Second Brain: PARA × Obsidian × Granola × Claude

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0300

A few years ago I was organizing notes using the Zettelkasten method in VS Code. Since then, everything has changed — largely due to the exponential growth of LLMs and agentic AI. I want to share a fresh tool stack that helps reduce cognitive load and keep information from slipping through the cracks when time is scarce: PARA × Obsidian × Granola × Claude.

The article is called «Second Brain,» which means we’re building a system that mirrors the structure of the human brain.

The Zettelkästen Note-Taking Method

Sun, 12 Mar 2023 12:00:00 +0300

Zettelkästen is an increasingly popular method of organizing notes and ideas, developed by the extraordinarily productive German sociologist Niklas Luhmann — a man who, over the course of his life, authored more than 70 major academic books and 500 scholarly articles, and received prestigious doctoral honors and prizes for his contributions to sociology.

The Zettelkästen note-taking method helped Luhmann acquire new knowledge more effectively and engage in deep research. This gives rise to a compelling hypothesis: «If Zettelkästen helped Luhmann absorb new knowledge, it can help us too.» All that’s left is to put this promising hypothesis to the test.

Online discussions of Zettelkästen — in both English and Russian — only began to gain traction in 2020, following the publication of David Clear’s article «Zettelkasten — How One German Scholar Was So Freakishly Productive,» which was also translated into Russian and published on Habr. This is despite the fact that Luhmann never kept his unique knowledge management method a secret — detailed descriptions of it in the original can be found in German academic journals from 1981 to 1987 (originals in German).

Productivity on Konstantin Zavarov

Second Brain: PARA × Obsidian × Granola × Claude

The Zettelkästen Note-Taking Method