How I Built a SECOND Brain 🧠 in Obsidian MD (Tiago Forte BASB PARA Method)

according to thiago forte we consume the equivalent of 174 full newspapers worth of content each and every day i'm not surprised with the amount of books articles and videos i consume it's hard to keep track of everything i learn instead of working on my outputs i drown in the sea of bookmarks and scattered ideas thankfully his book on building a second brain helps create a system to feel in control of our knowledge which then frees up our brain to focus on

what's most important thinking and creating in this video i'll share how i've implemented the essential principles from the book into practical use cases with my favorite note-taking app obsidian by following the code method to process information or the para method to organize your notes you can make the most of the content you consume on a side note the vault i'm going to be referencing for this video is my recently made obsidian starter vault which you can learn more about in the

description without any further ado let's start at the beginning of the personal knowledge management process if you don't already know the code framework is a four-step pipeline for transforming knowledge into action the first step is to capture all the ideas in your life generated from the content you consume and the experiences you have these can come in the form of book notes shower thoughts or mere journal entries first i'll go over how i consume content i have different workflows to capture

each input type since you don't really handle a book the same way you do a personal eureka moment while i'm consuming something i want to take notes on i create a new note with a respective template to record any ideas and highlights to keep track of my inputs i have a note that uses queries to sort my inputs based on their status data view the plugin i use to create these queries also lets me display relevant information i set like the finished date and my personal rating you can also modify its sorting criteria which in my

case brings the most recently modified files to the top of the list here's an example on how i would add an article into my obsidian vault so right now i'm in my inputs note where i can view all my different inputs and over here is an article that i read about a three-part daily routine for maximum productivity so i could just click this button right here and it would create the note but if you're on a different note you can just open up command palette search up input and then click the command

so now i'll just copy paste the title into here and it'll create the note for it automatically automatically setting the started date the title and the time i created the note so now it's time to set the status so i can see it in my inputs note and i'm currently consuming it so i'm just going to set it to orange next i'll jump to these cursor locations by using the jump to next cursor location command which i've set to alt 8. so let's jump here and then tags would just be

an input article as for links i was headed to personal knowledge management since this routine mainly has to do with the way we consume and use information and the next stop on the cursor checkpoints is the link to the article which i'm going to copy paste and put it here as i read through the article i just highlight using raindrop io just different headers and any resonating quotes or ideas that i find in the article but if there's something that comes from my own thinking i can easily

just add it over here and my thoughts are questions if you use read wise or pocket there's also community plugins to just automatically sync your highlights one for pocket and then there's one for read wise as well there you go unfortunately there's none for raindrop so i have to just manually copy it into my obsidian so here i have it i can just go to highlights copy and then paste it into my notes now that i'm done extracting

all the highlights i'll set it to yellow i'll also add a timestamp to which i finish the article and a rating which i'll just give it eight and if we head back to the inputs page you can see it right over here aside from media i also capture any personal thoughts let's say the article i read sparked an idea i want to elaborate on first i'll run a command to create a new thought note name this the idea on how there's too much content to consume i'll head down all the way to my thoughts

header where i'll link the idea and then from there i'll fill out these headers to further flesh out the idea the context will be the article so i'll create a link back to it feelings would be my current state of mind from this idea i feel a bit of overwhelm because of the sheer amount of information out there but at the same time i also feel intrigued by how i can possibly use obsidian and different practices to optimize and solve this problem the next step is just a brain dump to just jot down everything that comes to mind in my

case there's just too many things to learn and there's so many different sources to do so i'm just continually bombarded with things like my emails all the book recommendations i see i think it's better to just only take notes if i'll actually use it in the future instead i just bookmark and save for future reference so then for my future plan i'll just do the above and based off this article i'll slowly chip away at it while i go on walks in the afternoon or while in transit on my way to work i

have a note to organize everything but this time they'll be organized based on their kind of thought memories are for anecdotes and experiences reflections are for personal thoughts and lessons and musings are just random shower ideas then when i go back up here to add it to this list i will just set it to a reflection now as you can see pops up right here now that we have some information in our vault it's time to organize it there are three main methods i use to organize information

