NOT MINE
This is just a reference/bookmarked article from the internet i found interesting!
Hey everyone,
I’ve been diving into the whole “second brain” idea lately, and I’m putting together an article that looks at it from a psychological perspective. Thought I’d ask here since you’re the ones actually living with Obsidian day to day.
A couple of my own reflections so far:
1)The whole ‘brain’ label feels a bit misleading. At best, my Obsidian setup is like a personal Wikipedia super useful for storage and retrieval, but it doesn’t really think for me.
2)Sometimes I catch myself falling into effort justification spending hours linking notes and then convincing myself it was productive, even when I didn’t get new insights out of it.
3)Part of me wonders if the real future of this is AI. Something like NotebookLM or a local LLM that can actually take all our notes and surface patterns/connections we wouldn’t have noticed on our own. That feels closer to a genuine “second brain.”
I’m curious:
1)What have been your biggest challenges in sticking with a second brain system?
2)Do you ever feel the whole thing gets over-marketed like it promises more than it delivers?
Would love to hear your thoughts.
Edit (I’m still in the research phase of the article, but here’s the premise:
The mainstream has glorified and oversold the idea of “building a second brain.” People were sold on the notion that the best could create a fully interconnected, almost neural network like system in Obsidian, filling it with nodes containing summaries, notes from books, articles, quotes, and other pieces of knowledge.
Many dove in headfirst, taking on a huge learning curve to set up this elaborate system. But over time, they often find it doesn’t actually work for them the complexity becomes overwhelming, and the connections they hoped for don’t naturally emerge. Yet, they persist.
This is partly due to effort justification bias (also called the IKEA effect) where the more effort they put into building the system, the more committed they feel to it, even if it isn’t helping.
The original intention behind Obsidian and similar tools was simpler and Zettelkasten style method, where you freely dump your thoughts, ideas, and notes, and then, perhaps once a week, organize and link them to other valuable insights. It’s not about building a perfectly interconnected network from day one it’s about creating atomic notes that can gradually form meaningful patterns.
Instead, many people fall into the collector fallacy: they save and hoard everything in the hope that accumulation equals insight. This often leads to apophenia seeing patterns where none exist and the illusion of understanding.
In other words, the system becomes less about learning and thinking, and more about performing knowledge accumulation.)
Edit 2: I am not implying obsidian as an incompetent tool.
- Upvotes
u/czar_el 23d ago edited 23d ago
1)What have been your biggest challenges in sticking with a second brain system?
The greatest weakness is also its greatest strength: the freedom to do things multiple ways.
It’s a massive strength because you have options, flexibility, and extensibility. There is so much power and freedom built in, and with plugins the options are endless.
But it’s on you to develop the actual system and flow that fits your needs. Many people get overwhelmed by the options and don’t know where to start, or feel they have to use all the options and get bogged down, or choose a recommended system from an “expert” and assume that’s how all of Obsidian works then get disappointed when that one system doesn’t work for you.
I personally have a history with mind mapping software, offline notebook workflows, and coding IDEs, so I don’t have a problem sticking with my system for Obsidian. But I completely understand people coming in without that background struggling.
2)Do you ever feel the whole thing gets over-marketed like it promises more than it delivers?
Obsidian, no. The “second brain” pitch, yes.
It was never intended to be a full second brain. If you use a computer metaphor with your brain, it has a CPU (frontal cortex), RAM and ROM storage (short term and long term memory), sensory peripheral plugins (spinal cord, eyes, tongue, ears, nerves), and a mother board connecting it all (connectome).
Obsidian as a second brain was only ever RAM/ROM and maybe a bit of connectome or sensory peripheral plugins. It’s meant to store information so you don’t have to, but it doesn’t think for you. You can build in connections, and some input from peripherals. But it was never going to think for you, or automatically discover connections by itself.
Yes, AI can do the latter. There are machine learning approaches that can discover connections and plot graphs on its own, and an LLM could handle queries to answer questions based on the pre-vetted data in your vault (technique called “Graph RAG” which stands for retrieval augmented generation over a graph database/network). But that was never in the baseline pitch for Obsidian. You can’t blame the tool for something it never claimed to be.
Some thirty-odd years ago, a guy named Don Norman wrote a book called “Things That Make Us Smart”. The central thesis was that humans have always made “cognitive artifacts” that help us to think more effectively, and that new technologies should be designed in a way that compliments the way that we think rather than forces us to conform to some other process.
This is what people are talking about when they refer to Obsidian as a “second brain”. Not that it is literally thinking for them, but that it helps them with recall and building connections between concepts in ways that other tools haven’t been able to until now.
Is it overhyped? Sure, if it isn’t working for you. I’d make the argument that for certain kinds of knowledge work it can be pretty transformative, but only if it’s not imposing too much cognitive overhead on how you normally work.
- “Brain” is a metaphor for structure, not action. You might as well use the terms network or mycelium.
- The problem is that you put the wagons before the locomotive. You don’t connect notes as a result of working with information, but artificially indicate connections that mean nothing to you personally.
- Using AI to create connections is like copying Wikipedia and calling it a personal knowledge base.
