My Obsidian System for Productivity AND Creativity

Featuring Zettelkasten and Building a Second Brain’s PARA Method…

There are two common problems with knowledge work that people come across.

They are:

• Productivity
• Creativity

Everyone at some point thinks ‘Oh, if only I were slightly more focused then I might have XYZ’, or ‘Oh, if only I had an idea for XYZ, that would be great’.

I’m not here to tell you that I can entirely optimise productivity and creativity. They will always be there to some extent, as is the way of the world.

However, I can lead you through improving your capabilities in both skills, especially within digital personal knowledge management.

Helped by a personal knowledge management practice, I’ve posted over 100 articles on Medium during 2023. I supplemented this main work with 30 weekly newsletter issues, 12 short essays and thousands of tweets.

But how?

I started from nothing. Well, nothing aside from a laptop, some free software and a spark of desire to share my work.

Each part of this stack was critical. The laptop and spark of desire for clear reasons, I hope.

I can dive into a little more depth surrounding the free software…

I’ve always used the app Obsidian — it’s where I’ve cultivated a practice of personal knowledge management over the last year and a half.

The rest of this article will teach you to do this as well.

Let’s dive in…

It all starts with systems.

Systems for work have many benefits, especially in the context of personal knowledge management. Most importantly, they mean that you don’t have to make all the decisions, all the time about where you store your knowledge and how you use it.

Systems give constraints narrow enough for you to focus on divergent thinking where it’s most important — in the creative process.

Now there are many different systems you can use to manage your knowledge and each is good for different things. Inside Obsidian, where I work, I use two such systems…

• Tiago Forte’s PARA Method, from Building a Second Brain
• Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten of linked notes

Let’s dive into each one in turn and discuss what they’re good for…

The PARA Method is inspired, in part, by David Allen’s Getting Things Done framework for Productivity. This means that the PARA Method is centred around productive work also.

When using the PARA Method, your information in Obsidian is managed into discrete folders so you know where to find stuff and how to use it in the future.

The key word here is actionability. PARA optimises for using the information that you capture in your Obsidian vault. This doesn’t leave much room for organising ideas and insights in a way that allows you to be creative though. This is what the Zettelkasten’s for.

Created by Niklas Luhmann in the 20th Century, the Zettelkasten was originally a physical system which involved writing ideas on individual notecards and linking them to each other through an ID if they were related. These cards were stored in a large wooden box or crate, the ‘kasten’.

In the digital age, we have an advantage that Luhmann did not have. We can now use tools like Obsidian to create links to ideas which are limited in scope only by our imagination and the time invested. Digital tools are more flexible, allowing easier updating of notes and a greater context of link creation between ideas.

This is the power of the Zettelkasten, in the links you make between related ideas on different notes. By navigating these notes through these links, you can build up a detailed overview of concepts and topics and generate new ideas of your own.

This means that it’s hard to run out of ideas to write about when you have a fully-functioning Zettelkasten. If you can create a habit of capturing insights and turning them into permanent notes in your Obsidian system, you’ll build up Zettelkasten’s ‘critical mass’ quickly. At this point, it is said that the system shifts and responds to any new idea that you might place in it.

Although both systems are powerful in their own way, I noticed a problem with using only one of these methods for your work.

Zettelkasten and PARA are almost opposites in how information is stored and used within them.

PARA emphasises gathering all the resources you need for a specific project, within a specific folder, and working single-mindedly in this project until the project is complete.

Zettelkasten, however, has no such folders. You organise in a flat structure along with all other notes. It’s encouraged to diverge from a starting point, allowing your interest to bleed over into all other topics linked to this starting idea.

The problem herein lies that you could get sidetracked and spend too much time dreaming up new ideas and not knowing what to do with them.

Hence the need for a fusion of the two systems.

And that’s what I’ve built. It’s called PARAZETTEL.

After a whole year of using the system, I released PARAZETTEL, keeping it private but for a single Medium article back in May 2023.

This was a downloadable vault for Obsidian that people could open in the app for themselves and work through. Throughout the vault, I shared my philosophy around being productive and creating meaningful work.

I built the whole vault in a PARAZETTEL structure too, with the Areas folder transformed into a Zettelkasten, so people could experience the system straight away.

And now, almost four months on from the launch of PARAZETTEL V1, I’m launching V2 of the product.

This new and improved version of PARAZETTEL contains improved videos for plugins, theory and workflows. The book notes have more context to them. This adds greater depth to the ideas found within great PKM works like the original Building a Second Brain and How to Take Smart Notes.

For a limited time only, you can get PARAZETTEL V2 for a discount. Follow this link for more…

Thank you everyone! PARAZETTEL’s been a massive part of my life for the last half a year and I can’t wait for even more people to experience its magic! If you want to, you can check out the launch on my pinned post on X as well.

P.S. Thank you to everyone who took part in the first launch. It was one of the most formative and amazing weekends of my life. I’d love for this second launch to do the first one some justice.

P.P.S. We’re also live on Product Hunt for the launch! Check PARAZETTEL out there (I’m kinda new to it so do what you need to do, upvote seems to be the done thing. Thanks!).