This is your friendly reminder to avoid the productivity hacking tarpit. It feels productive to think about productivity but oftentimes you're confusing movement for progress. I'll give two specific pieces of advice for people who are thinking about switching from methodology / app A to methodology / app B.
1. You might find something that B does that is just so difficult to accomplish in A, so you want to switch. But before you do, you should spend a week living with the difficult path to do that thing in A. You will likely find that learning the muscle memory to do that thing in A was actually the difficult part, and once you've overcome that hurdle it isn't difficult any more.
2. You might switch to B and feel that "now, everything is so organized!" However, it's very likely that you could have "switched" from A to A and you'd feel the same way. What I mean by this is that by switching, you've forced yourself to revisit all of your notes. If you forced yourself to revisit your notes without switching, you'd see the same effect.
I wouldn't consider this to be a productivity tool in the usual sense (i.e., like Todoist or GTD). Instead, it's about facilitating deeper thought and making new connections between ideas. For a professional content creator, which includes most academics like Luhmann, the entirety of your career is your collection of notes. You can store them on paper, in the computer, in your head, or however you want, but those pieces of knowledge are all you have. Dismissing these tools as merely an arbitrary reorganization of a static collection of documents is like dismissing Javascript because we have html. Good luck creating Google Docs with only html.
Folks conflate TODO lists with a personal "library" because the first note they usually create is a TODO list, and then a set of sub-TODO-lists per project.
Often, what we spend time on most, are the things we need to get done, and our true reference "library" is just Google.
I would argue that a pure personal "library" is actually just the archive of past projects. In that context, searchability is more important that good organizing.
I have that sort of hybrid approach. My "main" doc is a TODO Journal where I list my todos for that day (often copied from the prior day). The journal maintains a record of what I've done every day since I started two years ago - each new day is set at the top of the doc. Many of the line items are themselves links to other documents (all in markdown), which are themselves a mix of project notes and TODO lists.
I use Typora to edit, and WinSCP to encrypt on a remote drive that's backed up each night.
It is indeed a tarpit that traps people who mean well and legitimately want to Get Things Done. The knowledge work/"second brain" community will have you convinced that everyone who you run into online is a PhD candidate. The irony is that a lot of people intend to "simplify" their workflow but end up reaching for more things to pile onto it. The breaking point for me was the first time I loaded Obsidian. It is a nice program but it incentifies Doing Too Much, at least for my taste. Granted, what influences a person to even care about how they take notes varies. The chaps over at Zettelkasten.de actually advocate for a very simple approach to note taking that can work anywhere. Personally, I've found that it's best for me to do the bulk of my work in a Plain Text environment -- plain like the text box that I am using to type this comment plain.
As much as pragmatics would point in this direction, saying "let's be realistic here .. etc.", perhaps nurturing that part of us that dreams in alignment with Vannevar Bush's dreaming up the "memex" or Douglas Engelbart's vision of "augmenting the human intellect" is still valuable if the urge is strong enough. Maybe the seeds of the next information revolution are lurking in such dreams .. especially given the progress we've made in NLP.
I felt the same way about Obsidian. It seemed really helpful on the surface but after a few days of using it, I realized I was spending more time recording everything and making sure to use the correct backlinks than I was actually learning anything. Just bookmarking pages gets you the majority of the benefit of meticulously organizing your notes, while requiring next to zero effort.
IMO, the advantage of apps like Obsidian is that you don't have to organize everything meticulously.
1. You just create a new note,
2. give it some tags in square brackets "[[Tag]]"
3. and if it direcrly related to a note you recall making, make that connection
That's it. With time the amounf notes grows, and the amount of interesting connections grows too.
It is also important to note, that the process should note be automated. If you want to learn something, you need to make the time to write the note yourself, as opposed to simply copy/pasting.
>What I mean by this is that by switching, you've forced yourself to revisit all of your notes. If you forced yourself to revisit your notes without switching, you'd see the same effect.
At this point, I've learned that a good system of notes requires frequent visits and pruning. Otherwise, it turns into an overgrown, sprawling dumping ground of tags and random notes/links.
To me, Zettelkasten, and tools like Roam, help reinforce that behavior by providing a reward in connections. My brain can outsource the connection-making, context generating aspect. I just have to be prescriptive about setting time aside each day to tend the "garden". Not a ton of time such that I get burned out. Just a little each day. As a knowledge worker, it seems like that is an invaluable exercise to build a habit around.
Hey, I came across an earlier comment you made on a post and wanted to ask you some questions with regards to leveling up skills, would you be ok with me emailing you?
>Niklas Luhmann ... published 50 books and over 600 articles. ... There are also over 150 unfinished manuscripts left in his estate. At least one of them is a text of 1000 pages.
