Back in May, I released an article about how I’ve created a fusion of Building a Second Brain’s P.A.R.A. method of organisational note-taking and Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten of interlinked atomic notes.
It was one of the most popular articles I’ve published to this day, presumably because of how it detailed a unique approach that I take to combining project and knowledge management.
This article’s going to talk about how I use this unique organisational structure in Obsidian to always have relevant and interesting topics to talk about — topics that relate to your experiences, topics that you and other people are going to be interested in hearing about.
I’m going to cover how I capture thoughts, how I set this up in the app, and how I go about selecting ideas and qualifying them through responses from an audience.
Let’s get started…
Setting up the system
The base folder structure in my vault is the same as the P.A.R.A. system — projects, areas, resources and archive.
You can read more about how I run this system in the above article, but in short…
It’s the same as Tiago Forte explains P.A.R.A. in Building a Second Brain, but instead of subfolders in the Areas folder, I have a Zettelkasten of notes that are all linked to other relevant notes, relating to my own life, knowledge and experiences.
I have shortcuts that I use to create these notes quickly, adding the metadata and formatting that I require in the note. That means, when I have an idea for a permanent note that I want to take, there is very little friction between generating that idea and writing it down in a permanent note.
What do I write in these notes? Where does the inspiration come from?
Permanent notes, in a traditional Zettelkasten, are your own thoughts and opinions on things, rather than anyone else’s. This means that you have to use your literature notes or the notes that you have in the Resources folder of P.A.R.A. in order to inspire ideas for you to write permanent notes.
Find things that resonate — facts, theories, advice.
Take these, notice how they have or are or are going to apply in your life and use this information to write a personal permanent note.
You can also generate ideas for these notes from living your life. If you make an observation, you can quickly capture a note or task from this observation that reminds you to make the note later. If you’re in a position to create the note when the idea strikes immediately, by all means, go for it!
If I don’t have access to my Obsidian vault, I’ll use the quick capture feature in Todoist to save the thought to my inbox, clarifying it into another note quickly in the future. I have the Todoist sync plugin, so the notes that I’m yet to create appear in my Obsidian vault above the index of notes in this folder that serves as a Zettelkasten.
It’s important that these notes are personal, relating to your own experience and understanding, or they’re just regurgitations of information that isn’t interesting.
Using the system
Once you’ve started to build up a connected web of your own thoughts in your notes, you can dip into it to generate ideas for content.
This is why it’s so important, as I mentioned above, that your notes here are personal. You can write interesting content about generic things, but it’s not going to be unique or as engaging as if it relates to your own experiences and understanding.
Generating ideas
This is easiest when you have access to an index of all your permanent notes and content. The overview of points of entry into the Zettelkasten is going to help you narrow down the point within the web that you want to write about faster.
This is why I have an ‘Areas’ note in Obsidian, which contains a Dataview list of all the content in the folder. I can quickly read through the titles, which are self-explanatory and concise, and get a good idea of where I want to enter the knowledge base…
Once I’ve clicked a note and entered the knowledge base, I can read what I’ve written in the note, but I’m only allowed to navigate purposefully by following the links to other content. This means that you’re travelling through your personal knowledge and experiences with context, helping better inform your decisions of what to write.
I can confidently say, if you enter your Zettelkasten with the intention of turning the information within it into written work, you won’t have to open more than three or four notes before you’re struck with an initial idea that could work as an engaging piece of content.
Best of all, you’ve only been focusing on writing content in your Zettelkasten that’s relevant to your own experiences, so you don’t have to worry about your writing being unoriginal. You are the subject, the muse of your notes, so this is the best way to go about writing for a personal brand’s content too.
You can take this idea, but you’re only one person. It’s more effective to qualify the ideas that you want to write about by pitching them to a picky, fast-responding audience that’s going to give you feedback first…
Qualifying ideas
The best way to qualify ideas is through short-form content on social media. I use Twitter for this, but Reddit and Quora are good text-based sites that you can use as an alternative.
Post your idea here. Make it as visceral and as engaging as possible, with the same level of effort that you would apply to your longer pieces of work.
If the engagement level on this piece is up, you can start preparing a longer piece of work about the content.
If the engagement of this post is down, go back to the drawing board (Zettelkasten) and dive into it again for a new idea.
Keep doing this, and when it comes to writing long-form pieces, you have several tweets or other social media posts from which you can choose the best ideas to elaborate upon.
Twitter is constantly changing, moving and updating, and the turnaround time for feedback on your ideas is rapid. This is useful in a position like this because time is of the essence. The more high-quality written pieces you can get out, the more your content’s going to be shown to people above others.
This is my guide to generating unlimited content ideas using a second brain. If you want to learn more about this system that I use for creating content consistently, check out the announcement at the bottom of this post. I hope you’ve learned something new here that you can put into action, and as always, thanks for reading!
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