mood, recent experiences, and new knowledge acquired.
Write down things you can’t remember, but keep the thinking in your head.
>It hit me: what got me here won’t get me where I need to be next.
This resonates a lot. I always have this feeling when I am browsing old notes.
>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.
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.
Kinda ironic how tools meant to externalize thinking can end up stifling it. Might be time to clean house
This post is a masterpiece
I enjoyed reading this but it also made me think I must be a bit weird. Depending on what I'm working on and where I'm at, I keep notes in Apple notes or obsidian, extended descriptions on bookmarks, physical sticky notes, an actual journal and pages files on desktop - barely any of it is tagged and I'd call it 'notes' rather than a 2nd brain but i go through it all every eight-12 weeks, cull what now seems irrelevant and try to act on the rest of it. I should probably learn how to actually use obsidian properly but I still don't get the 'second brain' terminology.
i like this. complexity bad, delete it! Most pkm, tools for thought, second brain apps confuse me. I drank the coolade with roam research but it drove me kinda nuts I've spent almost 3 years making my own tool. I mostly use it as a paste-bin, todos, lists -- and for the only thing i would never delete, voice notes on funny sayings or interactions with my 3 y/o daughter. my project is over at https://grugnotes.com if anyone else fits the anti note app vibe i'm kinda leaning into.
the thing with such a system is keeping it up to date
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.
I've been sober for over 19 years, the first few years are the most difficult transition if I remember. I think the author is overreacting.
You can't really deny the past, it's part of you.
I did the same thing recently, excluding quotes from books. Every other note, How To, and To Do gone. It provided tremendous relief. The vast majority of the stuff may as well have been written by a complete stranger. But, again, I kept my book quotes and notes as that is something I reference regularly. I guess the main thing was the realization that I literally don’t access 90% of my notes and they were of no value other than making me feel something about myself.
I don't take long-term notes at all, only quick notes on paper of thing I need to do. I tried to collect all thoughts, notes etc. but I would never read them again. Most of it would be outdated anyways. So I understand that these kind of notes might feel like ballast and might be a reason to not be able to close with things.
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'd like a digital reset - like starting a new play-through in a game.
I don't know how exactly? Buy a new PC, maybe I should jump platforms, a new email address, no past bookmarks, some deliberate avoidance of things I know by memory.
The old stuff will always be there, but I feel like a fresh opportunity to explore the digital world could be nice. Or maybe not?
I think this is not the time to delete an old archive of personal data, it feels like someone who deleted his bitcoin in 2010.. Data is eating the world.
I can’t help but wonder if it was the journaling, the act itself of creating and keeping a second brain, that ultimately was useful for the author.
It's baffling to me that anyone would do this in the age of LLMs. All of the author's concerns could've been solved or greatly mitigated by loading her PKM into a model as context. The article doesn't mention that she even considered this as an option. I hope the files can be recovered when she realizes this possibility.
>All of the author's concerns could've been solved or greatly mitigated by loading her PKM into a model as context
No, because the correctly identified concern by the author is much deeper. Knowledge isn't some repository of data, or some solipsistic LLM simulacrum of it, it's practiced, social, contextual. A real brain, unlike the "second brain", intentionally forgets.
To have agency is to purposefully erase, cut through BS, and start from a clean slate. Any person who has done anything meaningful starts with an empty sheet of paper. There's a reason all these note taking gurus have exactly zero actual work to their name, it's just productivity LARPing. Every single time you see one of these "productivity" advocates you try to look up if they've build something that has helped even one person with all their productivity, nothing. They just keep yapping about their notes.
I keep mine but archived as git history. I don't return to it but in critical moment I can come back to some obscure information I recorded years ago - useful for legal or insurance.
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.
It’s surely a question of perspective. View entries as (perhaps) things to do, or just as historical record.
The former is likely a mental burden, the latter not?
If it wasn't for the compulsive authoring, storing, organizing, accessing, discarding, archiving, indexing and retrieving of notes and related data I wouldn't know what a computer was good for.
