"Getting lost in your knowledge management system is a fantastic way to avoid creating things. Or calling that friend you’re estranged from. Or doing anything else even mildly threatening. It’s also a fantastic way to convince yourself that unpreparedness is what’s between you and creative work. If you believe you’re unprepared, know that you will never transmute into the perfectly prepared person that you think exists in the future."
I always framed this more as
‘the tools will not save me’. A better pen won’t make me a better illustrator, no system/framework/methodology will take in garbage and spit out gold. But, in retrospect, I think I should partly blame seeking a foolish level of preparedness. I’ll try to recognise/abstain from this ‘preparbation’ in the future.
I’m absolutely not gifted when it comes to manual crafts, but I’ve found having the right tool for the job brings me from shamefully incapable to acceptably competent.
For example I got into book binding a while back and while I started freehand I quickly built a jig and it vastly improved the quality of the work.
Preparbation is a great term :-) I always try to conciously remind myself to avoid diminishing returns when doing this kind of stuff (i.e 80/20 rule), but that sums up nicely with just the right amount of sting.
But if you do it well, it's the opposite. Luhmann, who came up with Zettelkasten, is known to be one of the most prolific scholars in the last century.
Zettelkasten was essential for this. The thing is that his original system was incredibly simple. I think that's what people are missing. Plain Org or Markdown files on a Git repository are a great way to mimic Zettelkasten. You don't need more and restrictions are actually very liberating.
I've found Logseq and Previously Roam work well in that they are low friction in recording information, but I'm still able to find information when I need it (most of the time). The nested block system means it's pretty easy to link concepts together without having to find the right place to put information. This ease of workflow helps me to be more creative, in that I can add a note quickly and move on, with out having to search, prune and deliberate on a 'PKM'.
It's not about doing it well versus poorly, it's about the motivation behind it.
If you're building a complex organizational system because it absorbs your time and enables you to avoid confronting the fear of making artistic choices and putting something out into the world, it's not helping.
If you're building a complex organization system because you need it to build the thing you want to put out there, by all means go for it.
It takes a lot of introspection to be able to distinguish these two cases.
Jira-ish tools help immensely if the project manager changes mid-project… at least some knowledge will be in work items if the previous pm actually did any work.
I think this is only a way to avoid creating things because we don't focus on collaborative note taking systems. Once people start sharing notes, they will start making friends by discovering the people who care about the same topics and create things together. Tweets and blogging are a bit like that but they are curated for a public image.
Add some diffusion models that take over the creative part, and knowledge management systems become a tool to act. Of course, the risk of getting lost in knowledge not only remains but increases.
1. List-style notes of things we need to remember
2. School-style notes of information and ideas
I think the former requires a tool, but nothing particularly sophisticated - Apple Notes for example with its search indexing is fine
I think the latter we write only to stimulate our brain to process information and learn better.
I think there is a discrepancy where a lot of tools attempt to make Type 2 notes more "convenient", i.e. to trying to somehow make them an extension of our brain, but the truth is that it's like hacking a hard drive to work as fast as a CPU register -- retrieving and working with information is always going to be orders of magnitude slower than working through your thoughts in your brain.
The reason I use a note-taking system is point 1 for what I'm working on now, point 2 when I'm following a tutorial and want to assimilate the subject, but there is a third point which is why I'm trying so many of them : I need a way to store information that's useful to me and be able to recover it when I need it.
3 examples would be :
1. An API is broken at work and you need to log a bug. who do you log it for? Who do you ask for help?
2. There are a few commands I need to remember to do stuff with kubectl, but can never remember the details. What are the exact commands i need to run to do this <specific use case to me>
3. I work in an area I've worked in a year ago and don't remember the definiton of business stuff. I want to be able to just look up how I defined it a year ago.
The big problem for me was this is completely different from school where you just learn stuff for 4 months, vomit everything on a test and then never re-use the notes again. I find the way I took notes at university competently inadequate because it's basically impossible to retrieve specific information.
After playing with a bunch of stuff I find I need 2 features :
1. hierarchical notes : instead of folders, notes are below other notes.
2. A good search function.
3. (optional) I also want markdown so I can write code blocks easily since I'm a programmer
I'm trying Dendron right now because it hits all 3 points, but honestly Zim Wiki is dead simple and is unreasonably effective if you don't care about markdown.