About advertising. The goal is not to help you, but to sell a course or a book. What do you need for this? First of all, make the simple complicated, then convince that only the author knows how to do it right.
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- The problem is that you put the wagons before the locomotive. You don’t connect notes as a result of working with information, but artificially indicate connections that mean nothing to you personally.
- Using AI to create connections is like copying Wikipedia and calling it a personal knowledge base.
This.
I think Forte’s PARA system is useful for some, but I’m more interested in the Zettelkasten method as a thinking aid. Having a background in libraries, I have to fight the urge to start organizing and cataloging information in some “completist” way - but that’s essentially Wikipedia, and I already have access to Wikipedia. Instead, I make notes leaning into the subjective - what I found interesting or meaningful in this source, not worrying so much about “what the source says” on its own terms. The connections between sources and connections with my own thoughts is most interesting to me because I use the tool to foster thinking, as a conversation partner of my own thoughts. Adding AI to this completely misses the point of a Zettelkasten as something else is making links rather than your thinking itself..
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If you are interested in the relationship between ZK and PARA (if you discard the add-ons for complexity).
- Resources are cards in ZK.
- Areas are the initial cards of chains.
- Projects are the result of thinking.
- Archives are legacy data and bequeathed projects.
These may not be folders, but tags.•
This ☝️
I think the whole “Second Brain” thing is a kind of semantic drift and misunderstanding of the original concept in philosophy and psychology - known as the Extended Mind Thesis.
The EMT never made any arguments about the possibility of making a second brain that doubles your productivity. It simply suggests that perhaps what we call “our mind” is not merely limited to our brain or our physical body, but all the interconnected systems we live with. Our phones, desktops, papers, etc. are all technically a part of our mind’s system since they aid in thinking, memory and knowledge discovery. The argument is thus “can you really call your body and mind all there is to your thinking?”
Thus someone must have played a game of Chinese telephone because by the time the concept made it to the PKM sphere, it had become reduced to “Second Brain”.
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To expand on this, a second brain implies a first brain, that hopefully is fully functional as well. I don’t see any reason to think having two brains means the first one simply stops thinking. The point is to use them together - the second brain helps the first. There is no reason to expect, let alone want, the second brain to think for you.
PhD in psychology here. I also have ADHD. I’m also a university lecturer in psychology and statistics.
I love Obsidian. It’s the most flexible note talking platform I’ve ever used. It only stores bits of my brain, but each bit it a a completely different notetaking system within the same vault. My ADHD brain loves that flexibility, because it thinks in different ways.
I will never use it as a full second brain, because I don’t have the time or need for that endeavour. Nor the obsessive interest.
But I recommend it a lot. Precisely because it is so flexible, so customisable, and suitable for first-timers, deep planners, researchers, gamers… the list is endless.
It’s awesome. Yes, it’s part of my brain.
Disclaimer: I am a Zettelkasten zealot from zettelkasten.de
1)The whole ‘brain’ label feels a bit misleading. At best, my Obsidian setup is like a personal Wikipedia super useful for storage and retrieval, but it doesn’t really think for me.
Thinking done for you shouldn’t be marketed. What the system should do is to open up the communication line to your future self (which is not straightforward. We all know that we often don’t understand notes from a week ago) and provide you with an elevating thinking environment.
Sometimes I catch myself falling into effort justification spending hours linking notes and then convincing myself it was productive, even when I didn’t get new insights out of it.
This is most likely the material’s problem. You should process material that is new and/or challenging to you. The linking should be a result of the thinking. New insights are not the result of linking.
The mainstream has glorified and oversold the idea of “building a second brain.” People were sold on the notion that the best could create a fully interconnected, almost neural network like system in Obsidian, filling it with nodes containing summaries, notes from books, articles, quotes, and other pieces of knowledge.
The issue lies within the method. Obsidian is a fine tool.
The original intention behind Obsidian and similar tools was simpler and Zettelkasten style method, where you freely dump your thoughts, ideas, and notes, and then, perhaps once a week, organize and link them to other valuable insights.
No, this is not how it works, and it is not the original intention. The original intention is to provide you with a framework for the work that you have to do anyway. I also incorporate aspects of critical thinking and systems thinking as guidelines for the advanced.
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Yeah… I quite like the ZKesque framing of “ongoing conversation with all your past selves” and specifically your past self when thinking about a thing. I also like the idea that “it’s kinda like a brain / process but Im the one doing the thinking”
New insights are not the result of linking.
Hmm. I find that they can be… or thinkinh about your linking. But Im doing a particular kind of linking which is giving each note a number of parents and then forming the backlinks into a paragraph (when I am looking at the note - I have dataview dump a list of unlinked backlinks which I turn into paragraohs when I want to think or take stock). I wrote a blog post on the scripts I use: https://readwithai.substack.com/p/slowly-turning-your-automated-maps
My real struggle at first was realizing that only I can find a system that suits myself. The right way to do things is what actually works for me. I spent days in Youtube watching people babbling about stuff that I couldn’t understand simply because I think in a different way and I have different needs. I installed 20 plugins trying to find a way to organize my notes and life to fit their structure and workflows, when it’s so obvious that it should be the other way around!
My advice to newcomers would be to ignore everything anyone says and just start taking notes. Ignore plugins. Ignore other people’s methods.