the pair method is the main structure of the vault which helps store information based on its action ability the zettelcostan method is a form of note-taking that promotes the connection of notes to come up with new ideas instead of keeping notes from a certain book all in the same note you would separate it into different ones by concept and link them all together lastly i have a main home note for quick access to all these different parts of my vault in the pera method your information is divided into four parts

projects areas resources and archives thiago forte implements his para organization using folders but i instead use the linking capabilities of obsidian for more freedom you can't place a note in two different folders but in reality information can be applied in different places at the same time and so linking allows for those one-to-many connections between nodes nonetheless obsidian still lets you use folders if you want to keep things simple projects are a series of tasks related to a goal with a deadline

my workflow heavily relies on my project note template which helped me both plan and keep track of my progress let's say i wanted to create a new project to make a video in my projects note i'll click on the button create new obsidian video if we head to the file structure it actually creates a new folder with the name of the note and moves the file there as well next we'll fill in the deadline let's just say it's the end of the month and let's set the area to my

youtube channel next i start planning the actual project and follow the okr framework to keep it simple o stands for objective which will be to upload the video and the key results would be brainstorming creating the script editing the video and then also publishing it and then let's just pretend i filled this stuff out for the time frame you can include the week in which you're planning on creating this video we want to work on this on the 28th week of the year and then from there we can create a new kanban board copy paste the title

and then create the note based off that and now you can see we have three columns one for things that we have yet to start things that we've already started and tasks we've already finished and now we can start implementing these key results into tasks brainstorming and then let's say creating script i can also add a date to the task which lets me see it in my daily note i just open this up come here see to do's and says creating script from the kanban board once i finish a

task i can then move it to finished and then i can choose to archive it to hide it from the board if you want to link a card to a certain note you can just create a link and then type in the name of the note you want to create to say obsidian video script so now if i click on this it'll create the new note for it once we're done setting up all our tasks we can then link the kanban board back into the project note and if you have a note that's relevant to the project let's

just go back to the old note we opened up earlier you can create a link to the project and it will show up right here you can also feel free to link any external links so now let's change this to yellow to signify that we're actually working on the project and now we can see this project in three different places we can see it at the weekly note we linked it to which in this case is 28 and if it was a project in the future week you can see it in the future plan you can also see it in your home note

and see all the active projects you have ongoing or you can see it in your main projects note with all the other projects thiago defines areas as long term personal commitments with no end date it can include identities like being a parent partner writer or programmer or it can include responsibilities like physical health finances friends and your car thanks to obsidian's customizability i decided to make my areas more dynamic than a simple folder

area notes will include more personal notes to self and thoughts important to you as well as any information that's generally universal to everyone to organize it all i have an area note template that organizes the notes linked to it based on their type using even more data view queries take for example this area i have on my own personal second brain i have related projects like the four step road map included in the starter vault inputs like the book i referenced and relevant notes like the overview of the vault to help keep track

of all the features next up is resources which is where the rest of the note-taking methodologies like zettelkasten and maps of content come into play this wasn't mentioned in the book but if you're going to use obsidian you have to utilize the potential of connecting your notes instead of a dedicated resource template to base my notes off of i use maps of content these notes which are also known as mocks are used as launching pads into the rest of your notes they don't really

contain much information on their own a mock can be created for any topic and themes of ongoing interest it can be a topic like productivity or personal management or an activity like games or note-taking if you're a bit confused here's an example first i have a notes header to add further structure to the notes i link to in this case there's different practices in personal knowledge management as well as tools like obsidian md if you don't link the note directly i then have a

query to capture any note that isn't already linked but links to this note if i were to add zettelcosten as a link you'd see it disappear i also separate notes like inputs and thoughts just to keep things more organized and then lastly i have this resource tag so when i go to my resources i can see it in this query notice how i can have personal knowledge management separated into both an area and a resource one acts as an area for my actual implementation and one acts as a map of content for more general

principles after certain notes are no longer in use it's time to hide them in an archive section unfortunately the nature of links make it hard to keep track of what notes are archived and what notes aren't as of now i only have it set to things in the actual folder if you're using folders instead of links thiago recommends you reduce clutter by first putting everything in archives as you start using notes you can then start to move it into projects areas or folders now you know how to organize