I think this is it. I have a single markdown file for all my casual notes (1), and a folder structure for my permanent notes (2). Notes of type 2 are the most valuable long-term, and it's worth the time to select what to store, and to structure it right.
I'm always on the hunt of my ideal open source, lightweight, non-cloud, cross-platform, mobile-friendly hierarchical note taking app, but I know I'm asking too much, maybe I'll never find it. Meanwhile I use plain text editors.
I use gitjournal.io to sync my folder of markdown notes between PC and phone. I wrote about my little ensemble of editors and tools at https://www.bbkane.com/blog/how-i-take-notes/
Came here to say this. I have a highly evolved note taking methodology/snippet setup(common MAC address prefixes etc)/auto-insert timestamp every line that I use VS Code for. If I spoke to someone 15 months ago, I can tell you who and the exact time/day and some shorthand notes about the call.
Any article that pretends to know what the right way of taking notes (say, "This is known as a commonplace book, and it is about how detailed your note-taking system should be unless you plan on thinking more elaborately than Leonardo da Vinci." in this article) is missing the point.
People think differently, people have different purposes and goals, people have different constraints on their time, their memory, their field. Can you procrastinate on note-taking? Sure. So can you on writing, and publishing, and building an audience, and writing papers, and doing the dishes.
Can people have a fantastic creative output by just opening a blank page and jotting down their thoughts? Sure. Can other people write great books with an elaborate notetaking system? Of course. There are plenty of people out there with terrific, obsessive note-taking and reference systems, Kubrick being one of the prime examples.
As someone with what looks from the outside to be an overarchitected note-taking system ( https://publish.obsidian.md/manuel ), it is a system that works great for me, and it is a system that makes me more creative and helps me discover ideas I would have never been able to articulate without. I used linear sketchbooks where I would write and draw whatever for years, filling hundreds of notebooks, and it came nowhere near my obsidian setup in terms of output and effectiveness.
I see a similar thing with people complaining about other people taking pictures of things. They assert that you won't remember anything if you spend your time behind a lens because that's how their memory works. I won't remember much/anything if I don't take pictures. I get new phones with a focus on the camera because photos are a big part of how I navigate my memories. Same with taking notes: if I don't write it down, it's gone. It comes back quick with as much force as a fresh memory upon review of the photo/note.
It's possible for both things to be true. Perhaps for a rare few a more elaborate system is required, but for most it is a hindrance. A piece of advice doesn't need to be totally universal to be useful.
This is strange. Lately, I've had a number of people in different situations (especially at work) tell me of similar efforts pushing back on organized process or.. organized anything, including note-taking, task tracking and more. Is there some kind of attempt at a mental revolution here or is this some kind of response to people being overloaded and not wanting to carry the mental burden/weight/let it go?
I almost feel like this should not even be a topic. Using tools to help organize thoughts - why do we care if it helps people? - not all brains work the same. What is wrong about organizing one's thoughts and spending time doing so??
I can see the argument that one can get lost in a meta-loop of sorts, but that's probably true of anything when you take into account procrastination - or certain brain types - that are prone to loops. For some people loops feel good, right? I say this as somebody who is lightly on the spectrum.
Even the pushback against knowledge management as a practice is perplexing - there was a time where Peter Drucker, for example, thought knowledge work would someday be all there was left to do.
That said, I can't help but wonder if there really is something bigger/some kind of trend going on here and I can't quite put my finger on it. Is this something evolutionary? Are we trying to evolve/seek a better way as an organism?
Honestly probably just the contrarian pendulum swinging. The answer of course is that the exact right amount of PKM is whatever amount is helpful for you at this particular moment. But imagine how few clicks that blog post would get!
I can't speak to any wider trend but I read this article as a pushback against the hype that maybe makes note-taking out to be a more powerful tool than it really is.
I tried note-taking and spaced repetition for a while. To the extent that it replaced mindless HN reading, it was positive but I can also see how easy it is to pour in buckets of time without much benefit. It's a very thirsty pursuit - there's always more you could do and you never reach a clear stopping point.
