getting started

Ok, I figured the best way to actually get started with the second brain, is to start using the second brain as the second brain :) ... once I had a good feel for things
For me, getting a good feel means that I need to follow my flow which consists of

obsessive research
- Opening up a bunch of links
- Going down rabbit holes
basic level of understanding
- Going into 'netflix mode' and getting All the Plugins
- Once I've gotten all the plugins that I could need or want, then I started caring about the look and feel
- From the look and feel, I then started to care about functionality
- Once I got started into caring about functionality, that is when I got into 'brain activation mode'
- With functionality, came templates

Obsessive Research

Discovery

Poking around
- personal knowledge notebooks
- browsing other people's digital gardens
- analysis of alternative
- demo
figuring out what I wanted
and what I didn't want
- feeling of jankiness
- feeling of clunkiness
- having to jerryrig my main things that I wanted

Basic level of understanding

poking around
- first thing I did was to look through all of the plugins
  - I enabled all of the core plugins that came installed by default
  - Originally, I only installed the ones that I thought would be useful
  - Once I had those picked, then I went to look into what other people picked and recommended
  - Then I went full YOLO mode
- then I took a deep dive tangent into setting up obsidian and chatgpt
  - this kind of lead me down to a rabbit hole and the video related to setting things up for DnD really put it all together for me
setting things up
- then I started going through the plugins and looking at their settings feature
- From there I dorked around with the layout a little bit
  - I figured out all the little icons can go into different sections and how the different sections work
tailoring
using
customizing

Observation

When I started going back and trying to correct formatting and doing arrangement of things, that is when the flow of ideas stopped and got impeded
The more I started to use an 'outline' way of doing things, the more things stopped working seamlessly and it was
In some ways, I like collapsing items, but in other ways, I don't and feel like it is starting to feel too formal by me doing it
I'm hoping in the future that I can use this in a way that i'm going forward at all times and not trying to go backwards to capture something that I had done before and making sure they get documented
I think what I like about the idea of this activity is that it'll keep me centered. I hav ea tendency to open up a lot of different tabs and go down rabbit holes. This will act as both a central hub and a focal points so that I have the freedom to let my mind wander, but then, if I stray too far or if I lose my way, I have a place to come back to. I think by the expectation that I'm going to be taking notes as I go along the way and the notes don't have to be perfect and they can be a stream of thoughts will be helpful so that I'll actually do them.

Hypothesis

I wonder if setting up templates will help with flow

Annoyances

Not having templates ✅ 2023-09-26
- Fixed: got templates
Pages not getting automatically organized ✅ 2023-09-26
- Not sure what this meant at the time, but it doesn't resonate now that I took a break and came back
I don't like the indentation ✅ 2023-09-26
- I hate the indentation less now that I stepped away and I'm not trying to perfect it all
I don't know why some bullets have a purple orb icon next to them ✅ 2023-09-27
- Something I did made them go away; pretty sure it was related to some indentation or outline feature
- OK, figured it out; it is when foldable text is folded
I don't like that the different level of headings aren't different colors ✅ 2023-09-27
- Now that I applied the gummy theme that made the headings different formats from each other; I'm ok that they aren't different colors
- I don't want to have to put text in a heading, but I want to be able to collapse
Not having started from the beginning ✅ 2023-09-27
- Ok, after reading Building a Second Brain: The Definitive Introductory Guide I feel less annoyed about this based on the part starting with a clean slate
Feeling like I'm starting out wrong and doing the wrong flow of things as it relates to the formatting and headings ✅ 2023-09-27
- Now that I'm on day two and getting into the flow and I'm updating the headlines and formate for templates of things as I'm going to be better suited and tailored to me, I can see that not having it from the beginning is OK and will evolve over time
Not having a quick way to change the letter casing and putting multiple things in CamelCase or Sentence case at once based on the heading level
Wanting to get ahead of myself and already have sync and publish set up

Curiosities

how do other people structure their notes; do they use folders or let their notes just roam in the top level
- Rather, how do I want to do it; I think after percolating on this a bit, I'm most likely going to do it by creating high docs; this is probably where the 'evergreen' thing comes from.

Learnings

As I was trying to set this up, I realized that cloudflare cloud is a heftier setup than I realized
Most of the gardens are deployed with Hugo or Jekyll

Ideas

I'd like a way to have a list of actions and then only undo certain actions

Lost Sock

I had a link for ChatGPT and Obsidian that I lost somewhere -- found it! https://dg-docs.ole.dev/ ✅ 2023-09-26
{ #b4beb0}

To Do

Figure out how to add in dates into ✅ 2023-09-26

Figure out how pages for newly created backlinks can get put into a specific folder

Figure out a mechanism to categorize notes of specific things as they're getting written

For example, I'd like to do a dump of all of the videos I watched to help this journey, but there are two specific videos that stood out to me so I'd like for them to also stand out in the notes

From reading Building a Second Brain: The Definitive Introductory Guide I expect this is going to get done using the 'inbox' method

Figure out how to link to different sections within the document I looked this up and the documentation gave a good explanation so if I wanted to link to the #Ideas section I would write ideas

Set up a styling, modal, etc something that helps create hypothesis that is different and outside of to-do tasks, but kind of works the same way

Figure out how to make references

Get good at formatting

Searches

obsidian redo shortcut
- https://help.obsidian.md/Editing+and+formatting/Keyboard+shortcuts+for+editing
folding text
mid journey in obsidian
chatgpt in obsidian
digital garden templates
digital garden starter

Bookmarks

Awesome List
- Publishing Obsidian: https://dg-docs.ole.dev/
- Hashtag theme goal: https://hermitage.utsob.me/
- Page templates:
  - https://facedragons.com/productivity/obsidian-templates-with-examples/
Come back to later: