Have you tried building a second brain but ended up just building a pretty folder structure? Tried Zettelkasten, PARA, and every other note-taking framework—only to abandon them all? Me too.And here’s how Obsidian’s daily notes feature finally helped me build my second brain.Related You Can Sync Obsidian Notes Between Your PC and Phone for Free, Here's How There is no need to use third-party cloud storage.
Posts 6 By Dibakar Ghosh First, what do I mean when I say ‘second brain’ It's not just hoarding notes in a pretty app The term “second brain” gets thrown around a lot, and in my experience, different people mean different things by it.Tiago Forte, the man who popularized the concept with his book , describes it as a system for saving and systematically reminding you of the ideas, insights, and connections you accumulate over time.That’s the kind of second brain I’m talking about in this article.
According to Forte, the secret to building a second brain boils down to a four-step method: Capture, Organize, Distill, and Express—abbreviated as CODE.Capturing and organizing are the easy parts.You can open any note-taking app—or even just a folder on your PC—and start storing everything you think is valuable or unique.
Then you can create a nested folder structure to organize all your notes and resources.The real problem begins—at least for me—when you try to distill the core value from everything you’ve saved.Why I failed at building a second brain for 5 years For me, capturing notes is something I do on autopilot.
Organizing those notes into folders is also fairly straightforward work—work that I actually enjoy doing from time to time.Experts would probably label this behavior as : doing something that feels productive while not actually getting any “real” work done.The distillation process, however, creates serious cognitive load.
Not only does it require significant discipline to regularly sit down and review everything you’ve saved, but it also demands deeper thinking as you try to combine those ideas with your own experience and turn them into original insights.I’ve been trying to build a second brain for the past five years, and this has always been a major point of friction for me.On top of that, even when I manage to get past that hurdle and start creating notes, I’ve never been able to build a system that reliably surfaces those ideas and insights when I actually need them.
At least, that was the case until I started using Obsidian and its daily notes feature, which finally helped me build a second brain.Here’s how the system works.How my Obsidian-based second brain works Less setup, more results Obsidian offers one of the most intuitive systems for capturing and organizing ideas and thoughts from the internet.
That said, if you’re new to the app, here’s an excellent article by my colleague Ali Haider to help you save any web page to your Obsidian vault.Now, to organize your captured notes, you can follow Tiago Forte’s PARA method, where all your notes and resources fall into four key folders: Projects, Area, Resources, and Archive.It works for many people, but it didn’t for me.
In fact, I don’t like to use folders at all.The cognitive overhead alone—remembering the folder structure and deciding where each note belongs—is just unnecessary friction.Instead, I like to use a tagging system.
I keep around 10–15 tags, and each note or web capture is categorized by one or more of them.Next comes the distillation process.This is where the daily notes feature comes in, which, when paired with Obsidian’s iconic graph view and the Dataview plugin, also helps with the idea expression process.
I’ve explained this in more depth in the following section.Obsidian OS Windows, iOS, Android, macOS, Linux Brand Obsidian Price $4/month (Sync), or $8/month (Publish) Free trial Free version available Download for free Expand Collapse Obsidian’s daily notes help me capture original ideas A journaling tool I turned into an idea machine At its core, Obsidian’s Daily Notes feature is a journaling tool, but I’ve repurposed it as a frictionless note-taking device.The option appears as a calendar icon on the left-hand toolbar.
If you don’t see it, you can enable it by heading to Settings > Daily Notes (under Core Plugins).In my workflow, after I consume a piece of content, I immediately press the Daily Notes button and write down my thoughts.It follows a format like this: Today I read X, and it gave me thought Y.
Here, X is a web clip—or what I like to call a reference note—and Y is an original idea I had while consuming it, written in just a few words.I don’t expand on the idea or properly explore it yet.This streamlines the idea-capture phase and makes it as frictionless as possible.
Each entry also contains a tag for organization and discoverability.Related Why I Chose Obsidian to Keep My Journal (And All My Writing) "No subscription necessary" is my favorite part.Posts 4 By Patrick Campanale How I ‘distill’ original ideas out of this workflow In the above format, X is internally linked to the corresponding reference note.
This means each daily note is paired with at least one reference note.I can visualize this pairing by opening Obsidian’s graph view.The benefit of doing this is that it immediately shows me which web captures I’ve consumed and had a thought about—and which ones are still untouched—because the untouched ones have no links to other notes.
There’s also the “Orphans” toggle, which helps filter out these unread notes.The Y part, which is my original idea based on the reference note, is also internally linked, but not to any specific note.This creates what I call a “ghost note”—a note that has been referenced through an internal link but doesn’t exist yet.
I can visualize these in graph view, where they appear as grayed-out nodes.Later—sometimes hours or even days afterward—when I review my note collection, I scan through these ghost notes and start fleshing them out, turning them into proper idea notes.You could technically expand every ghost note from the get-go, but I use an additional filtering system.
As you keep writing daily notes, you’ll occasionally return to an old idea and link to an already existing ghost note.When that happens, the ghost note ends up with multiple connections, which automatically signals that the idea is important or recurring.Those are the ideas worth fleshing out first.
Related I started using emoji in my Obsidian notes—here's why it's a total game-changer Learn how emoji turned dull, hard-to-skim notes into a vibrant, visually engaging thinking space Posts By Ali Haider How I ‘retrieve’ my ideas from my second brain and use them for creative expression Graph view, Dataview, and the art of connecting dots Once you have this infrastructure in place—reference notes, daily entries, and a set of idea notes that have earned their weight in backlinks—you have raw material for almost any creative work.You now have a collection of original ideas that can serve as the basis for a new creative project.Your personal journey—how you encountered different ideas and reference materials—is documented through your daily entries.
And your reference notes contain the factual sources you can use to support your claims.Subscribe to the newsletter for Second Brain tips Get practical Obsidian workflows, ready-made templates, and step-by-step examples in the newsletter; subscribe to access more actionable techniques for building, connecting, and surfacing ideas inside your second brain—plus curated plugin and visualization tips.Get Updates By subscribing, you agree to receive newsletter and marketing emails, and accept our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
You can unsubscribe anytime.When brainstorming, I personally like using graph view to visualize connections and patterns and turn them into ideas.I can also use the filter system to narrow my search based on tags, attachments, or keywords.
This is especially useful when I want to work on a specific topic rather than rely on serendipitous discovery.In my experience, a strong topic for a creative project usually emerges when I’m able to connect two or more idea notes together.That said, I realize that Obsidian’s graph view can feel a bit abstract and overwhelming.
If you prefer something more structured and deliberate, the Dataview plugin is worth setting up.It lets you query your vault like a database—filter notes by tag, date, or property and return a structured list.Related Obsidian vs.
Notion: Which Note-Taking App Is Best? Where will your notes live best.Posts 2 By Dibakar Ghosh If you decide to replicate this process of building a second brain, I should give you a fair warning: it’s going to be slow.In the first few weeks, your graph will look sparse and underwhelming.
But trust the process.Give it a month—maybe two or three—and you’ll build up enough of a base for the system to start surfacing connections you genuinely didn’t see coming.
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