People are annoyed. It is almost impossible to have a discussion about learning, without someone proselytising about Zettelkasten. Similarly, a few years ago it was almost impossible to have a discussion about intelligence, without someone proselytising about Dual N-Back. So, hopefully, this fashion too shall pass.
Saying that notes are completely useless is just stupid contrarianism, clickbait. But it is true that making and maintaining one's notes can be a form of procrastination. On the other hand, if you write too many notes, it can become difficult to find what you are looking for. There are different applications for note-making, each coming with different advantages and disadvantages. Choosing the right one... again, is important, but also can be a form of procrastination.
Things become even more difficult in an organization, where note-taking is a part of your job, and you have to cooperate with other people. And just like bad programmers generate spaghetti code, bad writers generate... spaghetti wikis? A large organization can have literally million Confluence pages, with tons of duplicated content, with no one removing the obsolete content, so when you search for e.g. "how to configure proxy", you get dozens of answers, most of them containing information that was correct five or ten years ago, but it no longer true.
Shortly, this entire topic is quite frustrating, at least for me. There is a problem. There is no obviously right solution. There are people promoting their favorite solutions, which often do not work for you. But at the end of the day you need to choose something. If you start making notes and change your mind ten years later, it can be quite a lot of work to convert your notes to the new format. (I just keep my old notes as read-only, and started making new notes in the new system.) Frustration makes people express strong opinions.
> Is there some kind of attempt at a mental revolution here or is this some kind of response to people being overloaded and not wanting to carry the mental burden/weight/let it go?
More so recently, I have seen more and more push back against what people are calling, "Toxic Productivity."
I could see an argument for psuedo-pathologizing one's attempts at trying to find the "best" note-taking system under Toxic Productivity.
Our relationship with productivity is unhealthy and we are doing it to ourselves by trying to over-optimise (min-max) everything. Yet, when we realise that we are all mortals, nothing that we do really matters in the end.... which can be both scary, but also liberating.
I mostly endorse this, but as I recently wrote in reply to something else [1], I also have found great value in writing things down to get them out of my head. In that case I was more talking about blog-post type things, but it includes notes for work and such.
So what I sometimes do is a hybrid model: I take the notes, thus satisfying my brain that the thing is no longer something it needs to chew on... and then basically discard the notes. Not quite literally, I don't literally chuck them in the trash. I might keep them around for a while in case I do need something out of them. But they don't contribute to my "to do" list, metaphorical or literal, much at all.
Yes. Every once in a long while, something falls through the cracks that I should have picked up. But the reality is that for me, YMMV, this approach is a huge net positive. I am able to constantly re-evaluate what's important right now without a lot of mental baggage, and usually, when I'm in the moment deciding what's important in this moment, I'm vastly more accurate in my assessment than I would have been trying to prognosticate a month ago.
I believe the author would agree fully with this model. They aren't against writing as thinking, they're against focusing on your note-taking system as a meaningful artifact in itself. And especially against it as an elaborate distracting one.
From neuroscience perspective, it is the Anticipation of the task that releases dopamine, not the "Doing" of the task, hence the appeal of all the productivity porn.
And as a corollary, it could be the Anticipation of difficulty in tackling a daunting task that makes you avoid it, rather than the actual difficulty in tackling.
So, the best way to getting into the flow state and getting things done (pun intended) is to force yourself to just do it.
Minimizing friction has been the game-changer for me. I don't avoid easy-to-do things, I just do them. If I can pre-load getting rid of friction I do.
For example, a meal plan generator was an expense I justified because it grossly simplified meal-planning and shopping. Removing that bit of friction made me much more likely to stick to my plan to more healthily.
My note-taking system, basically the same since college:
1. Write down every nontrivial observation in a flat text file.
2. When that file gets longer than a few pages, transcribe it into a new file while leaving out or combining or rephrasing everything that now seems trivial.
3. Repeat until you've either memorized everything or don't need the info anymore, then delete the notes.
In retrospect this is similar to spaced repetition, but with a subjective "this feels trivial now" interval instead of a fixed interval.
Honest question about step #3, there's a theory of YAGNI (you aren't going to need it) I feel going on here. Information overload/hoarding is not good either.
