The Day My Notes Came Alive
Too many notes become tombstones. The best become seeds.
Why Write Something You’ll Never Read Again?
I was sitting in church the other day, listening to a sermon.
It was a wonderful sermon and almost seemed like exactly what I needed to hear that day.
As I turn my gaze from the preacher, I look across the row and see people scribbling in notebooks.
One of these people was my wife.
I often find it interesting to look over and see what she is writing during this time.
From what I have noticed, it is always the main points and passages from the sermon.
Also, because this is my wife, I know that this will be the last time she visits this page.
Before long, the content of the notes is a thing of history.
Maybe there is some value in hearing it and then writing it down to make it stick.
I have often wondered why she took the time to write these things down during church, never to revisit them.
Was this because she was the preacher’s daughter and was raised to do this?
While writing this, I asked her, and she said it helps her to remember.
This is certainly a good thing, but is this the only value notes carry?
Or is there more to the story that many fail to see?
My experience with note-taking has been an interesting journey.
In the church service, I used to be a person who did not have a notepad, committing principles and passages from the sermon onto paper.
I found very little value in note-taking.
From my perspective, it was like writing something down to be shoved in a filing cabinet somewhere, never to be seen again.
Why waste time, right?
However, I can recall times when taking notes was of value to me.
If I were preparing for a school test, I would often read and write all the points that I thought were important to help me on the test.
I found that these notes often helped me better understand the topic, and I often received higher scores after this preparation.
I will say that many of these topics I took notes on, I was initially unfamiliar with, so they helped me to wrap my mind around what was going on.
If the topic was something I already felt I had a good understanding of before approaching the material, I likely would not have taken notes because I did not see any value in doing the extra work.
The Problem With Digital Dust
Now fast forward to now, 37-year-old male, 3 college degrees, a family of 5, many years of experience in the workforce, and a constant hunger for understanding and learning.
Life happens fast, and I have found it very challenging to process much of the information I am taking in daily.
I wouldn’t say it is as bad as going in one ear and out the other, but I feel very little of the content is being stored in a usable way.
My studies throughout history and top performers have pointed to many of them having a habit of keeping extensive notebooks.
People like Leonardo Da Vinci or Theodore Roosevelt, there seemed to be a practice that many of these people had that was relevant to the results they achieved.
This presented a gap in my understanding of the true value of notes.
A few years ago, I stumbled across an author who presented a concept called building a second brain.
I remember thinking that this sounded like an amazing idea if it really functioned as a second brain.
As a result, I went through the process of downloading Obsidian note-taking software and committing all written and digital notes to these notebooks.
It was a really refreshing feeling to have a place where all of this information could live together in some sort of harmony.
I had an interesting way of sorting these notes so that they all seemed to live in the proper place.
Whether I was looking for a journal entry or an essay I wrote in school, I could easily navigate to that folder.
Sadly, the high of having this system quickly faded.
It quickly became like all of my previous note-taking systems: a bunch of files collecting digital dust, taking up space on my hard drive.
I wondered whether the information these people throughout history collected was only good for their biographers after they died, or if they revisited these and found value throughout their lives.
As many notes and journal entries as some of these people had, I feel they had to perceive some value in these artifacts that I may not be aware of.
What was this value?
From Task Manager to Reflection Manager
One of the first things I did when I parted ways with my most recent employer was come back to Obsidian.
I was in search of a one-size-fits-all application that I could organize my life behind.
My notes, my calendar, my tasks, and anything else that may arise throughout the day.
I called this my Daily Command Center.
I was tired of switching between 100 different apps and really wanted a single solution for everything.
I tried really hard to make this work, but I still felt there was a lot of friction in the system, like cutting the grass with scissors.
Did I need a new app?
Did I need to invent an app?
I felt like I was at a dead end.
Looking back two months ago, right around the time I started this Daily Command Center, I focused primarily on tasks.
Although I wasn’t happy with the results and felt initially that it was a waste of time, it actually ended up being a starting point for something far greater than I imagined.
While my first note on April 27, 2026, was simply a task log, I noticed on 6/1 that it went beyond tasks and contained a journal entry.
It also contained reflections on the Theodore Roosevelt book I was reading.
From April 27 to June 1, I had only 6 entries.
From June 1 to today, there has been a Daily Command Center note every single day.
This is a testament to the value I initially perceived, to the value that I see today.
What exactly changed?
What started as a simple task manager transformed into a reflection manager.
Instead of simply talking about the tasks I was doing each day, I wanted to make sense of everything that was happening each day.
I wanted to think more about the Bible passage I read, the Roosevelt quote that caught my attention, or something a person said that caught my attention at a wedding.
