Your Thoughts Do Not Belong in My Second Brain

I love you, but you ain’t driving this bus, brother, and I’ve got the template to prove it!

Ilustration by Author

There’s been quite a change in the focus behind my work over the last couple of years. Two weeks ago I told you about the planting of the seed that saw me turn my notes upside down, striking out into the wilderness of a brand new Obsidian vault.

Yes, I do largely use Obsidian on my Mac to interact with my notes, but the app isn’t the focus of what I’m talking about today. This is about the innards of your raw files, not the glasses you use to view them.

PTPL reader Honore Francois recently shared her own second brain epiphany after reading the story I mentioned above:

My heart skipped a beat and I dove into this post…just the conclusion I’ve recently come to as I half-heartedly toyed with the idea of “ a second brain” that wasn’t and isn’t my own handwritten conclusions, questions, experiences, etc… As tempting as all the new solutions are, I’m quite comfortable with mine — it’s served me well decades before and continues to do so… Thank you for sharing this pivotal revelation .

Restricting my notes to my own thoughts and feelings is enormously freeing! It means that I can trust that the insights my notes surface, originated with me. The formula goes like this:

• Voraciously consume good content and ideas wherever I find them →

• Think about each thing that stands out, and why it’s significant to me →

• Distill the essence of each concept into its own note

The in-between steps include dumping stuff into my daily notes, using tag pages to track recurring themes — a new habit of mine, that makes more sense than using regular tags. 

When I’m reading online using my phone, I’ll use the share sheet to save interesting links (plus a phrase describing the main idea) to Drafts, then using an action I’ve made, send them to my Obsidian vault. I’m using seed, sprout, and evergreen labels to quickly see which notes need more work.

This is the template I’m using, based on Artem Kirsanov’s video:

<% tp.date.now("YYYYMMDDHHmm") %>
Status:  #seed  #unlinked 
TagNotes: 
# <% tp.file.title %>





---
# References

Here’s an example:

Screenshot by Author

I’ve set a hotkey to paste this template wherever I need it, whenever I press Control + Command + A (A for atomic note). You’ll need to install the Templater plugin for this to work. 

The uniformity my notes now have cheers and comforts my heart!

The last bit

To summarise, I’m loving keeping other people’s thoughts out of my main collection of notes. My former vault still has the Readwise and Kindle plugins feeding into it as a separate resource for building up my new space.

While I’m deeply opinionated about the best way for me to work, I’m not presenting the specifics of my workflow as the tenets of a kind of PKM religion. Oh, and by “deeply opinionated” I mean fully into the way I’m doing things now, but willing to change all of it when I see something that resonates more. (Thank you VS Code for making it easy to make vault-wide changes in a flash!)

The only hard and fast rule I can see with this second brain business, is that you put enough of the right kind of work into metacognition (ie. learning through observation about how you think, but not overthinking about how you think) that you come to know what works best for you now.

If you’ve got to this point and are unmoved by the concept of a your-thoughts-only-vault, first of all thanks for the read, and secondly, that’s a great way to know that it’s not a path you need to stress about following!

My last piece of advice is that you get to and set up your notes the way that makes the most sense to you today, and let future-you take care of their own needs (they can handle it).