I made a few attempts to use a second brain and bounced off from Obsidian each time.
Obsidian itself is not overly complicated; I used note templates, advanced formatting, canvas, and more.
I think my problem is the amount of time it takes to maintain it and the desire to make it look good and be useful. Having everything organized and searchable with hyperlinks at the top is very tempting. However, as you said, you need to constantly review your data, and navigating through it feels like a burden. For now, I end up with a physical commonplace book. It feels great to browse handwritten notes, and I can't edit it, so it looks authentic, but it lacks efficiency—there is no search function and no linking of ideas.
You are super right Martin. I think that's the hardest part. I mainly use Obsidian to organize notes for my papers (research articles), post and article ideas, and notes about lectures, books, and courses. Luckily, these are things I do frequently.
However, I think nothing beats classical handwritten notes. I also use them a lot :)
Yeah I feel you. That's the advantage of taking notes digitally. I like notebookLM! My favorite tool to read research articles is Zotero though. You can also take notes and read papers in your smartphone and tablet. That's a game changer. It is also open source, so many people is constantly creating plugins to make Zotero better.
nice article. Interesting idea calling digital storage a "second brain". With the ever expanding stimuli we now have in this world we definitively need a second brain :D
I made a few attempts to use a second brain and bounced off from Obsidian each time.
Obsidian itself is not overly complicated; I used note templates, advanced formatting, canvas, and more.
I think my problem is the amount of time it takes to maintain it and the desire to make it look good and be useful. Having everything organized and searchable with hyperlinks at the top is very tempting. However, as you said, you need to constantly review your data, and navigating through it feels like a burden. For now, I end up with a physical commonplace book. It feels great to browse handwritten notes, and I can't edit it, so it looks authentic, but it lacks efficiency—there is no search function and no linking of ideas.
You are super right Martin. I think that's the hardest part. I mainly use Obsidian to organize notes for my papers (research articles), post and article ideas, and notes about lectures, books, and courses. Luckily, these are things I do frequently.
However, I think nothing beats classical handwritten notes. I also use them a lot :)
My problem is a lack of those links. It kinda hurts. I work with research papers a lot and Google scholar if one of most frequent used websites.
A tip for you: try nootebookLM
Yeah I feel you. That's the advantage of taking notes digitally. I like notebookLM! My favorite tool to read research articles is Zotero though. You can also take notes and read papers in your smartphone and tablet. That's a game changer. It is also open source, so many people is constantly creating plugins to make Zotero better.
I am going to check Zotero. Sounds interesting.
nice article. Interesting idea calling digital storage a "second brain". With the ever expanding stimuli we now have in this world we definitively need a second brain :D