A person at this level of productivity will have an overwhelming amount of notes, and therefore an advanced system of organization is necessary.
I would guess that most people reading this are not anywhere close to that level, and likely do not need an advanced note-taking system. They would be better off spending time on their work, rather than spending time perfecting their system. This is especially true now that notes are often digital, and can be searched in their entirety in an instant.
With anything productivity related there's an intense honeymoon period where it seems like you've found the magical productivity elixir. In reality, you're just high on placebo. It's far too easy to chase that high from app to app, method to method.
Your comment would be useful if it didn't so completely missed the point. Its rightful context would be productivity. But here it is sitting atop a thread of comments for an article about an approach to note taking, inducing people who it could greatly help (note takers) to dismiss it as "yet another productivity hack".
I think it depends what your goal is. The 'How to take smart notes' book is specifically about taking research notes for academia or at the very least non-fiction writing.
Zettelkasten Method can make a lot of sense in contexts like that. If you are writing a weekly blog, keep building notes up and polishing parts of them for the blog. Then your note taking process is in fact your blog writing process, but a bit more procedurally free form.
It's way more nuanced than that. Avoid the treadmill or cargo culting productivity, but don't avoid reckoning with your habits and learning the skills you need to stay organized. That's a real thing and best done as early as possible. In my experience, I was interested in productivity stuff as early as a teenager but nothing clicked until my late 20s and then I finally found things that worked for me, and I'm glad I did.
If you end up doing this stuff as an end in itself, as in it becomes the task of your day, well then you're in trouble.
On the other hand, I've found real value in actually adopting /a/ "productivity system". For a year now I've been following the GTD approach, and it has made my work more structured, and more targeted -- instead of floundering in my own scattered thoughts and notes.
But I do agree with you that constantly switching to find the new perfect system is very unproductive. Partly because of the pareto principle, and partly because you actually get better at using your current system overtime.
You need to start where you are, and realize that just doing more things isn't going to fix any holes in your life. If you have a ton of things to do and you are having trouble keeping track of them, then you might have use for a tool.
Separate your work and your life and your ambitions. I'm lucky enough that I can track my work stuff in my head. If it ever gets to where it's too hectic, I escalate to a written task list.
My home life is similar. All of my life context is kept physically. I can see that the dishes aren't done. I can see when I need to take out the trash.
My ambitions, on the other hand, well, I've spent man-years of effort on hacking away at solutions to manifest them faster. I don't consider the time I've spent writing scripts and stuff wasted because I love doing this stuff, it's what I naturally start doing once everything else is sorted. I don't take a 'ship it' strategy to them because to me the point is enjoying the journey, not to get to the end as fast as I can.
I don't have to build a colocated kubernetes cluster in order to host a blog, but I want to. It appeals to my sensibilities to not pay hundreds of dollars for compute when I have a perfectly good desktop machine with lots of its own compute.
I've spent more time on keyboard macros than I'll ever save. But the feeling of power I get from having my world accessible with just a few keystrokes is great. And learning about how evdev and xbindkeys and the like work is interesting as well.
The hole isn't filled when I get to the end. The end is when the hole stops being filled. This is what organization will do to you if you're not careful.
The reason we continue to look for improvement in productivity is the same reason I use Git instead of SVN or zsh/bash instead of GUI. Learning curve is steep but I feel so much more productive. The reward of learning something new can be massive. I've spent tons of hours on learning Vim and tweaking its config file, and it has rewarded me with an editor that I feel comfortable using for a lifetime. I've also wanted to try Emacs because of its potential benefits.
Zettel* is not for everyone, just as GTD or Pomodoro or Agile/Scrumm or Kanban. But when it works for those certain people, it is like magic, and the productivity level just skyrockets. When GTD was popular a decade ago, it really revolutionized how I worked, and its biggest benefit was that it offloaded brain so I can really focus on what is essential, not having to constantly remember what I needed to do next.
It's the same reason I use markdown, git, vim/emacs/vscode, etc.
I found it useful to put my yak shaving nice to have tasks in an org document. Ironic, for sure, but something about writing it down scratched the itch and allowed me to move on.
1. You might find something that B does that is just so difficult to accomplish in A, so you want to switch. But before you do, you should spend a week living with the difficult path to do that thing in A. You will likely find that learning the muscle memory to do that thing in A was actually the difficult part, and once you've overcome that hurdle it isn't difficult any more.
2. You might switch to B and feel that "now, everything is so organized!" However, it's very likely that you could have "switched" from A to A and you'd feel the same way. What I mean by this is that by switching, you've forced yourself to revisit all of your notes. If you forced yourself to revisit your notes without switching, you'd see the same effect.