Obsidian as a Second Brain Video Notes
Bit of a look into using obisidan as a second brain for PKM
Suggests creating links to cover topics, concepts, ideas. Links will create a new note if it doesn’t exist already, but I’m pretty sure there’s a way with dataview to populate those empty notes with highlights from the ones that links to it, or something similar.
Don’t have to define every single concept as a link
Occasionally turn a quote into a link. Will probably end up showing up in/being applicable to different situations/notes.
Headings can be referenced from other docs! Select the stuff, right click it, “extract current selection” et voila! Now that’s gonna be real fucking handy.
(This is covered at pretty much bang on 20 minutes into the video). Might need some practice t work out what I’m doing/how it works.
Not gonna lie actually pretty excited about this again. Might have to do an up early again tomorrow just to get crackalackin on it some more.
Didn’t make it “Tomorrow” but back once again!
Can link references directly to paragraphs rather than to the entire note by linking straight to the heading. Not entirely clear how to actually do it, but can always look that up real quick if/when I want to.
^ is the way to link to headings
So This is a Heading
Stuff goes in here or something
So that seems to work pretty well! Doesn’t even need to be a heading by the look of it, once you’ve got the ^ inside the linking brackets, it’ll give you a list of paragraphs (live searchable with text) and then just create a reference in the target for you.
Hashtags next!
Useful for catching stuff that might not warrant it’s own note, example given is something you’ve been thinking of on and off for a while. Can tag it up, and easily search for all the references to it that you’ve made in any notes, referencing daily notes again. I guess if that gets to be enough unrelated bits n bobs scattered around the place can be easily pulled into/referenced/collated into a more formal/structured note.
When Should I Use Links?
- topics/concepts/research articles Concepts, pages, reusable stuff, people Separate nodes More structure
When Should I Use Hashtags?
- Categories with intent fundamentally about searchability When you search for something related to a topic, but might not know the structure of how that topic/note/actual writing will be put together. For more loosely related ideas Keep the categories meaningful. Reasonably specific/intentional Ok to use the same tag multiple times within the same document, because where it is will be relevant to the context of when you wrote it. Think of future you trying to track this bit of information down. NOT for archiving.
Zettelkasten.
Could be a bit of a big deal, it’s the buzzword I guess, that oughta kinda reinforce/give a name to some of the stuff I’ve been doing over the years anyway? Maybe? It this is a tale for a different day. For now, it is bed time.
zettelkasten
3 types of note:
- fleeting note Raw, not distilled, random thought Daily notes Fleeting thoughts, can be referenced from wherever at any time in the future.
- Literature note for articles, books, research, videos maybe. Should be written in own words ideally. Processing the information into my own words helps create a mental model, synthesise the info. Doesn’t have to be though, go nuts with the cut n paste Can cover concepts, people, books, articles, videos, etc. Data in.
- Permanent note Most distilled version of a note Covers a single idea in a few sentences Extremely concise, kind of thing you can memorise.
3b. Practical notes
Meetings, people, projects
Literature note to capture almost everything about a topic so you can research more when you need it, distilled note covers mostly what you need to know, concisely. Distilled note for the most important parts/concepts, literature note for where that came from almost.
Distilled note doesn’t have to be tiny, just the actionable stuff. “Significant summary”
Literature note for in depth understanding, distilled note = practical toolkit.
Search
Cmd-shift-F
Can add - to eliminate search terms. Eg “thing -otherthing”
Come click to open in new pane
Can drag n drop from search pane into notes to create links to those notes (or headings)
Path works too, probably more useful for excluding stuff though
TAGS! Tag pane can be handy for searching for tags. Can come click to select multiple ones.
Can narrow search to section, or even a line “section:(Thing otherthing)” or “line:(thing otherthing)” and it’ll only show instances where the search terms appear in the same section/Line.
Regex. Complicated but powerful. Whole entire rabbit hole to fall into there. Not gonna bother for now!
Footnotes! This’ll be handy for uni work.
So this would be a test1
And you can even have the actual footnote text next to each other, and in “reader” mode (and on export?) it’ll keep the reference at the bottom, after any further actual writing. This will be fire.
More info on formatting in the official Obsidian help guide.
Embeds
Like so:
Footnotes
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reference to here ↩