Building my second brain 🧠 with Obsidian

#LifeOS #PKM #Periodic-Note #Task-Management #Goal-Management #Time-Management

This article will take Obsidian as an example to share my practice of using Obsidian to build a second brain!

For more information, please refer to the official website LifeOS!

Preface

What is Obsidian?

Here is how it introduces itself on the official website:

What I especially appreciate is its rich plugin ecosystem. If you like Vscode, then you will probably like Obsidian as well. The only difference is that Vscode is for writing code, and Obsidian is for taking notes.

First Brain VS Second Brain

The first brain is our actual brain. It never stops working as long as we are alive. It performs tasks such as knowledge management, task management, and goal management. Most of the time, we cannot multitask, thus the first brain acts more like a CPU, with various tasks competing for CPU cycles. When there are too many tasks to handle, the brain becomes overwhelmed. It has to deal with current tasks while keeping the context of other tasks to switch between them, so we cannot focus on executing the current task. This is when an external system is needed to assist the first brain, which is the second brain.

The second brain is an external system. If we compare the first brain to a CPU, then the second brain is more like a storage system. It acts as a buffer between the first brain and the real world, reducing the load on the first brain so it can focus on the current matter. It can be compared to memory and hard disks, but memory is more frequent in communication with the CPU (the first brain) and has a faster read speed. This storage system stores things that the first brain doesn’t need to focus on all the time. Of course, it's up to the first brain to decide whether these things need to be stored. The content could be notes, to-dos, processes, and the medium could be text, images, videos.

For example, when we use the second brain for task management, important and urgent items are stored in memory, while unimportant and non-urgent items are stored on the hard disk; this week's tasks are in memory, while this month's tasks might be on the hard disk. Therefore, by utilizing the second brain, we can focus on the present without any pressure and switch contexts when necessary.

This article will use Obsidian as an example to share my practice in building a second brain! You may call it a second brain, but looking at it from different angles, I could also refer to it as "LifeOS," because I record everything concerning life and work upon it. Additionally, it could be termed a "programmable personal productivity system." I have written considerable code on it to do some querying and automation, and it is also the productivity system that I use to manage tasks and goals. It could even be likened to a "Monorepo project," where every folder represents a project, and the README.md within the project is like the Package.json, describing the metadata of the current project.

📢 Attention: This system is not a top-down one with pre-established processes to implement. It gradually formed as I used Obsidian and is still evolving. Let's tentatively call the current version 1.0. The purpose of sharing it now is to inspire others to improve their systems! I have already written an Obsidian Periodic PARA plugin to support this system! With this plugin, you don't need any programming background. You can easily create periodic and PARA notes by simple visual clicks!

My Practice

I adopt two systems: one for knowledge management and another for periodic notes. The former manages knowledge with dimensions like project/area/resource, and the latter manages tasks/goals/time with time as the dimension.

Core Systems

The closer to Projects the PARA component, the more actionable it is; the more long-term the periodic note, the less predictable it is;

These two systems effectively create two contexts that keep me focused:

Aspect-oriented Subsystem

Aspect-oriented programming - Wikiwand

Beneath the two systems mentioned above, there's a hidden subsystem for managing tasks/goals/time, primarily through "periodic notes":

You might be curious that the above subsystem seems to only use "periodic notes." In fact, the two main systems are connected through two methods.

Connection

How systems are associated

Tag Connection

Treat the first-level folders under PARA as special tags (they don't need to be exactly the same as the folder names), use them in "periodic notes," then you can index uniformly in each PARA folder in the same way. This ensures that the README.md index in each PARA folder has all the context for the current topic:

Project Connection

Generate a project in "knowledge management," to enhance focus on the project, there's a "main event list" or "project list" in every class of "periodic notes," such as:

Review

Quick Start

Download

  1. Click here to download
  2. Open with obsidian and enjoy

Creating Notes

"Daily Log" and "Project README"

"Weekly Review" and "Monthly Review"

"Quarterly Review" and "Annual Review"

"PARA Index" and "Task Index"

"Capture" and "Express"

First, let's introduce a concept, the CODE model, where:

Those familiar with PARA will see that this model is actually proposed by Tiago Forte in "Building a Second Brain," and it's the higher-level model that includes the PARA organization method, with O indicating the PARA organization method.

My practice is to temporarily store some marked articles in the "Capture" directory while using the "-1. Capture/README.md" file to index the notes tagged with #PARA/Capture scattered in the daily logs. This makes it convenient for me during specific time nodes, such as weekends, month-ends, and quarter-ends, to review and sort, first organizing marked articles into each PARA topical directory, then transferring some inspirational notes from the dailynotesinto some explicit to-dos;

Next, let's talk about "Express." I place my blog in the express section and also record some fragmentary notes in the daily log tagged with PARA/Express. These are outputs after internalization. If this output needs to be further posted on a specific social platform, such as Zhihu or Xiaohongshu, I will conveniently record it as a task. When I review the tasks indexed in the "5. Express/README.md" file and find pending ones, just complete them one by one.

Small Tips in Practice

Buffer Zone Mechanism

Place less important and non-urgent items swiftly into a buffer zone (Inbox) by creating tasks, keeping the main focus on "Projects."

Task Lists

Recording tasks shouldn't be a mental burden – writing them down doesn't mean they must be done. Having them written relieves your mind from having to continuously remember or fear forgetting them. I've recorded many tasks, many of which, upon reassessment, were indeed not completed.

It's important to have mechanisms in place that allow for review of recorded tasks, for example:

Task Reminders

I consider there to be three types of task reminders:

Micro-Habits

Easy to Refactor

Within each periodic note, the same feature modules use the same statement, such as "tasks collected this period," all inserted through the following query statement. The "this period" variable is provided by the current file name, which makes it very convenient to refactor all periodic files en masse, needing only to perform a batch replacement:

```LifeOS
    TaskRecordListByTime
```

Efficient Use of Shortcuts

Set consistent global shortcuts, so that no matter in which software, you can invoke the same function with the same shortcut. Here are some of my configurations: