I believed that note-taking doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all methodology. I’ve been through so many methods of taking notes. It started with taking a physical course note in college, moving to digital notes on iPad, and now, Obsidian as my primary note-taking tool.

A Brief History of My Note-taking

I made the section heading sound so grand.

After the mandatory course note-taking in high school, I found love in taking course notes in college. I used my version of Cornell Notes, the small column is on the right instead, and the rest are the same. This structure carried over to my iPad note-taking era. But this Cornell method dropped when I started using digital note-taking.

Well… I didn’t say “started using Obsidian” because it wasn’t a sudden change right away. I’ve gone through Google Keep, Notion, and even Craft. But when I discovered Obsidian back in 2021/2022, I felt like I struck gold.

My Love For Obsidian

I discovered Obsidian as a note-taking app, not an application for second brain or digital garden… yet. As a developer, at the slightest, I enjoy the idea of my notes in Markdown. And then Obsidian said it lives in your local file system, I think fainted.

Wakes up, well… Obsidian stores all notes in a local file (think of it as photo files or document files) in the local filesystem. It feels like I own the data unlike the previously mentioned application which my notes live on the cloud (granted they have an export feature.)

Existing Methodologies for Second Brain

When I started using Obsidian in late 2021, I discovered a video on Linking Your Thinking by Nick Milo ↗, I adapt what I can, and partially apply with Bullet Journal ↗, a system of which I already understand. I used it for the whole of 2022 but doesn’t feel right. I was focused on organizing everything into a folder, underutilizing Obsidian’s ability to link files in Wikilink-style (writing it like this, [[File name to link]]).

After using Obsidian mainly for note-taking. Around November 2022, I decided to restructure my vault, from a too-organized vault with many folders and subfolders, I put all “atomic” idea notes into the vault root. That helped me create new ideas without worrying about organizing those ideas into a folder. This time I adapted Andy Matuschak’s Evergreen notes idea ↗ into my vault.

Then the last adaptation that makes everything feels right, was a post by Eleanor Konik, titled When Themed Logs are More Useful than Daily Notes ↗. I discovered this post from her winning Obsidian October post (The Konik Method ↗). This helped me feel at ease from seeing empty daily notes, and blank areas on a day when I don’t have anything to write. I felt frustrated having to create new daily notes every day and seeing blank pages every day. I know that people may use a template to help kickstart a daily note, but I didn’t like that. Not only that her post helped me pass through a big hill on note-taking, but also inspired me to finally launch this site to share my notes. If you happened to stumble upon this post, thank you so much for your contribution!

I will write more about my method later on My Writing Flow.

Entering Second Brain and Digital Garden Era

I feel confident, comfortable, and relaxed sharing my content with the world now. This site allows me to do just that, a digital garden that shows a portion of my second brain (that lives in Obsidian). So welcome, and enjoy :)