How to Build a Second Brain with Obsidian

A second brain is a structured medium containing everything you can think about, like tasks, thoughts, ideas, important dates… It’s like a big database about your life.

Why do you need a second brain?

Building a second brain can improve your productivity because you will unburden your brain of everything that can be unburdened so that you can concentrate on what is essential: creating and taking action.

Then, because a second brain is an organized structure, everything you need can be found quickly because you can query and filter information.

Finally, if you wish to share your knowledge with someone, export it, or back it up, it can be done easily because everything is externalized through your second brain.

What is Obsidian?

Obsidian is a markdown editor and reader. But it’s more than this because with Obsidian you can build what is called a “vault”. It’s something where you can put every file you want and you can build connections and interactions between your files.

From your computer’s point of view, a vault is just a folder where you put your files. And that’s one of the biggest strengths of Obsidian, it works locally on your computer because it just works with folders and markdown files.

If you wish to install Obsidian, you can do it here: https://obsidian.md/. Obsidian is available on Windows, Linux, and macOS, and on Android or iOS (you can find it in the Play Store/App Store).

Note taking in Obsidian

The main purpose of Obsidian is to provide a user interface for note-taking. Below is a picture of the user interface :

Note yours won’t look like this because when you install Obsidian you don’t have any community plugins installed. And it drives us to a new Obsidian strength: users can develop plugins and use them to improve usability. But you’ll discover this later.

So, in Obsidian you can take notes, then?

Then there is a concept called “backlinks” implemented in Obsidian which allows you to make connections between your notes. Let’s say you have a note called “Machine Learning”. You want to make a new note called “Deep Learning” in which you are talking a little about machine learning. It’s coherent to reference your Machine Learning note in your Deep Learning note. To create backlinks, you write text between double brackets ([[Machine Learning]] ). Obsidian will suggest you some backlinks as you’re writing text between double brackets.

Once you have some backlinks, you can have a look at the Graph View. It’s a visual representation of your backlinks. Let’s have a look at mine to explain.

On this graph, every note in my vault is represented with a point.

Why some points are big?

Bigger is a point, more backlinks are referencing the corresponding note. I have some big areas like “Trading” or “Aeronautics” to which many of the notes refer. So these points are big.

And why are there colors?

It’s a personal choice. The graph view is customizable, and I’ve chosen to put the same color on the notes of the same area. So every color is an area grouping a lot of linked notes.

Finally, to find your notes easily, you can tag them or query them directly through Obsidian. Below are some tags I use. With such a setup, if I want to find all my reference notes, for example, I can do it directly through the “tags” pane.

Final Note

You can do absolutely anything in Obsidian with just markdown files (and community plugins sometimes). I use it as a knowledge manager, task manager, life OS and a lot of other things. I will explain my Obsidian setup in another article, so be sure to follow me if it interests you so that you won’t miss this article!

Edit: find all my Obsidian-related stuff here: Use Obsidian Like a Pro

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