Day 22 — Note to Self: Build a Second Brain
By: Sean Li
Tags: Organization, Henngeblog, Notes, Henngeadvent2020

As you might have gathered, Roam doesn’t have a traditional hierarchical folder organisation of notes. This is meant to help people organise their ideas better. Ideas and information are not siloed into neat little folders in our brain — it is more of a network of interconnected and associated fluid thoughts, which Roam looks to mimic.

I thought these features were pretty cool, and while looking into how best to use Roam, I came across two related methods.

Zettelkasten and building a second brain

The first of these was the Zettlekasten method, which is “a knowledge management and note-taking method used in research and study”. Zettalkasten literally means “slip box” or “note box”. One prolific German scholar, Niklas Luhmann, built up a Zettelkasten of over 90,000 cards and attributed his success in writing to it — in his eyes, it allowed him to write his works of over 70 books and 400 scholarly articles.

Roam and Zettelkasten are alike in the way that they both do away with the traditional file and folder hierarchy and instead create a network of notes. The modern Zettelkasten method now has a passionate following that suggests using various knowledge management software, but what’s amazing is that Luhmann managed to create his personal Zettelkasten with a system of physical drawers of notes!

One of the method’s strengths that is touted by its enthusiasts today is that the more you add to a Zettelkasten, the better it becomes. As you add more information to the system, more connections spring up and you can see things in a different light. It’s a big web of data similar to the information in your brain, but instead of spending the effort on trying to remember everything, you create a knowledge base — an external second brain, if you will.

Building a Second Brain is a costly course by Tiago Forte, a productivity expert, and is something that comes up a lot in conversations about Roam. I haven’t looked at the course in detail, but he writes about productivity on his blog. He champions a system called the PARA method for general life organisation that I intend on taking some ideas from. Here’s a link to some nice illustrated notes by Maggie Appleton summarising the course and the PARA method.

I was sold on the idea of building a personal knowledge base in a better way, but I was conflicted on what tool to use. Roam is good, but there are some issues. There is only a web app and no native app, but this isn’t a deal-breaker for me as it works well on both desktop and mobile. One of the bigger issues was the fact that I would probably be locked into Roam if I went with it. I was eyeing the 5-year believer subscription that had a price tag of 500 USD, but I thought I’d look at some alternatives before committing.

Alternatives to Roam

The first alternative I came across was Obsidian. With Obsidian, notes are stored in the markdown format, which is the format I already keep my notes in. This was perfect in my mind, as I thought it would mean that my notes would not be tied to a particular software. Obsidian adds in a lot of similar features to Roam, such as wiki-links and a graph view.

Obsidian’s graph view

It’s free for personal use and the editor is pleasant enough, but I realised that despite being in markdown, the additional features would tie me to Obsidian to a certain degree. I thought that if this was the case, I might as well look at other tools that worked with markdown.

I found a couple of tools that are built on top of Visual Studio Code, the text editor I use right now for notes and coding. These were Dendron and Foam, and interested me as I enjoy working in the editor and am very used to manipulating markdown within it. I intend on looking into Dendron in more detail, and it has already introduced me to some useful plugins for VS Code such as Markdown Notes. This introduces wiki-links, backlinks, and tags for markdown files. The downside with working with these tools is that they are not compatible with mobile, something I am still conflicted about.

I looked at Notion and Evernote as they have mobile apps that would provide a way for me to update my notes from wherever I might be. Notion recently added a feature to show backlinks at the top of each page — showing what pages link to the page you are on — bringing it one step closer to the other options. I’m a fan of Notion’s aesthetics and other features but the performance on mobile still leaves something to be desired. Evernote didn’t capture my attention and I soon dismissed it.

Photo by Sourabh Gijare on Unsplash

Takeaway points

So far I’ve talked a lot about the specific tools that I tried out, but I didn’t really want to focus on that.

One of the main ideas of Zettelkasten is that you look for discrete ideas in the content you consume. You can pick out ideas from books and articles you read or videos that you watch and turn them into notes. For me, I’ve started to try and be more present while watching and reading content and reflecting on it afterward. I will try to write a little bit about how it made me feel or summarise the ideas that resonated with me. I believe it’s helped me focus and take in ideas, turning a viewing of a YouTube video into something productive rather than a fleeting moment that I’ll forget about by the end of the week. I can engage in a more meaningful way with content and it’s reassuring to know that my thoughts are recorded for my future self.

On top of this, the idea of building a personal knowledge base is something that I am looking to pursue. While writing this, I had someone buy something from me on Mercari for the first time in a while. I had forgotten what kind of phrases to use to thank the buyer and convey when I intended to send the item, but it’s something I’ve definitely had come up with before. It should already have been in my personal knowledge base.

I’ve been taking some atomic notes regarding the front-end technologies that I work with on a daily basis. When I look up an answer on StackOverflow, I can summarise it in my own words, create a note, and put a link to the question. I’m trying to build up a library of my own understanding and I’m optimistic about the long-term benefits.

It’s a process I’ve only started recently, but I’m looking forward to the lifelong adventure of building my own knowledge base, my personal Wikipedia— my own second brain. Will you join me?