From Bullet Journal to Second Brain: How I Use Obsidian

I still write in notebooks.

That's important to say upfront, because this post is about a digital tool, and I don't want anyone to think you have to abandon what already works. I've been keeping a physical bullet journal for years — tasks, daily logs, quick sketches, the kind of thinking that feels different when your hand is moving a pen. That habit isn't going anywhere.

But a few years ago I hit a wall that paper has always had: I couldn't search it. I couldn't link a note from March to something I wrote in October. I couldn't see the shape of my thinking across months. So I started looking for a digital companion — not a replacement, a companion — and I found Obsidian.

That experiment turned into jeffs.link, a published slice of my actual notes that you can read and explore right now.

What is a "second brain," anyway?

It's just a system for capturing information outside your head so your head doesn't have to hold it all.

The idea is simple: your brain is for thinking, not storage. When you have a place to put things — tasks, ideas, things you've learned, references you want to keep — your mind can relax and actually focus. A notebook does this. Obsidian does this too, just with the ability to search, link, and grow the system over time.

You don't need to be technical to benefit from it. You don't need to set up anything complicated on day one. Start with a single note. That's genuinely enough.

What is Obsidian?

Obsidian is a free note-taking app that works on your own files — plain text files written in Markdown, stored in a folder on your computer (or synced to your devices). There's no proprietary format, no vendor lock-in, no subscription required to use the basics. If you stop using Obsidian tomorrow, your notes are still just text files you can open anywhere.

Markdown is the same format this blog is written in. If you've ever put **bold** around a word in a chat app, you already understand the basics.

A collection of notes in Obsidian is called a vault. Think of it as a folder with superpowers — you can link notes together, see how they connect visually, and search across everything instantly.

jeffs.link — my notes, published

jeffs.link is a published version of part of my Obsidian vault. It's built with Obsidian Publish, which lets you choose which notes to make public and turns them into a website. What you see at jeffs.link is the same content I reference day-to-day, just shared openly.

The two pages I point most people to are right there:

How To Get Started with Obsidian — everything from "what is this app" to plugins, sync, and alternatives
Organize Daily Notes — the system for one note per day that actually sticks

Go explore. Click around. The interactive graph on the right side of jeffs.link shows how notes connect — it's one of my favorite things about Obsidian.

Getting started (the short version)

The full guide is at jeffs.link → How To Get Started, but here's the honest short version:

Download Obsidian — it's free at obsidian.md
Create a vault — just a folder. Name it anything.
Make your first note — write something. Anything. A task, a thought, something you want to remember.
Don't worry about the system yet. The system comes after you've used it for a week and start to feel what's missing.

The guide goes deeper: core plugins worth enabling, community plugins I actually use, Obsidian Sync for keeping notes across devices, and Obsidian Publish if you ever want to share your notes publicly like I did with jeffs.link. It also covers alternatives — because Obsidian isn't the right tool for everyone, and that's completely fine.

Daily notes — the habit that carried over

The thing that made the biggest difference for me was daily notes: one note per day, automatically created when you open Obsidian.

This maps almost directly onto how I use my physical bullet journal. Each day gets a page. You log what happens, capture tasks, drop in links and references. At the end of the week you can look back. At the end of the month, you have a record.

The setup takes about ten minutes and makes the whole system feel alive. The full walkthrough is at jeffs.link → Organize Daily Notes. It covers:

Enabling the built-in Daily Notes plugin
Creating a template so each day starts with the same structure
Making today's note open automatically when you launch Obsidian (this is the step that actually builds the habit)
Choosing a folder structure and date format that matches how you think

The guide includes a real example template you can copy. If I were starting from scratch today, this is exactly where I'd begin.

You don't have to go all-in

This is the part I wish more people said: you can do this a little at a time.

I didn't migrate my entire life into Obsidian on day one. I started with daily notes. Then I added a few reference notes. Then I started linking them. The system grew slowly, in response to actual needs, not because I planned it out in advance.

You also don't have to give up paper. My physical journal still lives on my desk. Some thoughts need to be written by hand — the slowness is the point. Obsidian is for the things that need to be found later.

There's no right way to do this. What matters is that information stops falling through the cracks, and you start to trust that when you write something down, you'll actually be able to find it again.

How this blog connects

This blog — the site you're reading right now — is also built from Markdown files, the same format Obsidian uses. Some of what I write in my vault eventually becomes a post here. The two systems aren't that different: write in plain text, publish when it's ready.

If you want to see the note-taking side, visit jeffs.link. If you want to see how the portfolio and blog are built, that's right here at jkjrdev.com.

Start anywhere

If you've made it this far and you're curious about Obsidian, I'd suggest picking one of these and starting there:

Brand new to Obsidian? → How To Get Started at jeffs.link
Want the one habit that makes it stick? → Organize Daily Notes at jeffs.link
Just want to explore? → Open jeffs.link and click around

You don't need to have it all figured out. Neither did I when I started. The best note-taking system is the one you'll actually use — and that usually means starting simpler than you think you need to.

Thanks for reading.

Co-authored with Cursor, an AI-powered code editor.