AI for your Second Brain

What you get when you combine an effective note taking system with the latest AI technology available

Note tooling is something that I've been obsessing over for years. I've never thought of myself as a particularly good note taker but, as I started working more, I realized that I needed to offload information from my brain. It's hard to keep track of all the things you have on the go, your passion projects, and even things you might be trying to learn about outside of life. It's easy to feel overwhelmed with all the demands on your mind.

After filling many physical notebooks, Evernotes, One Notes, Bears, Notions, and Roams I've finally settled on Obsidian as my tool of choice for handling notes. This is in no small part because of its ability to facilitate a Second Brain note-taking system.

A Second Brain is an approach to help capture, organize, and retrieve information effectively. There are many different techniques for taking notes to build a Second Brain, including the famous Zettelkasten Method of note-taking. These systems reduce mental overload, improving learning, reinforcing memory, and making you a better problem solver and decision maker.

Midjourney - Prompt - “an ai taking notes using the famous Zettelkasten Method of note-taking, research flying around, manic energy, exciting, organized, abstract --v 5.1 --ar 16:9”

Obsidian is a great tool for any of these Second Brain techniques because of its ability to create links and references between content, structure content, build note-taking workflows, and quickly search the notes. Using it as a Second Brain creates a centralized location where you can keep track of all of your information. Having all of your knowledge in one place constructs a "Data Lake" you can analyze and search to help surface ideas, patterns, and generate new content.

Many writers use these pools of knowledge to "slow burn" their content creation, which leads to better research and more complete ideas being published. They start writing multiple articles at the same time, collecting research bit by bit, so that they can benefit from the serendipitous discovery of new information as they write. It basically avoids that feeling where you just finished publishing something and later realized that there's one or two things you wish you'd added.

I've been looking into using my Second Brain as a source for an AI chatbot. While access to the newest version of ChatGPT's Plugins will allow you to query against documents (like PDFs), I want to use hundreds of documents including highlights from articles, diagrams, and even referencing images. Anthropic announced a 100k token limit for their AI, Claude, this week but it’ll be interesting to see what the research shows about the AI’s ability to focus with a larger context space.

After I created a D&D chat bot to converse with the rules of a very old version of the game, I've tried to create the same thing, but for my notes. I dabbled at building a system to do this myself, but then I came across a plugin for Obsidian written by wfhbrian called Smart Connections. The plugin adds an AI-powered chat client right into Obsidian! It's great when I don't have to waste time building because someone else has already beat me to it! 😄

This is a glimpse of what my setup looks like for Obsidian. On the right is the Plugin, Smart Connections. I’ve spent quite a bit of time customizing the look and feel and I love how much can be customized.

I can ask the Smart Connections chat questions, and it will reference notes that I've added, or I can directly reference it specific notes for it to work with. The comparison tool that comes alongside the chat can also show which notes are similar to help create better connections between notes. This is great for creating maps over your Obsidian notes, which could come together into digital gardens.

You'll need a bit of technical knowledge to get Smart Connections setup. I've linked to Github where you can refer to the setup procedure, but you'll need to get an OpenAI API key setup, and you should be ok with spending a little money to index all of your notes. My ~500 notes took less than $1 to process, and then a cent or two every time I converse with it.

The ability to use AI with my Obsidian Second Brain has grounded my belief that this is the best note-taking system around. Being able to use your own Second Brain as a source is incredible. You can chat with everything you've learned and ask questions that maybe only you would know! Better yet, the answer will likely be familiar to you or written in a way that's clear to you because the explanations were written by you! Tools like Gitbook Lens are already realizing that chat build against Knowledge Management Systems is a revolutionary idea.

There's a future where we have the power to use our own personal data to improve our lives. Rather than selling data to create services like Google or Facebook, AI offer a way to use that data without needing any special training to be better able to leverage that data. With AI running on-device, we won't need to worry about an AI system keeping our confidential information. This will empower us to fully leverage what we know and our own strengths to be able to improve our lives without the need to sacrifice our data to do it.

While Smart Connections isn't perfect, it's a great first step in being able to create a generic documentation search system for your Second Brain. AI solutions can always be improved and optimized by adopting a less generalized approach. We'd love to work together if you're interested in creating a more optimized documentation system for your data, or are interested in what other capabilities you'd like to incorporate.