But the whole "second brain" trend always made my stomach turn and the surrounding culture of productivity/personal knowledge management is a tarpit.
For porn.
I enjoyed the piece, but wonder if the author could have found some benefit if they used the corpus to train an (ideally locally-run (for privacy)) ai - so that questions could be asked of it and some value extracted..
I deleted all my gchats over 10 Years ago and it was the most freeing thing I did in my digital life.
I realized they were absolutely useless but carried a weird weight for me.
“What if I need something important from them?” Nope. If there’s something important then I can ask whomever again.
“What if I want to go through them?” Nope. Never even thought about it since I deleted them. Not even the first times I chatted with my now-wife.
Once I realized they were useless it helped me never save my WhatsApp messages and I turned on disappearing messages as soon as the feature appeared. I have another friend I’ve known for 20+ years, we set messages to 8 hours disappearing. If we miss a message or forget what we talked about, so be it.
It’s all so freeing, I never realized what a burden it could be, worrying about what if I lost something. I delete everything now except my photos which have more value.
This is interesting. I guess I have all of my Whatsapp and Facebook messenger chats saved and have never thought about it.
I have never even thought about this being a burden in any way.
It's interesting that people have such different perspectives on this.
I maintain a very simple system a folder my ideas, another for my projects and one for thoughts I think that with the current search tools at our disposal there is no need to set up a complex system
This whole Second Brain idea is new to me. Sounds like a lot of work relative to what you get in return.
It's effectively a really intense form of procrastination.
Reminds me of stories people tell after they lost all their belongings in a fire. Pain but also relieve
Don't mean at all to discredit what the author's done - it's their life and seems to have been helpful to them and for that I'm very glad.
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!"
I know what you mean. It's not just notes. I had shelves full of trinkets and books that I never looked at. I threw them all way to "unclutter my life". I realize now, even though I never picked them up or read the books they triggered memories. When I bought them, what I was into at the time, things like that. I don't know how much I wish I still had them all.
I'm going though something kind of similar now in that there are several boxes of stuff of mine in my parent's storage. I haven't looked in them in 20+ years. I basically told them to just chuck them in the trash. I haven't seen them, I don't want to see them. If I see them I'll just end up keeping them for another 20+ years without looking at them.
Yes, they will trigger memories. Things I made in high school, elementary school, college, etc.... There's at least 3 journals. But, do I really care? If they had just thrown them away with out telling me or if the storage and burnt down I'd have no idea what was in them and I certainly don't miss the contents or even think about them except when my parents mention, "you know, we still have your boxes in our storage"
I don't know how to choose between keeping them and getting rid of a pile of trash haha. I'm choosing to throw them away. I'd prefer not to know what's in them so I don't know what I don't know. I guess partly I just want to detach from the past. Others certainly make different choices.
> Like looking at old photos
Many years ago I realised I never do that. I find no enjoyment in going through old photos, so I stopped taking and storing them.
But like you, I don’t discredit the people who do it. More power to you if it makes you happy.
That’s very nicely put and I’d feel the same way. I like seeing what mattered to me a while back.
This. IANAD but I think there maybe something deeper the author might be fighting, some hoarding and OCD.
Balanced amount of personal and family archive is nice when revisited.
That's what I feel after finding "Desktop" backup folders from years ago after refreshing my Windows installations. Each computer had their unique desktop and documents folder with bunch of software, games, half written plugins / codes.
When people discard something and Chesterton's fence doesn't come around to bite them in the back, I assume that the something was a bunch of rubbish in the first place.
Word of advice: don't do what the author has done. He has gone from one extreme (categorizing all notes obsessively) to the other extreme (wiping all notes, to start fresh).
The answer, as usual, is in the middle: keep all notes, archived. Feel free to restart old projects/ideas by archiving old projects to old/2024/legacy, and starting with a fresh page/folder, occasionally looking back at archived notes, if needed.
> He has gone from one extreme (categorizing all notes obsessively) to the other extreme (wiping all notes, to start fresh).
