Migrating My Second Brain

Today I went through the hassle of migrating my "second brain" from WorkFlowy to Obsidian. At least parts of it.

This undertaking has become necessary because, while I totally love WorkFlowy, it is very limited with more complex documents. As a matter of fact, it can't handle documents. And since I will be starting a new role with regular check-ins, WorkFlowy just didn't do the job well enough for me. Especially since I want such things to be persistent and not on a to-do list.

I went through quite an evaluation phase on which app or service I should move to. The key aspects that were a must-have for me:

• Saves everything as open format so I can freely change to anything later or point LLMs at it
• "It just works" sync between 4 devices, some of them used simultaneously, so I don't have to take care of file conflicts and duplicate file errors
• A more robust document support for more complex writing

With all that, the winner was clear quite fast. Obsidian.

After getting my head around how it works, I outlined some migration options with the help of Claude. But in the end I did everything manually since it gave me time to decide if something is even worth migrating. Also, even though I designed the structure beforehand, I had to restructure quite a bit while revisiting so many bullet points in WorkFlowy.

All that said, I did not get rid of WorkFlowy and won't. Basically, I will handle things this way:

• WorkFlowy > living > todos, drafting, quick notes, follow-ups, …
• Obsidian > persistent > topics, projects, wiki, people, …

Sure, I will have to use it for some time to really get a feeling for the new setup, but I think it was time for the partial migration. At least this is what my brain says.