# Moving my brain to Obsidian For a while I've been aware of the productivity movement of ["Building a second brain"](https://fortelabs.com/blog/basboverview/) and the myriad of related tools that are often called Personal Knowledge Management Systems ([[PKMS]]). I even started building my own, centered around the idea of a personal knowledge graph, that brought together sub-graphs from a number of data sources that were relevant to you. While there is still merit to this approach, I have found a tool that is incredibly close to what I wanted to build. Additionally, since it's functionally can be extended through plugins, I can add anything that I think is missing. This tool is called [[Obsidian]], and is the new hotness in the [[PKMS]] space. My approach of modelling all my information as nodes and edges in a graph, map perfectly onto [[Obsidian]]'s core functionality of being essentially a [[Markdown]] editor. Nodes in the graph map to [[Markdown]] files, and links between files map to edges in the graph. [[Obsidian]] even has a [[Obsidian Graph View|Graph View]] that visualises information that way. While the developer in me wants to create my own personal knowledge graph system, so it can be tailored exactly how I want, I would have had to do a large amount of work, just to get "table stakes" functionality. By just using Obsidian, I get a great desktop app, mobile app, and base system for free, and then I can just build my customisations on top of it. I'm in the process of moving all my information over to Obsidian, including information I used to keep in Google Tasks, Google Keep, Apple Notes and information that, frankly, I had no good place for and so would drop out of my brain. Another great feature of [[Obsidian]] is [[Obsidian Publish|Publish]], which lets you publish some, or all, of your [[Markdown]] files as inter connected webpages, that are hosted on [[Obsidian]]'s servers. This is a paid service, but it's so useful and customisable that I'm happy to pay for it. This has allowed me to move another service over to [[Obsidian]], this blog! I was previously using [Jon Sundell's Publish](https://github.com/JohnSundell/Publish) to turn Markdown files into static web pages, which were then hosted on GitHub Pages. Since the blog posts are still in [[Markdown]] it was really easy to transition over. As a bonus, I can now easily publish information and thoughts, don't really make sense as blog post, perhaps because they have ongoing relevance and aren't specific to a point in time. I've gone deep down the [[Obsidian]] rabbit hole over the last few months, and I'm hoping it will lead to greater productivity and organisation.