No, he went from extreme to "in the middle", if you find yourself in their place you should do EXACTLY what he did.
> I’m planning on using it again. From scratch. And with a deeper level of curation and care - not as a second brain, but as a workspace for the one I already have.
You can't categorize a gazillion notes you obsessively picked up over years. Do anything required to become functional again, in this case, delete it all if it is psychologically weighing on you
> Markdown files in nested folders.
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.
I only keep my own thoughts in my 2nd brain, mostly daily journals. To see how my thinking evolves over time. Helped me to develop my unique theory on human behavior.
Why not just start a new notebook/vault? Notetaking systems are all imperfect and it's best not to throw a fit every time you run into those imperfections.
What if you change your mind again a year later? Couldn't you achieve exactly the same by simply archiving everything and starting from scratch without big data loss?
> Couldn't you achieve exactly the same by simply archiving everything and starting from scratch without big data loss?
No. The act of irreversible deletion is meaningful and has a real effect, archiving is not at all the same thing. It’s like moving houses and carrying all the junk you had in your attic to a new garage: all the crap is still there, you still think about it, getting rid of it is liberating. Even if you discover you needed something you threw away, having to redo it from scratch will require doing it differently, with fresh insights.
The analogy doesn't make sense since you can't avoid physical things you moved, they still take space and you see it every time you visit the garage.
> has a real effect
Sure, and I've mentioned one such effect - inability to access knowledge when you change your mind later.
And redoing doesn't require doing anything differently, you could end up doing exactly the same thing finding that useful info, just wasting more time in the process.
> they still take space and you see it every time you visit the garage.
And the digital things take space in your disk and, more importantly, the mind.
> inability to access knowledge when you change your mind later.
If you change your mind later. I’m an avid deleter, have been for years, and have never regretted it. It won’t happen, the upside of deletion is just too good.
That regret is a you thing (shared by many others), not a universal human characteristic. You’re not the author of the post, so your feelings don’t apply to them and their decision.
> you could end up doing exactly the same thing finding that useful info
Yes, you could. That is extremely unlikely, but you could.
> just wasting more time in the process.
And it still wouldn’t have been a waste of time. Not only would you have confirmed everything, which is extremely useful, it is very unlikely you wouldn’t have thought of new ideas or gained new insights in the process.
> take space in your disk and, more importantly, the mind.
They don't, your mind isn't big enough to worry about everything you store digitally. You need to at least try to state the actual issues with just knowing that your archive exists. The article at least established personal issues with maintaining the notes, but you failed to even try!
> I’m an avid deleter, have been for years, and have never regretted it.
How is it relevant when "your feelings don’t apply to them and their decision."?
> It won’t happen, the upside of deletion is just too good.
What crystal ball with the perfect visibility into the rest of your life have you glanced this certainty from?
> That regret is a you thing (shared by many others)
No, that's just an ~ad hominem you've made up. I didn't talk about regret. The issue could just be a waste of time later without any feeling of regret involved.
> Not only would you have confirmed everything
You don't have the old version, so you wouldn't know whether you've confirmed or rejected anything.
> which is extremely useful
Don't stop here, what's the usefulness?
> it is very unlikely you wouldn’t have thought of new ideas or gained new insights in the process.
You could say exactly the same thing about reading your old notes since new insight isn't banned there. The only more certain difference is the extra effort required to recreate.
> They don't, your mind isn't big enough to worry about everything you store digitally.
Patently incorrect. I did worry. Not about the contents of every little thing, but the fact that they existed. Some unmanaged, some improperly categorised, some perfectly triaged but no longer useful…
> The article at least established personal issues with maintaining the notes, but you failed to even try!
What does that even mean, “failed to even try”? Did you fail to even try to give me a recipe for chocolate cake? I didn’t think that would be relevant, so I didn’t mention it. But alright, I gave you some details in the rest of the post. All you had to do was ask, no need to criticise others for not doing something they didn’t even knew you wanted.
> How is it relevant when "your feelings don’t apply to them and their decision."?
