As the year draws to a close, and the annual dusk settles, there is a quiet moment (undoubtedly helped by being on leave) to think clearly and clearly think about thinking.
I am reminded on this blog’s reason for being, and its Reason for being as well as the ability to improve the learning and synthesis process, as I find myself far too spread out in interests and in the “must-dos”: from an engineering background, to a fascination with socio-economics, geopolitics, and the humanities; and now I teeter on another crest - waiting to fall into the arms of Cyborg form of Athena. Wisdom personified, but enabled by nanotechnology this time. Moreover, I find myself professionally engaged (scale ups aren’t so straight forward), being an Executive Committee member of a trade associations, and an Officer Commanding, while the wine business (events these days) hums in the background.
It comes at a juncture too, when my Primary brain is likely to explode, with my foray in a formal education in Material Science and Engineering. It may not just be about this domain itself, but setting myself in the position to learn, innovate and create quickly and efficiently.
A trait that is not impossible: I read about (ahem Napoleon), and have also met in person impressive individuals who have outstanding memory, and an ridiculous ability to compartmentalise and multitask across numerous (and highly varied) Such traits which I now start to see for myself, with some key elements such as: Heuristics, a comfort with imperfection and intuition.
On to the second brain…
Hows it’s been going
Making an improvement on this has always been at the back of my mind for quite some time now, but never with the establishment of a complete system. I fell into the simplicity of convenience, tracking my shower thoughts and things to document on Google Keep.
Eventually these will coalesce into a critical mass that I would document onto Dynalist and subsequently a Markdown file which would form a basis of a blog post. It may take a rework and redraft or two, but it eventually got there.
I had taken steps to, to start using Obsidian as my preferred note taking app of choice - although made by the same developers as dyanlist, it has far more features and is a bit of a darling for some in this knowledge-management related community.
I first came across in many years ago (arguably even around the time of this website) when i was obssessed with complexity science, and loved the interlinkages and representation of nodes and systems. Indeed, non-linear thinking is something I am fond of, but it is very difficult to track. In Summary:
- Keep all thoughts on Google Keep (no tagging)
- Transfer slightly more refined thoughts onto Dynalist
- Upon critical mass, write out a synthesised post on Dynalist
- Convert to Markdown, transfer onto my Hugo blog and publish
Taking Smart Notes, Zettlekasten
To formalise this “upgrade”, I finally did some research and also bought (hmm) and read Smart Notes.
I also watched some fairly good videos by youtubers John Maverick and Odysseas . In short: keep it simple, don’t get distracted by 101 plugins, and do what works for myself.
The great news, wast surprised me was that my current practices did not differ too far. The only difference being a more structured approach in tagging links (which I had aspired to do) and methodology of collection upstream.
Chuffed about it - given that it more or less fits my current thought flow. Albeit less outcome oriented (my writing does not originate from “wriing Paper X” or “10 papers a month), but rather from the one-too-many shower thoughts that need to be noted down somewhere.
Execution and process
I now structure my Obsidian with the following (think of these as essentially nested folders).
1. Setting and keeping track of the North Stars:
- Goals - tracking my annual repository of Long, Medium and Short term goals. It has, it 3 years of doing such exercises, started to demonstrate and manifest certain things satisfactorily.
2. Synthesis of intellectual pursuits
- Thought dumps - keeping notes raw, I’l
- Live Notes - for work in progress
- Posts - for completed works, and archived
This is helped immensely, by Obsidian in itself being written in Markdown.
3. Project Specific Work
A “Third Brain”, which i may consider is how to dedicate and compartmentalise some key projects (material science) that I will certainly need to invest significant mental energy into
- Project and hobby specific areas: Poetry, side hustle ideas, speeches
4. Keeping Track
I realised there were “two brains” of the second brain - one for intellectual pursuit and synthesis, but equally important but tedious and operational:
8.x Personal covering health, administration people, travel, private thoughts, etc. I will likely migrate my “medical CV” into this space.
5. Supporting Infrastructure
Some useful tips learnt as well was to set up a separate area for reference points - these can be called on later and referenced within Obsidian. 9.1 to 9.3: Tags, Indexes, and Templates
Limitations
The transference from Obisidian to a blog post does require some degree of repeated link forming (between tags on obisdian itself, and weblinks when online)
Conclusion
All in all very glad i finally had the time to sit down and sort this out. Excited to put it into action in 2025.
I was reminded too, that all of this effort and structure is perhaps a solution to the modern times by choice….But it caters well to the anxiety-dispositioned types, who feel a need to never lose a thought, and never lose the knowledge.