The power of Obsidian is its flexibility. Let your needs guide you.
Just write notes. Questions and needs will naturally emerge. Then you start looking around for possibilities and you discover there most probably is a plugin for that, or someone had your same problem/need and has a way of dealing with it you can get inspiration from.
I consider it a common mistake (that I for one made) to look for guidance before having written at least a few hundred notes. People want to learn entire systems for needs they don’t have and maybe never will, forcing themselves to cognitive loads that lead to nothing but frustration and actually increase the friction, instead of easing it. A “safe” system does not exist. Try something, look at it partially fail, improve from there. Iterate.
- Just write notes.
- Let your needs guide you.
- Focus on content, not structure. Structure will emerge on its own when content gains a certain critical mass
- Just write notes
u/Amateur66 23d ago edited 23d ago
1) What have been your biggest challenges in sticking with a second brain system?
Initially, like a lot of people, my biggest challenge was just to settle on one interface and one way of using it. Others kept catching my eye. But quickly - thanks to seeing a lot of people in this forum who were further down this path and still endlessly switching horses - it became apparent that there would be no end to this. Since I loved the philosophy of the founders of Obsidian, I pledged to myself to just settle down and use it in the simplest way possible. And for 4 years now it has been joyous, 100% Obsidian and 100% the format for notes that I established in the first few weeks.
2) Do you ever feel the whole thing gets over-marketed like it promises more than it delivers?
I think people chuck the ‘second brain’ expression around with wild abandon and a lot of people think it’s a magic key that will automatically unlock wisdom and serenity. So I think that part is overdone. But in terms of the leverage and power of taking ‘smart’ notes in general, if anything it’s way under-celebrated. I have digested books, articles & I documentaries with so much more purpose and get so much more joy from my learning thanks to it. So this is where I think AI might be the real danger. If AI robs you of DOING THE WORK - ie.sitting back and rephrasing key points that resonate for you and creating YOUR OWN links to previous knowledge - then that would be the worst outcome…
I absolutely feel the “second brain” concept is overmarketed. Most of the people advertising this use the word without much understanding of how our brains actually work. They are not neurologists. They simply refer to how they think most people behave. To be honest I believe this whole concept is overhyped as a result of content creators trying to sensationalze content with buzzwords and clickbait.
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You’re right! It is an over-marketed, boiled-down and misguided interpretation of various older ideas in the philosophical space - such as the Extended Mind Thesis, or various other ideas mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
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They are not neurologists.
Nobody is stopping those neuroscientists to build a second brain for you. if they can’t build something, they should keep their mouth shut.
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I am not sure I follow you here..
2)Sometimes I catch myself falling into effort justification spending hours linking notes and then convincing myself it was productive, even when I didn’t get new insights out of it.
In my opinion, it’s better for me to waste time linking and organizing my notes than dumb-scrolling on some social network.
The brain is not only for thinking but for storage as well. Therefore the “second brain” is the extra storage only, for instance an SSD of 4TB to store all of your music, and leave your computer’s drive fresh and empty ready for extra work.
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But memory for the brain is not a static repository more like a dynamic and reconstructive process.
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Who said what you store in Obsidian or any other second brain has to be static? Mine certainly isn’t but perhaps I use it differently
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The nature of information is static.
1)The whole ‘brain’ label feels a bit misleading. At best, my Obsidian setup is like a personal Wikipedia super useful for storage and retrieval, but it doesn’t really think for me.
I think that depends on how your first brain works. I think with obsidian, sometimes. How? Writing things. I used to do that with open and paper, then other tools, and now obsidian. It isn’t something exclusive to any second brain tools, but something related to how each person works and thinks.
Also, offloading things frees me up for other things. I live in a very fast, stressful and dynamic industry. So having means to guarantee I’ll deliver what I need is a must.
Again, it could be pen and paper for tasks, but what about the investigative process? Knowledge sharing? And so on.
2)Sometimes I catch myself falling into effort justification spending hours linking notes and then convincing myself it was productive, even when I didn’t get new insights out of it.
Always start with “why”. I delete many notes from my vault. And I have notes from decades ago available. If I delete one note that I don’t need anymore, it is productivity. If I create one note, it is productivity.
My productivity is not in my vault, but in what I deliver in the many roles I have as a person, husband, parent, employee. The notes and the vault are tools.
The carpenter doesn’t measure the hammer productivity by the number of nails it hit, but by the outcome he could create with that (and other) tools.
3)Part of me wonders if the real future of this is AI. Something like NotebookLM or a local LLM that can actually take all our notes and surface patterns/connections we wouldn’t have noticed on our own. That feels closer to a genuine “second brain.”
AI — I use it — is part of the future, but not the future of this. If you go to a training session and watch complex things for a week, but you only take notes during the first day and use colleagues notes for the other four days. Do you believe you’ll learn and know the same as if you took notes for the whole 5 days?
AI should be the colleague asking for your notes and helping you think. You probably learned in psychology about the different ways we, human beings, learn and how different processes work. Writing forces you to read. Writing concise ideas forces you to think about what you want to say, and then you immediately read what you wrote. And then you revisit concepts as a memory refresh. With AI you are only reading. There’s no internalization of knowledge. Your vault becomes Google: everything’s in there, if you know how to search for it, but nothing from there is your knowledge.