That’s not the jab you seem to think it is. It is relevant precisely as way of example of something similar to the author. It is precisely so I don‘t speak for them that I gave you a personal example that is close enough. It presents “the other side” (people who delete) in a way we can engage without assuming anything about the author.
First you complain that I “failed to even try” to talk about my experience, then you complain when I talked about my experience in that very same post. Please make up your mind.
> What crystal ball with the perfect visibility into the rest of your life have you glanced this certainty from?
Do you not see how this counter argument is counter productive? By the same token, I could ask you by what crystal ball do you know neither I nor the author are better off by the deletion of material. The answer is: you don’t. And maybe I can’t know for certainty either, but I sure as hell know myself better than you know me. And I do know what I threw away in the past, and the things I lost accidentally (tangential issue), and I know what my attitude and life repercussions have been. And for that, I can say with certainty I prefer things as they are, with the deletion.
> I didn't talk about regret.
Changing your mind about something you did isn’t regret? Alright then, let’s forget the word, replace it instead of “that feeling of wasted time”. Doesn’t really change the argument (because, crucially, that’s not what an ad hominem is).
> You don't have the old version, so you wouldn't know whether you've confirmed or rejected anything.
Deleting a digital file doesn’t erase your memory. But either way, I meant confirmation in the sense of reasserting the research. Doesn’t matter what the old version said, only that the new one is correct. Also, crucially, if in your scenario you can’t be sure of what the old version said, then you also don’t know if the time was wasted or not.
> Don't stop here, what's the usefulness?
It’s in that exact same sentence you quoted. It’s literally all the rest of it that you cut from the quote.
> You could say exactly the same thing about reading your old notes
With the monumental difference that in this case the old notes were a cause of stress. In hundreds of notes, maybe you’ll have to recreate one or two. Or maybe none. Yet not having all the other cruft is absolutely worth the trade off. Maybe not for you, but certainly for me, and probably the author of the post.
I don't delete them but I put them in a archive folder and kn the main folder I only maintain the current version of the files
The futile craving for permanence.
I deleted all my bookmarks since I was hoarding unhealthy amount of them. A lot of them were in "to read" folder. It was so freeing to "let go"
Ha did the same a few years ago with over 2000 bookmarks! A lot of links were already dead anyway.
Sometimes I remember a particular line from a particular article and wish I had kept the links. But I have learnt that things should go away permanently and it's normal to never get to read it again. "Life is like that"
I had around 3.8k collected over the span of 4 years
Who needs two brains anyway?
I don't get this. I have a megabyte or two of plain-text notes, and going through them and maintaining them and extending them is fun (apologize to the person who doesn't like threes). There are notes for a novel, ideas for future personal projects (way too many to do in my remaining lifetime), attempts at capturing my understanding of great scientific and philosophical problems, weird things I invented in my dreams, various ideas which didn't fit anywhere else. Guess what, the novel will probably never get written, projects will never get done, I will not make a philosophical breakthrough. So what?
Some ideas on how am I supposed to start hating my notes:
* They grow to 100MB, then it starts to be a burden
* I switch from notepad.exe to a dedicated application which somehow exploits my hobby of writing notes
* I develop OCD or something else
None of this seems very relatable. At this point, I might be writing a new note with these ideas, updating it when I get more ideas or when the one, most plausible explanation jumps out at me. Then I would read it years later and have something to think about before bed and have a good feeling that I didn't lose something and I am not left with thougths about the last episode of a TV show. Or is that supposed to be a bad feeling?
> I don't get this.
I’ll try to help.
> going through them and maintaining them and extending them is fun
It’s fun for you, not for everyone else. There, it’s as simple as that. All you need to understand is different people enjoy different things.
> Or is that supposed to be a bad feeling?
It’s not “supposed” to be anything. It will be good for some, bad for others, neutral for others still. There’s no objective right answer. If you enjoy something and it doesn’t harm anyone, do it. If you don’t enjoy it and it isn’t necessary, don’t do it. Other people will have different preferences.
