I’ve spent way too much time productivity hacking and fiddling with the perfect PKM (personal knowledge management) system. And I’d increasingly been coming to the same conclusions as Joan Westenberg, whose recent blog post, I Deleted My Second Brain, has been making the rounds.

I haven’t gone so far as to delete everything, but I can see the cathartic value in it. I’ll quote from Joan:

But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories.

In my case, it sometimes literally stopped me from reading because I dreaded the “need” to take and organise notes.

Worse, the architecture began to shape my attention. I started reading to extract. Listening to summarize. Thinking in formats I could file. Every experience became fodder. I stopped wondering and started processing.

I felt like I needed to always be archiving things, storing random internet posts for who knows what.

That’s not to say that I don’t still use Obsidian and iA Writer for specific tasks. My Buddhist Studies vault is handy for my MA programme and related research projects. But the difference between that and how most chronically online types are doing second brains is the specific focus. I’m not logging and analysing every minute I meditate. I’m not web clipping every single vaguely interesting site I visit.

I have a still fluid vault concept in progress that’s more of a diary than anything else. It’s not productivity focused; it’s just tidbits here and there. Some days I feel like a diary style daily note. I type out some blog posts, notes to clarify my own thinking on something, or just an idea. If I really like something, I’ll clip it and save it—but that’s the exception.

I also find it handy to have project folders just hanging out on my desktop for sorting through very in-progress stuff like buying a car, home improvement projects, etc. But this isn’t systematic or a second brain. It’s just slightly less chaotic.

For better or worse, my whole extended family uses iPhones. Group folders on Apple Notes is really the best way to handle shared text and archives.

The thing is, none of this is attempting to make a holistic attempt at capturing everything or being able to reference anything in the future. Once you accept these limitations, then software like Obsidian becomes curiously more powerful.

By switching away from wanting an all encompassing software solution to managing knowledge to just having a few practical notes for specific tasks, this point of Joan’s comes to the fore:

In trying to remember everything, I outsourced the act of reflection. I didn’t revisit ideas. I didn’t interrogate them. I filed them away and trusted the structure. But a structure is not thinking. A tag is not an insight. And an idea not re-encountered might as well have never been had.

Sometimes really thinking about something is spending an afternoon staring into space, working in the garden, cleaning the house, and working through some difficult ideas. You can’t just add a tag and call it a day.

And one last point about memory. The Pāli word sati, usually translated at mindfulness could with equal validity be translated as memory. Our society has lost the connection between awareness, active recall, and that memory is a present recreation rather than a faithful archive. Hence:

There is a Hebrew word: “zakhor.” It means both memory and action. To remember, in this tradition, is not to recall a fact. It is to fulfill an ethical obligation. To make the past present through attention.

This all aligns with my other goal of simply looking at screens less.