I've used Obsidian for a long time, but I never fully understood the concept of having a second brain until a few pieces of information fell into place. For the longest time, I just used it as a productivity tool — a place to write, keep notes, organize my thoughts, and store everything interesting I learned. But in the process of using Obsidian and watching my vault slowly grow larger and more interconnected, something clicked. All those different pieces of information were essentially me translating my actual brain and memory into a digital format. While the human brain excels at processing and extrapolating ideas, memory is an area many of us struggle with. Whether you're neurodivergent, a sleep-deprived new parent, juggling too many responsibilities, or all of the above, gray matter is not the most effective storage medium.

Obsidian, on the other hand, is a fantastic way to store information (and it doesn't make weird faces when trying to uncover a dusty, cobweb-ridden memory from the corner of its mind). Throughout any given day, I will drum up dozens of article ideas, potential story plots, questions I'm curious about, and more. By the end of the day, I'll remember maybe five of those, and that's if I'm lucky. By noting these ideas, I'm able to later explore those ideas and think about them when I have the time.

Here's the caveat. I don't treat my vault as a "second brain" for productivity purposes. While web gurus have tried to sell the idea of a second brain being some kind of productivity magic bullet, I don't see it that way. In my opinion, it's much more effective as a repository of knowledge that I can look back to years down the line to refresh myself on whatever subject I might be interested in at that moment.

My "second brain" is more like a memory vault

It doesn't think for me

Obsidian is kind of an all-in-one tool. I track everything inside it — story ideas, thoughts on media I've watched and read, articles I've written, and much more. I also keep a journal in it — not daily, despite my best attempts at consistency—so adding what I learn is a natural extension. It's the kind of application I wish I'd had during college. More than a decade after graduating, I would love to refer back to the course materials and brush up on a few things. While that content is long gone, I'll be able to look back on what I'm studying now just by opening my vault.

It's not necessarily useful. There are some topics I doubt I'll ever look back over (like the transcript from a meeting), but it's interesting to know I can open my vault in a decade or two and see that I met with such-and-such about a certain topic, if any memory of that meeting is long gone.

Unlike my actual brain, a digital memory bank is easy to search

It's a lot easier to find stray thoughts

This is especially useful because it gives other people a way to actually access my brain — not literally, of course, but if I need to dig up something about a specific subject, it's easy enough to find. If I have to ask someone to pull out some information for me, that's simpler, too. No one has to search through the chaos that is my document folder on my computer, nor do I have to explain an esoteric naming system to help them find it. Obsidian's tagging system makes it easy to search for specific topics, while its fuzzy search means searching a few words in the title of a note will usually yield results.

So if I'm away from home and my mobile Obsidian app doesn't sync, and I don't have access to my computer, I could call up my partner and ask her to find what I'm looking for in my notes. Or, if something were to ever happen to me, all of our family's important documents are stored there in the vault.

Capture everything, organize just enough

You don't have to drown in information

When I'm working on an article, rather than just using Obsidian to write the story, I save any research I find and any relevant page I visit, to the vault. Now, Obsidian is already pretty well organized through its tags, but I find that splitting things into folders helps from a more visual approach. I hate having a bunch of unsorted notes in my vault, so I use a hybrid system that blends folder navigation and hierarchy as well as the tagging system.

But, for example, while writing this story, I wanted to dive into some of the organization systems, like Zettelkasten and PARA. I researched the systems on various websites, but rather than just pulling the relevant information out, I saved the entire page into my vault. I can quickly reference it later, link to it, and use callouts from the page to highlight all the relevant information while leaving the rest of it there, untouched, for later reference.

The real thinking happens during the capture, not after

Don't offload the cognitive load

Here's the thing: those productivity gurus aren't entirely wrong. The arguments against personal knowledge systems — which actually date as far back as Plato — have some merit. The brain is great at synthesizing information, and much of that happens while you're capturing information and reading through it. Haphazardly taking notes doesn't necessarily equate to better productivity; in some cases, you're building a knowledge graveyard, not a garden. I value extreme amounts of note-taking for archival reasons, but this methodology is one that I've developed for myself, that works with my specific workflow. It won't be a fit for everyone.

I'm not avoiding thinking; I'm respecting my time

We live in a busy world

I'm not choosing between synthesizing information and taking notes, I'm just doing it at different times. In an ideal world, I'd have plenty of free time to ponder every stray thought that catches my attention, but this isn't an ideal world. When an idea comes to me, I capture it quickly before it can escape, and then I sit down and think about it more when I have the time. If a random plot idea comes to mind while I'm shopping for groceries, I can't reasonably explore it there — but I can make a quick note in my vault and revisit it later that evening. Trying to force myself to process every bit of information as soon as I encounter it is its own kind of cognitive overload, and it's just as detrimental as taking no notes at all.

A second brain is for convenience and posterity

I use Obsidian to store thoughts for later review, but there's also a part of me that hopes it will one day be viewed by my grandchildren or great-grandchildren the same way we read our forebear's journals. Maybe a bit of myself will live on in a digital format, and my second brain — whether that remains in an Obsidian vault or in some other future software — can be reviewed by my predecessors to see how I worked on a day-to-day basis.