Oh, the OP pretty much told me that they didn't like taking notes. I am trying to understand why, what is the mechanism? Is it like burning out? Can it happen to me and my notes when I start doing something wrong? Why is "just do less of it" not a solution? Why is "just expect less from it" not a solution? Am I an exception? If so, why?
"All you need to understand" is for insects.
I understand this and I have done similar a few times (e.g. deleting all old emails, deleting all notes, deleting a tonne of old files etc.). It's quite freeing. We do hoard a lot of digital stuff that we really don't need. Saying that, there are a few times over the years I've needed somethings, realised I deleted it and regretted it. That feeling passed quickly though and I soon realised it probably didn't matter.
I used Obsidian 2 yrs. ago for almost 2 weeks and I quit. I did not know why - until this post. I felt missing s.th. or left myself behind by not using s PKMs. Now I feel calm after reading this post. It seems that my subconsciousness alredy knew, that (to me) a PKM would never reach a break even point...
i will just give a fresh counterargument I encountered yesterday. when trying to reset my Passat service warning, you got to press a combination of button, hold a few seconds, etc.
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.
Thanks for sharing, it was an interesting read that made me introspect on my usage of Obsidian too.
I think there's a couple of points during his journey the author could've came to a more balanced conclusion than deleting his "second brain" (obsidian folder).
First is ofc the tool-creep that he mention. It was supposed to be a support tool, to make you reach a goal or solve a problem. Yet it become a goal in itself. A classic Goodhart's law. This should've led him to realize that he need to limit what context the Second brain idea is applied to. Luhmann, the Zettlekasten guy kept in his physical office, segregating his "thinking & writing, work" with the rest of his life. The authors case is the classic "Todolist trap". If he could've identified that early, he could've maybe siloed it better to the useful part.
Second, The "Unread list". One of the first things even in the Zettlekasten ideal (which spanned the entire second brain idea) is to never put in anything unprocessed. Everything, new idea to new reading, should be first processed, thought of, and then written down in your own word. When you break this principle, your second brain is not a brain, it's a todo list.
The third is to humanize it. This also affect point 2. If you properly review your second brain, you'll notice that great insight or ideas you wrote down doesn't seem so great anymore, or lacking. It's also hard to recount why you considered this thing great, or worth writing down. That's when you realize that sometimes, the detail of the idea doesn't matter as much as why/when and how you came up with it. You more often can come up with same idea, hopefully even more refined, if you just remember the context of it.
This should transform your "second brain" from not merely being a list of connected ideas, but with contexts. Who did you share that idea with? Where you sad/mad/angry? what did you do the day you got that idea? Those are all ques your brain can use to reconstruct the entire picture, wayyy better than just words. People that wrote diaries have known this since forever. It's not the ideas you want to keep, but the mental state that reached you to that idea. New, future you, can take that idea way way further, given the same mental state. This insight alone should delete all unread lists. At best it should be delegated to a reference/archive "folder" disconnected from your second brain.
Second brain is not an archive, it's a process. When you misunderstand that, often because you're attached (ego) to the ideas you generate, you fall for the trap the author did.
Edit: I realized that the author is from the rationalist movement. That kinda figures.
This resonates with me, I’ve never considered knowledge as something you can live.
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.
What an incredibly stupid thing to do.
The main problem of notes is that most tools are bad, Emacs/org-mode outshine the others, still having it's own hiccups (for instance a very limited transclusion support so far with org-transclusion and delve at the best).
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!
I started building the second brain a while ago but I quickly started to feel like I was trying to dance while wearing a straitjacket so I stopped doing it.
Great post, it captures a lot of feelings that I myself share about “PKM”!
> I don’t want to manage knowledge. I want to live it.
This is the essence!
Very good post. I think the nuclear action was perfect, it was neede to get out of the loop.
