Obsidian As A Second Brain

Pages and Links

You can easily link content in Obsidian by using [[ and ]]. This is the key to a Second Brain—associating like ideas from a variety of different sources and creating a graph of content.

There are a couple of handy additions to the [[]] syntax you should be aware of:

After the note title, add a # and then you can link to a specific header.
After the note title, add a ^ to link to a specific paragraph. This creates a reference.
Add a ! before the link to transclude the content.

Zettelkasten

Zettelkasten is a note organization popularized by the sociologist Niklas Luhmann in the 20th century. (Zettelkasten is German for "slip-box").

Zettelkasten traditionally has three main types of notes:

Fleeting: A quick, raw, ephemeral note. These are stream of consciousness, and are meant to get an idea out of your head and onto paper.
Literature: For articles, books, research, etc. Ideally, these are written in your own voice, but it's okay if they're just there for your reference.
Permanent: An extremely concise summary of a topic. It distills a concept succinctly into a few concepts. These are the most distilled version of your thinking.

Dabi has a few recommendations for applying Zettelkasten.

Use daily notes for fleeting notes.
He has a "literature" folder for literature notes.
For permanent notes, he has a separate Topics folder.
Dabi calls "permanent" notes "distilled" notes. He wants this to summarize the concept.