1)What have been your biggest challenges in sticking with a second brain system?
Discipline. Living in a busy and fast paced environment makes me switch contexts related to my role several times a day. Sometimes things are complex and I can’t even take notes. So this is the struggle: discipline.
And time. After 10h of work, I don’t want to be at my mobile taking notes, much less power on a computer for that: I call it a day (if nobody calls me later).
2)Do you ever feel the whole thing gets over-marketed like it promises more than it delivers?
I feel that people don’t want to learn their tools and get half baked solutions from YouTube and think that these solutions will simply do everything for them.
Due to not understanding the tool at their hands, not practicing, they don’t get the outcomes they thought they would have.
What I see, many times, is people disappointed because a hammer isn’t a screwdriver (and there’s no plugin for that — yet).
Yes, the purpose of many YouTubers is to sell courses, views, subscribers, but rarely real knowledge or content that is useful and practical. They make super complex systems with beautiful acronyms and names that aren’t practical or that aggregate very little to one’s process. The effort is rarely worth it.
People are very successful without taking notes. With commonplace books. With bullet journals. With an agenda. With a calendar. With digital tools. It is more “people” than “tools”.
Honestly I just take notes for the sake of taking them. Philosophies and methods are all bullshit. Shit like Johnny Decimal is a fucking scam. Just take notes on what you’d like to recall later. Doesn’t really matter what you call it or how you perceive it.
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Absolutely…take my upvote bro
i personally get alot of spontaneuous ideas that i completely forget later, obisidian is just an organized and smooth way to store these ideas. maybe i use just to have a really cool graph view 0_0…. either way the UI is alot faster than Google Docs for example so its easy to just go in write something and go out.
It sounds like you have an outcome you’ve already settled on (“second brain” is misleading, over hypes the tool, people waste effort with overly complicated setups but justify the effort to themselves).
I’m sure all of that happens, and I’m sure this sub self selects for people with more complicated setups, but there are tons of people using obsidian in simple ways to keep track of things they would other wise forget.
Of course second brain is an imperfect metaphor. I don’t think people really want to off load thinking. It is more like off loading the job if remembering everything, and like all writing tools, it forces you to write which itself forces you to think things through more thoroughly than if you didn’t go through the process of writing it.
The structure facilitates that writing, with the organization components facilitating the recall portion.
The key feature of obsidian, for me, is links and back links, which lets the organization structure arise post-hoc, instead of having to come up with some crazy system in the first place that you then have to stick to.
Which is to say, obsidian is the note keeper I’ve used with the least overhead compared to other tools I’ve tried.
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It was never an outcome. Just a premise I’d like to discover more.
‘Second brain’ is misleading.
The tools aren’t.
When I talk about “second brain” I mean, I am capable of searching and retrieving information from it at the same rate I can speak
E.g. I was interviewed on a friends podcast the other day, and I wanted to reference a book I had read. I was able to search for the entry and grab the key dates and author without any pause or interruption to my speaking
NaN. consistency of taking notes and consistency of reviewing Obsidian files. I read a lot about zettlekasten and first principles, and it made me want to dive in with how Obsidian was structured. Then came the part of actually doing the consistent work to take advantage of the benefits of Obsidian. And I fell off the band wagon.
I don’t think of it as a second brain so much as a secondary hard drive for storage. If I want to write or think about a certain topic and I have already collated thoughts and notes from prior articles or books, then I have access to this information without needing to have it all in my head. At the end of the day my own brain still does all the thinking for what I want to do with the information.
NaN. yes I feel like the community over markets the second brain idea, but not Obsidian themselves.
Perhaps not “over-marketed” but it’s not a good term, no. For me Obsidian is a highly competent note taking system, my personal knowledge base that I couldn’t do without. And it’s awesome for that purpose. But it doesn’t “help me to think”.
I don’t expect Obsidian to think for me. It just needs to store things I can’t reasonably store in my memory. But it’s not a wiki - everything in my Vault is thing that relates to me and to the things that I do in some extent. Then you look at an Obsidian graph, notice each of those nodes are related to at least one thought that you have had in your life, and you think “my thoughts are linked… kinda reminds me of neurons” and you call it a second brain. That’s all that is, it’s not that deep.
To answer your questions:
NaN. Collecting, mostly. I was never really much of a notetaker before Obsidian.
NaN. No. Not by obsidian, at least, but maybe by “productivity tubers” that will tell you “the best six thousand MUST HAVE plugins for Obsidian”. You open a note, you write it in Markdown, you link notes, that’s Obsidian. The second brain thing delivers as much as it promises, it’s just not magical. The whole point of taking notes at all, even in a pen and paper, is to help you think: you spend less effort memorizing and more effort extrapolating. If you’re actually taking and revisiting notes and not just copy-pasting links and excerpts then the connections will come naturally - in your brain, first, in Obsidian, second.
I never thought of the “second brain” metaphor as literally something that is actively thinking or discovering knowledge, but more about retaining data and connections. Because the human brain is amazing but it is poor at retaining memory.
