I’ve wanted to start up a second brain for a while and decided to with a combination of PARA and Zettelkasten that a YouTuber name CyanVoxel created as my organizational system. PARA (or Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archive) covers a creative and task based activities while Zettelkasten works better for information synthesis. The two have overlap in the Resources section which I think of as external information sources. Here’s how I’ve laid out so far: ! There are a few things that I might change. When starting the blog, I thought it fit better under the Permanent synthesized notes of Zettelkasten. It would be the only exposed to the public. I could see it ending up under Areas as an ongoing project. I don’t like having Resources broken down by source, so I’ll restructure that as pull in different modes of information. In the end, there’s no right answer besides what feels best. That’s the double edged sword of combining some systems.

Other things work well. Having a folder per project and a page per task works well with Obsidian’s Projects community plugin. Frontmatter gives me the flexibility to query and aggregate structured information without having to fill in entries for every single page. Finally, having notes in Markdown and being synced to a GitHub repository is convenient for accessing information even if I don’t have Obsidian on a device, say a phone or work computer.