your notes but how do you make the switch from highlights to tangible concepts to distill the knowledge i consume thiago recommends to progressively summarize your notes this method is best for larger notes like books after extracting highlights from our resources we go through three rounds of summarization first we read through our highlights and bold the essential sentences and parts second you highlight the key words in those bolded areas to make it easy to skim like if they were headers of an article lastly we take the

highlighted passages and convert them into an executive summary that organizes the key ideas it gives us multiple layers of depth to our resources to complement the potential different use cases we may need for it of course this process would be quite time consuming so i usually only do it for inputs that i 100 know i'll need in the future after distilling the information you can then use evergreen notes and connections to link it with the rest of your knowledge evergreen notes consist of atomic sized

independent ideas that are then connected with related ones they are continually revisited and refined as we come across more information in the resources we consume as we grow these notes we begin to build a forest of ideas they can come in various forms to act as building blocks for the overall structure of our thought navigation in my greenhouse note i keep track of the progress of my evergreen notes after progressively summarizing this article let's mix it in with the rest of our notes first i'll create a link to a new

note we're going to create called dan koh's content creation cycle so to create this new note i'm just going to click on it and it'll automatically load the template let's link it back to the resource then i'll create a header for each part of the cycle i'm actually just going to copy paste this real quick i know i have a note in my vault that's related which is called managing inputs next up i have different notes for each of these ideas already so i'm just going to create links to them if you want you can go one step further

and turn this into a separate note and you can just name it something like mindfulness helps empty our minds from thought so then you can create this new note link it to mindfulness and then here i could just put practices to help cultivate mindfulness and then i can go into detail on how so i'll just copy this block and paste it in here do the same for this quote as well as you can see we've created a new note from this article that is now connected

to lots of different ideas already existing in our obsidian vault now it's time to put your notes to use to flesh out ideas and think of their potential use cases i use my brainstorming template to both curate and synthesize information related to a specific idea i use this to brainstorm for content creation but you can also use this to just further develop your understanding and transfer your findings into already existing notes i also have a problem-solving brainstorming template

for when i want to come up with a solution using my notes let's use the brainstorming template to come up with the ideas and structure for this new obsidian video you know create a new brainstorm topic can be building a second brain in obsidian next we can fill out the brain dump just write out everything that comes to mind too bad there's absolutely nothing in it so we can just go to the next step which is linking any references we can link resources like building a second brain in obsidian by tiago forte

as well as the main ideas of the book like the pair method and the code framework for organized ideas i can just start writing my script here and for potential outputs it would obviously be this video if you were to do this solely for flushing out ideas though you can link it to the new notes you create because of this brainstorm to make the creation phase easier thiago recommends a four level process for retrieving information related to your note the most direct way of searching is to just literally search for

the keywords so build a second brain as you can see it's in this one because you know we're writing about it and you can see all the notes where the line shows up the next step is to just look from relevant notes so i would say the source material is pretty relevant so i can see go to my application note and see all the related notes i took from the book which i can then use for this video next up would be tags but instead of tags we just have maps of content so i go to the personal

knowledge management mock and see all my related notes there and then the last method is just sheer luck which i can do by opening a random note just cycles through everything if you want to only show certain notes you can use the search bar here to only open notes that match this criteria so i'll just only include files that have the input tag and then random note from search and it opens only notes that are inputs [Music] if you find these workflows related to

your personal knowledge management needs all the things i've mentioned come ready to use in my starter vault for the first week of this video's release i'll be giving 25 off using the discount code ultimate 25. in the vault you'll get lifetime access to future updated versions over 100 notes that include the templates and notes used in this video as well as the notes i've taken on personal knowledge management the vault will come with all my essential obsidian plugins and hotkeys to make note taking fun and easy lastly you'll get a four

step interactive roadmap built into the obsidian vault to help you go from beginner to pro learn personal knowledge management learn obsidian md and then learn how to use the workflows provided in the vault anyways if you found the video helpful be sure to like and subscribe for more content like this this has been john maverick stay mindful please click on one of the videos trust me it'll be worth it