Present Perfect

"Your Second Brain is for preserving raw information over time until it's ready to be used, because information is perishable. Your Second Brain is the brain that doesn't forget." - Tiago Forte

Personal Knowledge Management is going through a wave of innovation with new tools like Roam, Logseq, Obsidian, Notion, RemNote, and others gaining traction over Evernote, OneNote and the like. It's a great time to get curious or reacquaint yourself with the tools and processes that strengthen learning, processing, and expressing your knowledge work.

The expression "Second Brain" has been popularized by Tiago Forte, who's been running an online cohort-based class called Building a Second Brain I took the class last year and found it a powerful distillation of an approach to PKM and note-taking. If you want to learn more, they just wrapped up the Second Brain Summit and posted all videos online: Second Brain Summit 2022 - Full Session Recordings - YouTube

The next class cohort is open for enrollment until March 30th midnight ET, at Building a Second Brain: Live 5-Week Online Course, and runs from April 12th to May 10th, 2022.

"Taking notes is the closest thing we have to time travel." - Kendrick Lamar

Taken from The Playlist - a curated perspective on the intersection of form and content (subscribe, discuss)

"Your Second Brain is for preserving raw information over time until it's ready to be used, because information is perishable. Your Second Brain is the brain that doesn't forget." -...

Obsidian's Gems of the Year 2021 nomination has been a great source of cool ideas to add tweaks to my Obsidian setup.

In particular, Quick Capture (mac/iOS) and Inbox Processing was a great gem to uncover as I try and implement the weekly review stage of my Second Brain/PARA setup!

I noticed that the archive/move script was a little slow, taking several seconds to open up the dialog for selecting a folder, breaking my flow. I checked the code and noticed it built a set of folders recursively.

I simplified the code for my use case, removing the archive folder path, and using the file explorer's built in move dialog (which is much faster) and a callback to advance.

The resulting gist is Obsidian: Archive current file and then open next file in folder (Templater script) · GitHub

I'm sure it could be improved further if I understood the execution, variable scope, and callback model better, but this is good enough for me!

I get very little coding time these days, and I hate working in an environment I haven't had a chance to really master yet. It's all trial and error through editing a javascript file in a markdown editor with no syntax highlighting. But it's still a nice feeling when you can go in and out of a code base in a few hours and scratch the itch you had.

Obsidian's Gems of the Year 2021 nomination has been a great source of cool ideas to add tweaks to my Obsidian setup. In particular, Quick Capture (mac/iOS) and Inbox Processing...