Picking a note-taking app (again): Obsidian, git and a PARA second brain

I take a LOT of notes. I’ve just never kept them anywhere that lasts.

My track record so far:

• Paper notebooks and journals, which are great while I’m writing and useless six months later when I need to find something
• Whatever local notes app came with the machine, which gets nuked with every new job or new device, notes included
• The big apps. A couple of times I tried to put everything in one bucket with OneNote, Evernote and Google Keep. Back in 2015 I was tweeting about how much I loved OneNote’s Outlook integration for taking notes in meetings and sharing them with my team. None of them lasted. TBH the flow was never consistent for me.

So I’m giving it another shot, and this time I made it a proper project, with a project note called “2021-06-30 - Finalise on a note taking app”. Today is the 30th, deadline day! So here’s what I picked and how I’ve set it up.

A week of second-brain videos

It started on 23 June. That evening I wrote a note titled “Recreating my obsidian workflow as second brain”, and all it says is that the structure is inspired by two things:

• PARA (Tiago Forte’s PARA method): Projects, Areas, Resources and Archives, four buckets that are supposed to cover every kind of information you deal with
• Zettelkasten: small, timestamped notes that link to each other instead of living in one giant document

Later that night I binged a couple of videos on the “Second Brain” idea. The concept seems really nice and promising! I also wrote down my only real worry: it might get way too overwhelming once I start logging more things.

Smart notes like these are new to me, but the idea is old. One of the wiki pages I made that weekend is for the Memex, Vannevar Bush’s 1945 idea of a desk that stores all your books, records and notes and links them together. My page for it is a picture and a heading: “Origins of Second Brain??”

On 26 June I explained the whole setup to a friend. We ended up talking about the Internet Archive’s library, Obsidian, second brains and, somehow, “the cake is a lie.” Don’t ask.

Obsidian vs TiddlyWiki

The project note has a short checklist. Here’s where it stands today:

• Do some basic research and try out some of the Second Brain philosophies
• Obsidian vs TiddlyWiki
• Backup strategy
• Homelab friendly?
• Research encrypting notes automatically with a script, on both my laptop and my phone

The two finalists work very differently. TiddlyWiki is a notebook that runs in your browser, where every note is a “tiddler” inside the wiki. Obsidian is an app that sits on top of a plain folder of Markdown files on your own disk. The notes are just .md files, and Obsidian adds the links, backlinks and the graph on top.

I went with Obsidian. There wasn’t one deciding reason, it just won on everything I cared about:

• The notes are plain Markdown files. If Obsidian disappears tomorrow, my notes don’t.
• Plain files mean backups are just git, on the laptop and on the phone (more on that below).
• The community is big, and there’s a plugin for pretty much everything I’ve wanted so far.
• The graph view and backlinks. Link a note once and both sides know about it, which is the whole point of the Zettelkasten bit.

Backups: git on the laptop, GitJournal on the phone

Since the vault is just a folder of text files, backing it up is easy: put it in git.

On the laptop I’m using the Obsidian Git plugin, which commits and pushes the vault to a remote repo on a schedule. My verdict in the project note was one word: fantastic! I don’t have to remember to back anything up, and I get the full history of every note for free.

On Android I’m using GitJournal, a Markdown notes app that syncs with git. It works on the same repo, so I can update the vault from anywhere and the change shows up on the laptop after the next pull.

The two open questions

Is it homelab friendly? My homelab already runs Nextcloud, and since last August its big box has been a Dell R510. The notes don’t touch any of it yet, and I haven’t worked out what “homelab friendly” should even mean for them.

How do I encrypt it? The vault already has notes on money, fitness and work, and it lives in a git remote. I’d like it encrypted automatically on both the laptop and the phone, without having to think about it. Exhibit A is Avi Aryan’s cloud-based Obsidian encryption setup: the vault sits in an encrypted gocryptfs folder inside Dropbox, and a small script mounts it, opens Obsidian and unmounts it when Obsidian closes. That covers the laptop. I haven’t figured out the phone side.

