imperfect notes & my second subconscious
I've never been a great notetaker. Winnie Lim suggests I might be overthinking it: it's not a second brain but a second subconscious mind.
I’ve never been a successful notetaker. Winnie Lim enumerates the many reasons why not, which seem to be very close to her thinking too:
“Because of my personality I tend to solve for the whole before wanting to do something. For years I wanted to figure out how I could retrieve the notes in a meaningful manner before I committed to making them. If I cannot remember I had made the note, did the note really exist?”
The problem is that you end up trying to come up with a smart taxonomy of notes ahead of time — and that’s always bound to fail, at least for me. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve wiped my Obsidian vault clean because I didn’t like the structure or the maintenance of it all threatened to overtake any utility. Instead, as Winnie points out, the best thing to do is just write the note. It’s a bit like throwing the text into a big bucket, and that’s okay.
I hate to say it, but this might be a decent use case for some kind of personal LLM (ideally on-device so I’m not sharing my private notes with a third party I don’t trust). If you’re constantly just making notes without structure, being able to ask something about their content feels like it would have a lot of utility — again, at least for me. I’d love to be able to have my notes about a certain topic summarized when I need them. Or even have the summary proactively come up for me depending on my context.
Then again, maybe that doesn’t matter at all:
“My brain is constantly holding scattered bits of information so it is just better to offload them somewhere in one place. I think the main difference is I don’t see obsidian as my second brain, I see it as my second subconscious.”
I like that. Blogging is a little bit that for me, but blogging has an audience. There’s something useful in being the Harriet the Spy of your own life and putting words to things that otherwise might go unsaid. There’s poetry in it, too, which is very obvious from Winnie’s post.
I’ll give notetaking another try.
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