Not only this, but what do all these things have in common?
How do they relate to each other?
What is it about these three things that caught my attention this day?
Instead of days being stale and rigid, the days became full of meaning.
I believe this is very true in how I used to see each day, as just a list of things that need to be done in order to not only survive but get to a better place where I have more control over those tasks that had to be done.
In a way, I despise the structure.
I hate being confined to a box, having a certain time that I have to do something, let alone planning my days, months, and years this way.
If I finish all these tasks as prescribed, does it improve my quality of life?
If I don’t complete these tasks as prescribed, will I feel that the day was a failure?
Ultimately, my Daily Command Center had changed from something of very little value and importance to something I can’t wait to contribute to each day.
What will I discover about myself and the world today?
How does it connect to my past, other people, or even what I want out of life?
How does what I discovered today make me wiser tomorrow?
Turning a Graveyard Into a Nursery
After this discovery, I thought I had found the breakthrough.
However, I noticed something was still missing.
Although I found great meaning and purpose in recording my observations and discoveries, I still had this nagging question in my mind, asking me what value these would have tomorrow.
Sure, I was finding great value in the immediate, as my wife did journaling in church, but I didn’t want my notes to die here.
After all, these were exciting to me when I wrote them down, and many of them led to further questions that I hadn’t fully thought through yet.
In a sense, this was only the capture part of my notes, which had become really effective, but now I realized I needed to improve the organization and retrieval if I really wanted this note system to continue adding value to my life.
It was as if I had these wonderful thoughts and ideas that were full of life, and as they went from my mind to my computer, they were dying.
I began brainstorming what kinds of things I could do to keep these notes alive in my vault.
I wanted to turn my vault from a graveyard into a nursery.
Instead of showing up only to die, they needed to be here to be nursed, to be developed, to grow.
The only problem was that I knew in my head what I wanted, but whether it was possible or already discovered, I had no idea.
When Notes Start Thinking Back
The first improvement I made was to the connections.
I wanted to understand how my notes connect.
I found a simple plugin that showed notes connected to my current note, and also a score of how much they connect.
I thought this was a brilliant discovery, only to realize it didn’t tell me what the basis of the connection was.
Before you ask, of course, you can connect through links and tags, but at the beginning of a discovery or observation, it is very challenging to tell where your idea might end up.
Tags and links that are no longer of value add friction to the process.
Where friction exists in my systems, I feel I lose value.
The more friction that exists in doing something, the less likely I am to do it.
The connections were great, but I wanted to understand the why.
This led to my discovery of an AI called Obsidian Copilot.
This plugin allowed me to understand the why behind connections, but also so much more.
I could ask the AI questions related to my notes, and it would make connections I had never even considered.
This AI would notice blind spots in my thinking, things I had never thought of.
This Copilot would also evaluate my system and help me develop it even further.
This was becoming a lot more of what I pictured when I first heard the term “Second Brain.”
It was as if my notes had come to life, that there was a live and active mind behind them.
I could find what I was looking for and maybe also what I needed and didn’t know I was looking for by simply entering a prompt.
Finally, I was finding great value in note-taking, and it has accelerated the development of my ideas beyond what I had ever imagined.
Don't Let Your Ideas Die
In this journey, I have changed from a skeptic to a believer on this topic.
I have had possibilities in note-taking all of my life, but I never fully perceived the value in.
As a result, I believe this really stunted the depth of my thinking compared to where it is today.
You may say, “Well, Obsidian hasn’t even been out for that long, so what are you worried about?”
I respond with the fact that people have been using forms of this system for many years.
I observed something similar in Robert Greene’s notecard system.
Although it didn’t have an AI brain behind it, he was most certainly recording information with the purpose of it being retrieved again, of adding value to something he was working on.
While his system may have done exactly what he needed it to do, the capabilities we have in technology today make these processes much more accessible.
I dread the idea of creating a notecard with each idea for a story I have and storing them in boxes, and having to hunt them down as I remember them.
However, that had led to best-selling books on his part.
What I have discovered is unique to the way I think.
Maybe my system will be of no value to you.
Maybe you will find Greene’s system more effective, or even something else.
The purpose of this article was not to sell my system; in fact, quite the opposite.
The purpose of this writing was to challenge you not to let your ideas and discoveries die with the day.
A challenge to continue to think through and build on what was important to you yesterday.
You could forget that breakthrough discovery if it’s not stored where you can access it again.
Would you be comfortable receiving an account number for a crypto vault with millions of dollars if you didn’t write it down and store it in a safe place?
The same should be true for your ideas.
You never know what they become could be of the same value as what’s in the crypto vault.