I support deleting your second brain
If the circumstances are right, of course.
I don’t think I want a map of everything I’ve ever read. I want a mind free to read what it needs. I want memory that forgets gracefully. I want ideas that resurface not because I indexed them, but because they mattered.
What does it feel like to start again?
Like swimming without clothes. Light. Naked. A little vulnerable. But cleaner than I’ve felt in years. – Joan Westenberg, “I deleted my second brain”
I stumbled on this fascinating article by Joan Westenberg, because she did what’s best for her, against “commonly held wisdom”.
Just because it’s “common wisdom” doesn’t mean it’s wisdom for her. Having a second brain is such a personal thing.
I chuckled a little when the mods at the usually placid Obsidian forums on Reddit stickied a note that they’re carefully monitoring the post about her article.
At HackerNews, the discussion was equally heated.
Most people seem to be saying, “Well, she didn’t do the second brain thing right!”. Others say, “Well, I would never!”
I resonate with what Joan said later in the post:
My new system is, simply, no system at all. I write what I think. I delete what I don’t need. I don’t capture everything. I don’t try to.
This made me chuckle as well, because this is what I do.
Unlike some people, I am not romantic about my notes.
Once upon a time, I kept one of those filofax thingies; the one with those inserts you could buy separately?
One day, I was looking through notes from the previous quarter. Then, with a smile, I took it out of the filofax and ripped it in half.
My colleague, who sat next to me, exclaimed in horror: “What are you doing??”
I turned to her, shocked that she was shocked. “Tearing my notes up and throwing it away?”
“Nooo! You should keep it! Don’t throw it away!”
I blinked. That thought has never occurred to me before. (Meanwhile, she couldn’t believe there existed someone who would destroy her worklog the way I did.)
See, I had a visceral pleasure just tearing the damn thing up. To me, the notes about my tasks, thoughts about work, laments, whatever, was in the past. I will never revisit it again. It’s pain and discomfort I no longer want to revisit. Tearing it up meant that I can look forward to the future. Keep it? What in the world for?
Once, I even burnt my notes, grinning as the jottings of the last quarter turned to ash.
Maybe I’m weird, but that’s how I am. I don’t enjoy journaling like some people. I find it a chore. Rereading my old journal entries felt like torture, revisiting an old me I want to leave behind.
I stopped turning my Obsidian vault into a task management app because I don’t understand why I’d visit my old todo lists. (And also, it’s just better at being a note taking app, not a task management app.)
The lists are reminders of reluctant days hunched over the computer making myself do things when I’d rather be outside just staring at the sea.
However
I won’t delete my current second brain.
Maybe I’d delete my old second brain, however, as it was filled with task lists after task lists.
But my current second brain incarnation is just right.
You see, my second brain is not just information storage; it’s an idea vault. Imagine being able to skim through your notes, copy relevant bits and cobble the bits together into an essay. (The video below will show you my process.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sodVw5ZXXBU
That’s how I write using my second brain.
The vault holds my notes and ideas, which will eventually be turned to essays to share with the world.
So, deleting it would be cray cray.
But like Joan’s recent revelation, I don’t capture everything. I don’t even try to.
I follow an Obsidian Youtube influencer, and he says that he has thousands of notes and finds that he takes too much notes on things.
(But fortunately, he’s also like me, he turns most of these notes into essays to share with the world.)
Me? Well, I’ll never have that problem. For one, I like to keep my notes short and sweet. I also tend to think better with mind maps, so a lot of times I tend to save mind maps and use the notes as ‘expanders of the mindmaps’.
Basically, I’m a very intentional note taker. If I take notes, I’ll ask myself: “What will this note be eventually used for?”
Most of the time the answer would be: It’ll be an essay one day.
That, or, “It’ll help me remember something important.”
As a person whose memory isn’t the strongest, Obsidian has been an invaluable tool in creating my second brain which helps me organise my ideas, write faster and push it out to the world.
I used to store everything in my brain and try to write at everything at one go. Now that I have a second brain, I cannot imagine how I handled writing the previous way. Man, no wonder I felt drained after each writing session! The brain isn’t designed to keep so much information internally. Externalising your thoughts into notes in an Obsidian vault is the way to go, and less stressful too!
It is also a place where I keep things I have trouble remembering – like, a link to my tenant’s tenancy contract, or a phone number to my plumber.
Yes, I could use an online service for this, but it comforts me that I have this information locally, in my drive, accessed by a tool that saves things locally, in a format that won’t turn obsolete.
So, no, I won’t delete my Second Brain because I know what I’m using it for, and because I don’t capture everything and like to delete and trim down my vault.
My second brain needs more organising though. It’s a tad messy, but I will take my time.
Cat mom. 
Epicurean. 
Showerhead balladeer. 
The defiant lab rat in God’s pristine research facility.
I want to revive my interest in:
My current interests are:
I have a background in:
