In Search Of A Second Brain
For most of the past decade, I have been pretty good about keeping notes. This is maybe the one thing I can consistently take pride in: no matter what else I'm dealing with, I tend to keep a journal and write things down. The format this takes over the years, however, has changed a lot.
A brief summary: up until I started grad school in 2018, I kept my journal, to-do lists, writing drafts, and so on in Microsoft OneNote, taking paper notes in the context of classes because I felt it would help me remember things better. I also occasionally blogged on Medium. I was introduced to "social bookmarking" through are.na during grad school, and added that to my list of things to maintain, using my Medium blog for documentation of various grad school projects. In 2021, I started keeping a day planner after feeling that doing a daily to-do list in OneNote was driving me insane. In 2022, I got pretty into self-hosting and did a hundred days project of just working on various stuff on this website, and dropped OneNote in favor of a self-hosted install of TiddlyWiki, hoping to follow Shawn Wang's learn in public model.
After a couple years of wrestling with TiddlyWiki, I realized that ultimately there are plenty of things I keep in my notes that are meant to be private: they aren't of use to anyone except me, and things like journaling or writing about my feelings aren't things I'm terribly comfortable saving on a public-facing website even if only I can see them. So I started using Obsidian for my private notes, leaving my TiddlyWiki as a rarely-updated artifact of a more hopeful time. Finally, this year I decided to try switching out are.na for Pinboard, just in time for it to be dying.
(I hope Maciej goes back to work on Pinboard, but ultimately if I'm out $60 to support a cool product and interesting guy that lasted that long it's not a huge loss for me. It still works, even if it's not being supported, and I find the tagging system a lot better for "second brain" purposes than are.na's channels. If it eventually goes down, that's another argument in favor of self-hosting, I guess.)
The goal, even before I knew the term, was always to find a good way to maintain a second brain. But, at this stage, I'm using four different apps, some self-hosted, some not, for the various types of information I'd like to store and sometimes share. I have, as is the programmer's way, deeply overcomplicated things for myself, and locked myself in to a number of pieces of software I chose for no particular reason other than "it seemed interesting at the time." Over the past couple of years, my needs have become clearer, as have the ways my current rats nest of second brains is not meeting them.
I still want to learn in public, but context switching between my private Obsidian notes, my public blog, my in-between TiddlyWiki, and my bookmarks, which I'd eventually like to integrate into this website as well, often results in me losing the thread of information or, well, neglecting to actually do the "public" part of learning in public a lot of the time. There's also a wide gradation of types of information I create or use regularly and how private/public and permanent/impermanent I want them to be:
Ideally, all these things could live in one place (or a couple of places that are better-integrated than they currently are, so, say, I can automatically post my pinboard bookmarks as part of a linkroll on this site). This also doesn't touch on closed vs. open-source, which would be its own scatterplot: in a perfect world, all of these things are self-hosted and open-source, but as my TiddlyWiki experiment shows, the ongoing support of a self-hosted app, especially something with weird syntax and horrible documentation, can become a massive pain point in its own right when I'm just trying to take fucking notes.
I think there's a world where I'm able to maintain a digital presence like Soren Bjornstad, who really seems to use TiddlyWiki to its fullest while also maintaining a blog, but at this point I'm willing to accept that I find TiddlyWiki far too frustrating to wrestle with. My aspiration, as I've mentioned in other blog posts, is to have something like Simon Willison's blog: a single feed for short thoughts, links, and full blog posts. Ideally, I could build it from markdown, so I keep both public and private stuff in different folders in Obsidian, and in a file format that will be maintainable even if Obsidian is eventually deprecated. Unfortunately, it's been surprisingly hard to find a single solution that meets those criteria!
I've committed to doing a hundred days of writing (this is day 2, by the way), and I'm hopeful that the process of posting something on this blog every day will help me find the motivation to make progress on the longer-term solution I want for a second brain. I'm pretty passionate about personal websites and the "indie web" (I save pretty much every interesting personal site I come across on Pinboard), but when I didn't have a daily commitment to working on mine, I quickly found it hard to overcome the inertia, especially when I got into the habit of taking shortcuts, like, say, making quick fixes while SSH'ed into my personal server instead of keeping a good git history and building from local.
Unfortunately, the biggest factor to maintaining a good second brain is probably consistency. If I had spent the last two years consistently writing on this blog, or using my TiddlyWiki, maybe I'd feel differently about it. So I'm not committing to rewriting this whole thing in Eleventy just yet: I don't want to just swap out one set of headaches for another. But I do think it's reasonable and achievable to get at least the first part of my aspiration above: a single feed for everything public. If I can get to the second part (everything lives in Obsidian), well, icing on the cake. In the meantime, if anyone does have an all-in-solution for my problems, please help me, my second brain is starving.