A personal knowledge management system captures your thoughts and keeps them working for you.
It's part notebook, part database, and part writing assistant.
For content creators, your second brain can be your best friend if you spend quality time with it.
How you put your thoughts in your second brain is of course up to you.
You can always begin by following someone else's system, but in the end it works best if it jives with how you process information.
How my journaling starts
I've built a writing practice with 750Words.com. My streak is 139 days and counting.
My words combine personal diary and content ideas, so there are definitely insights every day that I want to capture in my Obsidian vault for later.
I'm still figuring out the best way to do this.
Maybe you've gone down this road and would have some advice for me!
The first stage of getting my daily words into Obsidian is straightforward: I type them in over at 750Words.com, and then copy-paste them into my daily note in my Obsidian vault.
(I know this already has an extra step. I could just type these words into Obsidian directly. Thing is, I like confetti, and 750Words gives me confetti when I finish my daily words. It's the little things.)
No real way to mess this up at this point.
Four (well, five) ways to extract the goodness from the mess
I'm not going to want to keep my daily words as a single blob, though. I'll want to extract individual thoughts or lists that came out. (Fun fact: My system automatically tags my daily words pages for follow-up. More about that at the end.)
Here I have a few options.
- Copy-paste pieces of the daily words into a fresh note, and edit them in the new note.
- Remove pieces of the daily words and put them in fresh notes, replacing them with links to the new notes. Reprocess the notes by editing what I just pulled out.
- Remove pieces of the daily words and put them in fresh notes, replacing them with links to the new notes. Leave the words as-is in the new note, and reprocess the notes alongside the original words.
- Add links to the daily words to the new notes (without removing them from there), and reprocess the thoughts in the new notes.
Option 1 is the easiest and it's the one I'm doing now. The downside is that I lose traceability with where the idea came up. Copying the text doesn't produce a link back to the source document.
Option 2 I can accomplish easily with the Refactor plugin. It does what I've described: It replaces highlighted text with a link to a new note, and inserts the text into the note. This keeps traceability. If I edit the text, though, the original words are gone.
Option 3 is basically Option 2, but with the original text intact in the new note. There's some duplication but I have both the traceability and the original text I wrote.
Option 4 is basically Option 3, but I link near the words that I'm referencing in the new note. I don't necessarily need to copy over the text, because it's still in my daily words note. This has the advantage that the new note is cleaner (no duplicated thoughts) and I can go back and find the reference easily if I need to.
So all of these have pros and cons. The best thing I can do is experiment with each and see which works the best.
I suppose there's also an Option 5 which is to be choosier what I put in Obsidian in the first place. I don't have to copy the entire set of daily words over.
I probably won't do this because it keeps some of my words in a different app, and one that's not in my complete control. Obsidian notes are files on my computer, which are very much in my control.
Creating a second brain is a journey.
And it's a journey without a finish line.
There is a starting line, though.
If you're still looking to start, or are not sure where to start, then I have an Obsidian starter kit for content creators available!