We’ve been using tools to improve our memory for millennia: from cave drawing to writing to book making, journaling, Commonplacing. And along come computers and software and now we have Obsidian that’s designed for that memory retaining function plus impressive bells and whistles.
But it seems you’re a little hung up on the other function of the brain. The concept of a “second brain” has existed since before we had computers, it’s called Commonplacing and it had nothing to do with a machine doing the thinking for you. Papers can’t think after all.
u/podious 22d ago edited 22d ago
brain = memory + processing
obsidian = memory
obsidian!= processing
depends how “brain” is defined. If solely as memory it is true Obsidian provides a “structured” depository. But if we define “brain” as a processing tool of course not. In that case second brain definition collapses, which I am also not a good favor of.
In my doctoral degree I benefited lot since I cannot retrieve all the critical details sentence by sentence. It allowed me to store accurately the points with great traceability. I have never expected a tool to think for me even GPT stuffs.
You’ll have to differentiate between the types of users in order to see the benefits. From my perspective I can see massive wins for writers, researchers and people that don’t have working memory in their first brains.
Outside of that it’s a lot more data hoarding and procrastination disguised as productivity.
Many people tout the benefits of “no longer having to Google stuff” but I really can’t understand that reality unless it’s super niche or hard to find information.
It’s just fanboying and missing the point of what it is. It takes notes. That’s it. The premise is you add some sort of map of content to your notes and if enough things generally point to a similar topic you can add further context.
Over time (as in consistent use) you see more and more hubs link together. You do it though, its not automatic. That’s where most people end up taking it in a completely different direction and missing the forest for the trees. It gets complicated for no reason.
It’s not for indexing, its for synthesizing.
1: I gave it a try recently as we had our second kid and my brain is slightly fried from years of sleep deprivation. I thought it would help me remember, but I have so much to recall that I can’t put it all in, or I might forget to enter it completely, and the whole things a bust. 2: It’s overhyped because people want to sell templates on Gumroad.
After several years I realized that linking is not that useful for me. Currently migrated to neovim and marksman lsp and I see the beauty of simplicity and portability. However for people who are into deep research and creative field, I think it might be helpful.
u/Responsible-Sir-5994 23d ago
My biggest concern with Obsidian: I’m too lazy to take everyday notes about my day and feeling.
I use obsidian to keep some information and use mixed methods: PARA for long-term info (articles, Linux cheats, movie, book and game tracker, etc) and this plugin (https://github.com/mirnovov/obsidian-homepage) for short notes (really it is one note to fast paste links or tasks) and delete them when it’s done.
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I haven’t personally tried it but a local LLM could be a great addition to the idea of a second Brain. Feeding your thoughts and ideas and letting it make the connections. Taking it from a passive library to an active collaborator.
It can also make inter-connection and semantic relationships which can be overlooked by a human.
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Why would you externalise the process of discovering new connections and relations? You’re throwing away the serendipity moments. By doing this everything becomes information and not knowledge.
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I never threw out the process of discovering. A local LLM was meant as an idea to see some points i missed out.
What obsidian or any other tool or plugin does is a word based subjective linking. Without understanding or taking into consideration the nuance or the context of the topic.
A local LLM is much more sophisticated and can understand the contextual elements and build a network of link more semantically.
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u/Responsible-Sir-5994 23d ago
I not accept neuroslop to summarize or rewrite content. If it makes articles instead of me, I not remember that.
I supported my situation analysis according to Adele Clarke. Was super helpful. Memos and networking went much faster than with traditional tools. Especially because I could use the graph view.
This post really resonates with me. I spent several years early in my career caught in exactly these productivity rabbit holes, and your analysis hits the nail on the head.
The Digital Hoarding Trap:
What I discovered through painful experience was that I was essentially digital hoarding—collecting systems and tools that gave me the illusion of productivity while actually becoming obstacles to real work.
I highly recommend this video that articulates these exact concerns: Why I Deleted My Second Brain: A Journey Back to Real Thinking.
The creator describes his second brain as becoming “a mausoleum, a dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions piled on top of each other like geological strata.”
Your point about effort justification bias is spot-on. I can’t count the hours I spent perfecting tagging systems and elaborate linking, convincing myself it was “productive work.” The dopamine hit from optimizing systems is far more appealing than tackling actual mundane but important tasks.
The Collector’s Fallacy
This is the core. Massive vaults filled with “insights” never applied. As the Zettelkasten community puts it: “to know about something” isn’t the same as “knowing something.” Just storing information doesn’t create understanding; it can prevent it by giving us the false sense we’ve “dealt with” an idea when we’ve only filed it away.
After cycling through multiple systems, here’s what I’ve learned:
- Tools should be invisible —they support your work without becoming the work
- Measure by output, not input —can you point to specific ways your system improved actual work outcomes?
- Embrace forgetting —as the video notes, “Human memory is not an archive. It is associative, embodied, contextual and emotional. We do not think in folders.”
Your analysis of this as intellectual insecurity is great. In rapidly evolving tech fields, I’ve learned that trying to capture everything is counterproductive—the landscape changes faster than any system can track.
The real discipline isn’t perfect capture and organization. It’s curation and deletion. What gets deleted matters as much as what gets kept.