You should write your thoughts, not copy paste others'. This way you help reorganise your brain to adapt to the subject. Some thoughts should be written as a tool and then thrown away, others (more important) should be kept
,.............the ancient greeks, correctly identified nostalgia as a disease.That said ,deap personal memories do serve a central place is familial and tribal/cultural knowledge, but the ......."insignificant bits (and bobs)" are poison this is something that I have experienced on a number of occasions when knowledge keepers have......inserted, very short statements that serve to turn a great deal of other myth and trivia into a cohearant whole containing actionable instructions. a list can never,ever, serve this function
> Sorry, you have been blocked You are unable to access beehiiv.com
Well
Having went through similar deletions before the important takeaway is that the reason the author felt relief is that deleted things that were weighing them down.
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.
I'm not sure I can relate to the author. My Zettelkasten is not a todo list or project binder or whatever personal life management function they use it for.
Mine is for consolidation of knowledge. For instance, when I study math and I write a pen and paper proof as an exercise I then write a clean note from scratch and link to other theorems or corollary notes I have etc. Similar stuff for computer science or programming. I find out that this process solidifies the work I'd already done and make it less likely to forget.
I also think people get a bit too dogmatic about the ways to use technology to help improve your life. Like, what the heck complex rules about Zettelkasten? I don't know what kind of expectations they have going into this. Do these "influencers" telling you how to use it sell the promise of the ultra-intelligent god from the popular meme? Just open the damn editor and write, you will find what works for you through tinkering and iteration.
Yeah, it seems like they were writing massive volumes of useless ephemeral to-do lists and throwing them away was easy.
Maybe they were doing it wrong and should've been writing down durable knowledge that has lasting value.
I write down guides to do things, explanations of how things work that make sense to me, information that I know will be useful at some time but will be accessed infrequently (e.g. information about people or projects).
A 7,000 book reading list seems useless if your goal is to read all of them. But if it's just a bank of interesting books to pull from when you want something to read on the beach or on a sunny weekend, that doesn't cause me stress at least. I'm adding to the bank, not adding items to do. Like my list of board games to try.
Digital notes take an insignificant amount of space, you can just keep them and ignore them, use them when you need to. Deleting them seems to me like neuroticism. Some kind of symbolic gesture for emotional relief. There are a lot of productivity gurus online that will try to sell you a course on the best way to take notes, and perhaps the author has fallen into one of those traps, taking notes of things they don’t have interest in. in a way that does not feel natural and satisfying. I only take notes when I am compelled to. It’s a gut feeling that I rely on. It’s effortless for me to take notes because of it. It provides me comfort and relief knowing that my memories are accessible, and I gladly write them. The author makes some grandiose assumptions that we have to forget. You don’t have to, and neither do you have a choice in it. It’s some kind of idealist way of thinking to justify the author's actions. Seems misguided. Memorization plays an extremely important role in learning, but for those of us with executive function problems, using our notes augments our life for the better. Just as the author talks about how memories work, my notes are just like my thoughts, webs of interlinked notes strung together. A lot of times, I just remember what tags and backlinks I can use to find the information I am looking for in my notes.
> Some kind of symbolic gesture for emotional relief.
Calling someone neurotic and insinuating they are doing this for symbolism instead of having a real, tangible effect on their life is rather narcissistic, don't you think?
These sort of comments always baffled me; they read as if you've never taken the time to talk to someone who lives or operates differently than you, and don't consider any way but yours a valid worldview and lifestyle.
I feel like someone who never struggled with mental health will never get someone who did.
I dealt with anxiety, it certainly sounds like something I'd do. It's not that it's digital notes, that I can leave - no, my mind would be occupied with them. When I was younger, I would throw my stuff away, hoping that it will help me get more disciplined.
> Calling someone neurotic and insinuating they are doing this for symbolism instead of having a real, tangible effect on their life is rather narcissistic, don't you think?
No? Even if you think it's wrong I don't see what's self-important about that claim. Maybe there's lack of empathy but that's only a small part of narcissism. And saying something is done for emotional relief doesn't sound like lack of empathy to me.
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I am someone who has tendency to do stupid shit like that. This is 100% symbolic gesture.
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Please don't do this here.
A poor workman blames their tools.
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