The two note-taking strategies of Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten and Tiago Forte’s PARA in Building a Second Brain have dominated managing many people’s personal knowledge and projects. Freshly introduced to the world of PKM and note-taking, I started out reading books such as How to Take Smart Notes from Sönke Ahrens, convinced that making my second brain into a slip box for managing ideas. Then I saw a video of Ali Abdaal interviewing Tiago Forte about his book Building a Second Brain and decide to make a purchase.
This changed my note-taking system forever and to this day remains one of the most influential books that I’ve ever read. Here was a robust and simple system for people who needed to manage projects and other documents in their workflows as well as intricately linked and numbered atomic notes. I was sold on this system and used it religiously before I realised the value of creating something unique that worked for my specific needs.
My current system is a unique fusion of the two systems that I built over around half a year of experimentation. I write online content as well as producing YouTube videos and learning and writing essays for my university degree. In this article I wanted to break down this system to show you how I work, and also to demonstrate what I mean when I ask people not to copy my Obsidian. It would be a slightly unwieldy and unnecessary system for someone without my use case, but I want it to serve as a example as to how you can incorporate ideal parts of different note-taking methods to create a blend that allows you to reach the highest level of productivity that you can.
System walkthrough
My system inside of Obsidian is loosely based upon PARA from Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain. This is the method that organises your notes into one of four buckets — Projects, Areas, Resources and Archive. Project folders are for notes related to short term goals and outcomes that you are working towards. Areas contain folders for notes relating to long-term goals or ongoing commitments in your life. Resource folders are for items that relate to projects and areas that you think are going to be required in the future. The archive contains folders for completed projects and resources that you no longer need to reference regularly.
Realising I wasn’t purely a knowledge worker who could get away with a Zettelkasten of atomic, bi-directionally linked notes alone, I chose to organise my work based on this folder structure. This means that I can manage projects related to my own writing and also for university by storing related files together. Elements of the Zettelkasten method are used in my Areas folders. Because these notes related to ongoing topics of interest, I use the folder in a similar way to the ‘permanent notes’ folder in Luhmann’s system. This means that the notes in this folder link to each other, and they are atomic, containing only one idea per note. The title is detailed and explains the content of the note in a way that can be linked in text in other notes.
Through organisation and project management that contains elements from PARA and also from Zettelkasten, the system has the best of both worlds — resource management for when I’m working on completing specific outputs, and a folder of linked notes that I can look into and add to whenever I need inspiration. I also have folders where I can contain university notes and PDFs separately again. Obsidian is used in the creation of flashcards for my learning, but the notes aren’t often referenced when working in my second brain so it’s useful to have them stored separately. Having said this, when I need to write an essay, the project folder is contained with all of my other projects because it’s something that I am actively using and opening. It will be archived once the piece of work is submitted.
A note on building your own system
Recently I published an article called ‘ Don’t Copy my Obsidian Setup and I Won’t Copy Yours ’, and I wanted to briefly bring the idea from within that piece to light here. I think that the walkthroughs of Obsidian systems online are very inspiring and impressive, but the primary reason that you are building this second brain system is to help yourself get more work done. Don’t blindly copy the work of other people, rather cherry-pick the most applicable and interesting ideas that you can apply to your own work that will actually have a positive effect. Have a Digital Minimalist’s view of trying out all these new ideas and only implement the ones that have an overwhelmingly positive benefit. ‘Less is more’ applies in systems like these — realistically we would still be able to produce work on whatever notepad app our system uses by default, so all that any extension should be doing is providing a more efficient way to reach that output.
Conclusion
I hope that this walkthrough of my own organisation system in Obsidian has inspired you as to how you can merge popular ideas to create your own unique system. At the same time, if this article hasn’t provided you with anything that you think will provide value to your own workflow, I thank you for reading, but don’t feel as though you have to implement anything I suggested if it’s not going to improve your productivity. Clap if you enjoyed the article and follow if you want to hear more about Obsidian systems and building a second brain to improve your work. Thank you for reading!