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Finally someone understood what I was trying to imply and resonated with collectors fallacy and effort justification bias (ikea effect).
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Yeah I think that you have to approach this in a mindset fully aware of the collectors fallacy (and this is probably why this is introduced at the beginning of the zettelkasten site, etc). My issue now is that I’ve gone a while without any formal “second brain” and due to this I don’t really have a “source of truth” location where I know to put things I come across throughout the day. So there’s two sides to the coin. Also, my initial vault(s) were all public and gained traction and people consistently want more lol
u/Parang97 22d ago edited 22d ago
So I use Obsidian to put researched knowledge into my own words. I guess my main hobby is I love researching things, learning everything. And never retained much of that knowledge until Obsidian. I come up with a topic im interested in, study it, then bring it into Obsidian with references so i can find it easy when my brain loops back around to it.
- I’d say my biggest challenge with my second brain is structure. I have a ton of hobbies (thanks ADD), and many of them are similar to each other. Like fly tying for fishing. 2 different hobbies that accomplish the same thing. Being able to find the information i need from my Obsidian vault can be tricky. Lots of folders.
- (So imma split this into Obdisian and Second Brain, use whichever one you need) I don’t think obsidian is overmarketed, maybe overhyped. So many people start obsidian by adding a ton of plugins to the point it’s unusable. When I got into it, i watched almost every youtube video on the topic, and everyone had their own way to do it with their own flavor of plugins. It can be overwhelming. So, I just started typing and modified the file structure to fit my goals as I inserted information. So maybe not obsidian itself is overmarketed, but the community plugins are? I’m not sure if that answered it or not, the ADD train hasn’t stopped at the psychology station yet.
The second brain part? Ohhhh yeah. I would love to go the rest of my life without having to hear that term ever again. I wouldn’t call it a second brain, more like my own wikipedia. A second brain would be something that can take my information and expand on it, find connections, etc. Which yeah, there are programs that can do it, and id consider them a little closer to the truth, but its still just a way to access info. We don’t call google a second brain
u/geGamedev 22d ago edited 22d ago
I’m on my phone typing this, so I can’t respond to everything at once but early in your post something stood out to me. A second brain implies there is a first brain, ie the second brain is never intended to think for you, it’s intended to help you think.
The second brain functions as a knowledge base and memory aid, providing a means of enhancing divergent and convergent thinking via links and tags. Unlike typical file structures entirely dependant on rigid folder systems, a “second brain” can adapt to how you think, even as you change over time. It can also function as a time-capsule if backed-up periodically.
Edit to add: I have tried NotebookLM and regularly use Gemini (Google’s AI), but never to have them think for me. NotebookLM seems like it would be useful for a large collection of notes, but the podcast function is appealing even with only a few notes uploaded. That said, there’s a Gemini plugin for Obsidian that does what NotebookLM does, minus the podcast feature and file creation.
You might like to look at a bit of a review I did on note taking in obsidian to get some perspectives (https://readwithai.substack.com/p/note-taking-with-obsidian-much-of). Though it might all be hype
Personally, I sort of use Obsidian for work notes rather than study notes which I think makes a difference. If the thing that you are doing is going to take a couple of hours writing a couple of paragraphs about it isn’t too much. I don’t reality view it as taking time… more handholding.
To me it was never a second brain in that it was going to do the thinking for you. It was to support your own brain and free up space and keep track of things.
Like having one place to put everything. Instead of having lots of random notebooks, notes on your phone, word docs on your computer etc. Just one place where everything goes.
Then when you wanted to find something it was easier. You don’t have to guess where it is it’s just in your second brain.
Sometimes it’s a memory aid (recipes, pantry inventory, CRM system “ask John about his goldfish Frank” “this is a good gift idea for dad’s birthday”, what shows I’m watching & what day they are released. Resurfacing an old idea.)
Sometimes it’s a memory trainer (Space repetition, quiz my self on study materials)
Sometimes is a thinking partner (linking notes in my Zettelkasten and coming up with new ideas. Comparing completing ideas. Updating old beliefs or unlearning and relearning based on new information)
Sometimes it’s for goal and task management (helps me break down big goals into all the small tasks needed and keeps me motivated cause I can see I’m making progress over time. And to like life audit, is this really what I should be spending my time on. Does this still matter to me or have I or my life changed.
I definitely agree you can get caught up in making the system and forget to actually use it but that’s a problem with every productivity thing. A shiny new planner will do zip for you if you never actually write in it.
You need to make it, maintain it, and make something with it for it to be a successful second brain imo.
u/CompetitionItchy6170 17d ago
A lot of people get stuck turning their “second brain” into busywork tagging and linking endlessly without real insights. elephas solves this by letting you drop notes, PDFs, and files into its Mac-native Super Brain. With a quick shortcut, you can ask questions across everything summaries, patterns, timelines without over-engineering your system. It turns Obsidian-style storage into an actual thinking partner.
Part of me wonders if the real future of this is AI. Something like NotebookLM or a local LLM that can actually take all our notes and
I think this experiment has already run its course, since relying on something that hallucinates is very limited in terms of use cases, but I think there’s a better alternative…
Instead of having AI think for us, we can externalize our agenda as code just like we can our memory as markdown. AI I can fill the gaps, like providing transcription, but I think reliability is key and default to code for reliability over AI.