Both are still unchecked, but I’m not going to wait on them to start using it.

How the vault is laid out

The top level is the five PARA buckets (inbox plus the four), numbered so they sort in order, each with an emoji because why not:

0. inbox 📥
1. projects 🧩
2. areas 🌟
   ├── fire 🔥
   ├── fitness 💪
   ├── future planning ⌛️
   ├── mindfulness ☮️
   ├── personal growth 📈
   ├── travel & living 🌏
   └── work 💻
3. resources 📮
   ├── files 🗂
   ├── logs 🪵
   │   ├── daily notes
   │   └── workout notes
   ├── people 👥
   ├── reading notes 📚
   ├── templates 🛠
   ├── wiki 🌐
   │   ├── productivity
   │   ├── software
   │   └── tech
   └── zettelkasten 🗃
4. archives 🗑

What each one is for:

• Inbox: in the words of its overview note, “Everything that you create lands here.” It’s a live to-do list and scratch space, and things get moved into the other buckets later.
• Projects: something with a goal and a deadline. “Finalise on a note taking app” was one.
• Areas: things I have to keep up with over time with no end date, like fitness, work, money and personal growth.
• Resources: everything I’m interested in or want to look up later, so the wiki, reading notes, logs, templates and the zettelkasten.
• Archives: finished or abandoned stuff from the other three. The note-taking project goes here now.

Every top-level folder has an overview note with the same name. It embeds that bucket’s PARA definition from my “P.A.R.A. method” wiki page, so the rules sit right at the top of the folder, and below that there’s a live index of everything inside, rendered as cards by a folder-note plugin. When I open “1. projects 🧩” I see the definition of a project and then every active project, without keeping a list by hand.

Wiki pages are one per thing: Obsidian, TiddlyWiki, Proxmox, ESXi, Plex, Nextcloud, Memex and so on. A lot of them are still stubs. The Obsidian page currently says “A note taking tool.” and that’s it.

Zettels are named by timestamp plus a title, like 2021-06-23_18.34 - Recreating my obsidian workflow as second brain. A lot of notes start with the same small header, so they get tags and at least one link back into the rest of the vault. This is the one on the Obsidian page:

Tags: #productivity #smartnotes
Associations: [[Second Brain 🧠]]

---

Some of the first zettels that aren’t about the system itself are notes on a YouTube video about how to simplify your life, and on Picasso’s bull lithographs as a lesson in simplicity. Bit of a theme there.

Templates

The daily note template is the big one. It opens with a short checklist of basic habits, then a small table to score how the day went, then the usual to-dos, and it ends with a few reflection prompts:

## Basics
- [ ] Make your bed.
- [ ] Posture check.
- [ ] Drink more water.
- [ ] Stand every hour and take a walk.
- [ ] Read for 15 mins today.
- [ ] If it takes 2 minutes, just do it.

## Metadata
Metric | Score | Notes
--- | ---: | ---
Last night's sleep |
Workout |
Morning |
Afternoon |
Evening |
Night |

## TODO
### Personal
### Work

## Rough Notes
Lorem Ipsum

## TIL

## Reflections
### I am grateful for:
### What excited me?
### What made me anxious?
### What caused me pain? and how?

The last habit is the two-minute rule: if something takes less than two minutes, just do it now instead of writing it down. I started using the template on 28 June, so I have exactly three daily notes so far. Ask me again in a month. :)

The workout log is a Markdown table per gym session: the area of focus, then one row per exercise with time or reps and a notes column, plus a small legend at the bottom ($ for a superset, ! for a personal record, RM for reps max). Each log links up to a fitness goal note, so the goal’s backlinks collect every session that counts towards it. I’ve logged six sessions this way since 23 June.

This is the most structure I’ve ever put around my notes, and the worry from that first night still stands: it might get too heavy to keep up. Let’s see how it goes!