We during the course of study and work , gather a lot of information. It is not humanly possible to remember every bit of what we have learnt, we would be considered computers if we did!
So the need of a knowledge management system arises. Its not something that would replace textbooks and the other standard references, rather it’s a place to store notes that are easy to access and contain the required information and nothing else. This is a place to quickly reference something when in doubt. We call this the “Second Brain” , because it acts as an extension to the information that we already know. Any new information that we acquire can also be easily added for future reference.
I don’t mean the kind of thing you might have used when you were a school kid. I mean something that is designed specifically for knowledge workers and the people who work with them. It isn’t about the software itself, but about how it’s used and managed.
You can think of knowledge management as a toolkit for managing information. As such, it’s a set of tools that supports your ability to do your job effectively. What makes it so important is that it allows you to achieve two things at once:
It helps you build up your own internal repository of information — your “intellectual capital”. This is what people refer to when they talk about knowledge workers having their own “brain”.
It enables you to share this information with others in an efficient way — which means not just sharing it with other people, but sharing it in such a way that they can use it too, getting rid the all the unnecessary vocabulary and making the information easy to consume.
Please keep in mind this system of second brain doesn’t only apply to medical or engineering knowledge. It can be about a book you read and would like to remember, or it can be YouTube video or podcast that your happened to stumble upon while casually browsing the internet and found intriguing. It can be literally anything that you find worth remembering. Just capture the thought into your second brain and have a look at it a later date.
There are many softwares that exist that are capable of fulfilling the requirements but I chose Obsidian after juggling through a few.
I hope you find the motivation to invest time and energy into creating your own second brain , because I know I did and it is one of the best decisions I made. In the future I will be writing in more detail about the use of Obsidian as a second brain and how you can implement one too.