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when I introduced ai it meant a local LLM which is fed your data and notes with the sole purpose of seeing and making connection which were overlooked by a human synthesis and semantic relationships
u/Andy76b 23d ago edited 23d ago
Second Brain is only a claim, in my opinion and I also think that it is misleading.
What you build with Obsidian, no matter how sophisticated it is, it remains only a support that produces something if it interacts with your single brain. It does nothing as a brain on its own.
The couple author-obsidian based “thinks” only as much as its author thinks. Obsidian doesn’t think, what you build using Obsidian (for example, a Zettelkasten) can help you think.
I’m still in the research phase of the article, but here’s the premise:
The mainstream has glorified and oversold the idea of “building a second brain.” People were sold on the notion that the best could create a fully interconnected, almost neural network like system in Obsidian, filling it with nodes containing summaries, notes from books, articles, quotes, and other pieces of knowledge.
Many dove in headfirst, taking on a huge learning curve to set up this elaborate system. But over time, they often find it doesn’t actually work for them the complexity becomes overwhelming, and the connections they hoped for don’t naturally emerge. Yet, they persist.
This is partly due to effort justification bias (also called the IKEA effect) where the more effort they put into building the system, the more committed they feel to it, even if it isn’t helping.
The original intention behind Obsidian and similar tools was simpler and Zettelkasten style method, where you freely dump your thoughts, ideas, and notes, and then, perhaps once a week, organize and link them to other valuable insights. It’s not about building a perfectly interconnected network from day one it’s about creating atomic notes that can gradually form meaningful patterns.
Instead, many people fall into the collector fallacy: they save and hoard everything in the hope that accumulation equals insight. This often leads to apophenia seeing patterns where none exist and the illusion of understanding.
In other words, the system becomes less about learning and thinking, and more about performing knowledge accumulation.
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Hello, I sent a detailed comment right now. You may want to look on the term’s roots in the Extended Mind Thesis, and how it may have been a misinterpretation of this original idea.
In sounds good in theory. In practice it requires a lot of plumbing, almost on a daily basis
My biggest pain is tracking. Tracking progress in any kind of initiative shouldn’t be done in obsdian. There are other tools for that or just go analog
Your entire article from a psychological perspective is as dumb as your first brain and your second brain. Here is why:
1)The whole ‘brain’ label feels a bit misleading. At best, my Obsidian setup is like a personal Wikipedia super useful for storage and retrieval, but it doesn’t really think for me.
It is not misleading to me, probably it is misleading to you. But are you sure it is the only thing that has mislead you in life or you get misled by everything that exists?
2)Sometimes I catch myself falling into effort justification spending hours linking notes and then convincing myself it was productive, even when I didn’t get new insights out of it.
This is because you are linking the notes for the sake of linking. You have absolutely no idea why to make those links.
3)Part of me wonders if the real future of this is AI. Something like NotebookLM or a local LLM that can actually take all our notes and surface patterns/connections we wouldn’t have noticed on our own. That feels closer to a genuine “second brain.”
Notebook LLM is not your second brain. It is the brain of the AI. it is not even your property, it is the property of the AI, you are only allowed to have access to it.
What have been your biggest challenges in sticking with a second brain system?
I’m not even “trying” to stick to it, it comes organically to me.
2)Do you ever feel the whole thing gets over-marketed like it promises more than it delivers?
What is overmarketing? Is apple over marketing? Is Louis Vuitton over marketing? Is Tesla over marketing?
The mainstream has glorified and oversold the idea of “building a second brain.”
The mainstream will continue to oversell thousands of more things to the gullible and non-thinking population.
That’s the destiny of non-thinking population.
Instead, many people fall into the collector fallacy: they save and hoard everything in the hope that accumulation equals insight. This often leads to apophenia seeing patterns where none exist and the illusion of understanding.
If you don’t know how to drive a car, it is your problem, not the problem of the car manufacturer. Or the dealership that sold you the car.
In other words, the system becomes less about learning and thinking, and more about performing knowledge accumulation.)
In other words, you have absolutely no idea how to use a second brain. Your misfortune.
My comment will sound very arrogant to you. But that’s how I deal with passive aggressive dumb “articles”.
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You might have missed the very first line, I said I’m putting together an ‘article’.
It is not misleading to me, probably it is misleading to you. But are you sure it is the only thing that has mislead you in life or you get misled by everything that exists?
It might not feel misleading to you, but that doesn’t erase the fact that the term ‘second Brain’ is framing. The label itself primes people to expect cognition, not just storage.
This is because you are linking the notes for the sake of linking. You have absolutely no idea why to make those links.
Exactly, that’s effort justification AKA IKEA EFFECT in its glory. People confuse hours of tinkering with progress even when no genuine insight comes out of it. That’s not stupidity, it’s a very common bias.
Notebook LLM is not your second brain. It is the brain of the AI. it is not even your property, it is the property of the AI, you are only allowed to have access to it.
Sure technically, but the interesting bit is perception. Often people treat external tools as a part of their own thinking ( extended mind hypothesis). Whether or not AI ’ belongs’ to the user isn’t the point.
What is overmarketing? Is apple over marketing? Is Louis Vuitton over marketing? Is Tesla over marketing?
That’s just a weak analogy. Luxury brands sell status, the ‘Second Brain’ system sells productive outcomes. If the outcome don’t appear, it’s fair to say it’s over marketed
If you don’t know how to drive a car, it is your problem, not the problem of the car manufacturer. Or the dealership that sold you the car.
That oversimplifies things. If someone buys a car because the dealer says it’ll fly and then it doesn’t, it’s not the just ’ the driver fault ‘. My point isn’t that obsidian is useless, it just that the second brain movement oversold it as something it isn’t.
So my premise isn’t “Obsidian bad, second brain dumb.” It’s that the idea of a second brain gets oversold, which interacts with human biases (effort justification, collector fallacy, illusions of insight) and leaves many people stuck in systems that feel productive but don’t actually help them think.
You’ll probably read this and think I’m implying you’re a moron who can’t grasp nuance. You’re not but the way you argue makes you sound like one.
That’s the tricky thing about the Dunning Kruger effect: it doesn’t announce itself, it just leaks out through overconfident analogies that collapse under scrutiny.
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the term ‘second Brain’ is framing. The label itself primes people to expect cognition, not just storage.
The iphone manufacturing company name is Apple. Can you explain to me when people hear the name Apple, Why do they now try to eat the phone? Shouldn’t this be the default behaviour of all humans according to your logic? Does it not primes people to expect edible fruit.
People confuse hours of tinkering with progress even when no genuine insight comes out of it.
Speak for yourself, you don’t represent all the 8 billion people on the planet.
Often people treat external tools as a part of their own thinking ( extended mind hypothesis). Whether or not AI ’ belongs’ to the user isn’t the point.
So, your own extended mind hypothesis is an evidence that the term second brain is absolutely legitimate and not misleading marketing. Thanks for doing the work for me. Your silly game is over.
the ‘Second Brain’ system sells productive outcomes.
No, it doesn’t sell an outcome. and it definitely does not guarantee any outcome. This is where you started imagining things.
You’ll probably read this and think I’m implying you’re a moron….That’s the tricky thing about the Dunning Kruger effect: it doesn’t announce itself, it just leaks out
You’re a classic example of someone who sold his common sense for psychological jargons. And someone who sold his first brain for his second brain.
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u/jerr9185 22d ago edited 22d ago
You’re mixing apples and iPhones in more ways than one.
The iphone manufacturing company name is Apple. Can you explain to me when people hear the name Apple, Why do they now try to eat the phone? Shouldn’t this be the default behaviour of all humans according to your logic? Does it not primes people to expect edible fruit.
False equivalence. Product names don’t work the same as conceptual metaphors. Nobody expects to eat an iPhone because the category is obvious (phones not fruit). But when you call a productivity tool a “brain” it does set up cognitive expectations thinking, creativity, memory. That’s not me imagining things that’s framing theory 101 in psychology.
Speak for yourself, you don’t represent all the 8 billion people on the planet.
I never claimed to. I’m describing common patterns of bias (effort justification, collector fallacy, apophenia). These are well documented, not personal anecdotes. If you don’t experience them, great. That doesn’t erase the psychology for everyone else.
So, your own extended mind hypothesis is an evidence that the term second brain is absolutely legitimate and not misleading marketing. Thanks for doing the work for me. Your silly game is over.
No. Extended mind explains why people experience tools as cognitive extensions it doesn’t prove the metaphor is accurate. A prosthetic leg extends mobility, but it’s not the same as a biological leg. Likewise, Obsidian can feel brain like, but it doesn’t literally “think.” That’s the nuance.
Btw it’s ‘is evidence’ not ‘is an evidence’
No, it doesn’t sell an outcome. and it definitely does not guarantee any outcome. This is where you started imagining things.
Then why do all the courses, books, and YouTube gurus market it as “unlocking your creativity, connecting your thoughts, surfacing insights”? That’s exactly the promise being sold. It’s marketed like a personal AI long before AI was mainstream. Pretending otherwise is selective blindness.
Finally, calling psychological concepts “jargon” doesn’t make them go away. Biases don’t stop existing just because you don’t like the vocabulary. If anything, dismissing them outright is a textbook case of the Dunning Kruger effect in action: overconfidence in common sense, underestimation of actual research.
So no, I haven’t sold my brain. But I’ll admit after reading your analogies, I did consider leasing out a few neurons just for you.
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Stop overcompensating. You lost the case. It was not your day. Try your fraudulent manipulation again some other day.
By the way, thanks to ChatGPT for writing your post and comments. You are the kind that will go extinct because of AI.
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Translation: ‘I ran out of arguments so I’ll just declare victory’
Classic argument by assertion. Screaming ’ you lost ’ enough times till it sticks. Might work in a playground.
And just for you ad hominem fallacy. When you can’t dismantle the points you attack the person.
You are the kind that will go extinct because of AI.
Bold prediction if it wipes me out it’ll surely take your ’ Apple = iPhone = edible fruit ’ logic