One thing I cannot shake is, there are things that I know I learned, but I can no longer remember. Without a prompt, a shred of something from the past - a note, a book, something - I often cannot recall it anymore.
People with brains that suffer from memory loss/recall issues/Alzheimer's/dementia/long term retention - etc. - how does doing #3 address that? I feel like maybe you don't need to look at it all the time, but couldn't having that around as a reference still be a prompt for you at some point later in your life, where maybe you can't just remember everything?
I am similar. I have a very good memory, and am ability to hold a lot of detail in mind, but my recall is horrible. It can take me hours to get my head back into a subject, but once I'm there I can easily go deep. As you can imagine, context-switching can completely destroy my ability to engage meaningfully on any pursuit.
What I've found useful is creating index files that have just the highlights for the major "blocks" of thought. Then it's like skimming my thoughts. I just need the triggers to prompt recall. If I can get the pump started with the main ideas, or key information, the details will flow.
I also tend to take copious notes about everything, but I don't pressure myself to actually use them. They serve a different purpose. Because it takes conscious effort, the act of note-taking convinces my subconscious that the information of important, and improves my recall, at least for a little while.
Not the same process as above. The index files are optimized for reading and to promote recall. The detailed notes are optimized for writing and to promote retention in long-term memory
I guess, to the article's points, I feel like note-taking is a personal endeavor. If you're doing it because you think you "should," it's probably not useful. But as you are trying to know your own mind and develop your own productivity, it's a tool that can address some specific challenges. What it ends up looking like should be very tailored to your mental processes.
I like this system. This is also somewhat similar to the bullet journal system, but in a "to-do list" context. Every month you write down your to-dos. The next month you cross off those that no longer matter, and move forward those that are still relevant and pending.
I've been using Obsidian for a year or so now.
I only take notes for meetings / planning agendas for meetings ahead of time - I also have the notes automatically committed to git on the hour. I actually got inspired to do this by James Comey's well documented use of contemporaneous notes. I don't know why I'm not important - in fact, what I need to look for in obsidian is the concept of having notes `expire` after a bit.
In anycase, all these articles about note taking are always about how they work (or don't) work for the individual author of said article. It doesn't mean it's the right solution for you. Take what does work for you and abandon the rest without giving it a second thought. This comment included.
Readit News
"Getting lost in your knowledge management system is a fantastic way to avoid creating things. Or calling that friend you’re estranged from. Or doing anything else even mildly threatening. It’s also a fantastic way to convince yourself that unpreparedness is what’s between you and creative work. If you believe you’re unprepared, know that you will never transmute into the perfectly prepared person that you think exists in the future."
For example I got into book binding a while back and while I started freehand I quickly built a jig and it vastly improved the quality of the work.
One of my mantras lately has been, "If it doesn't make me at least a little uncomfortable, I'm probably avoiding something."
Zettelkasten was essential for this. The thing is that his original system was incredibly simple. I think that's what people are missing. Plain Org or Markdown files on a Git repository are a great way to mimic Zettelkasten. You don't need more and restrictions are actually very liberating.
If you're building a complex organizational system because it absorbs your time and enables you to avoid confronting the fear of making artistic choices and putting something out into the world, it's not helping.
If you're building a complex organization system because you need it to build the thing you want to put out there, by all means go for it.
It takes a lot of introspection to be able to distinguish these two cases.
Deleted Comment
Add some diffusion models that take over the creative part, and knowledge management systems become a tool to act. Of course, the risk of getting lost in knowledge not only remains but increases.
I think the latter we write only to stimulate our brain to process information and learn better.
I think there is a discrepancy where a lot of tools attempt to make Type 2 notes more "convenient", i.e. to trying to somehow make them an extension of our brain, but the truth is that it's like hacking a hard drive to work as fast as a CPU register -- retrieving and working with information is always going to be orders of magnitude slower than working through your thoughts in your brain.
3 examples would be :
1. An API is broken at work and you need to log a bug. who do you log it for? Who do you ask for help?
2. There are a few commands I need to remember to do stuff with kubectl, but can never remember the details. What are the exact commands i need to run to do this <specific use case to me>
3. I work in an area I've worked in a year ago and don't remember the definiton of business stuff. I want to be able to just look up how I defined it a year ago.
The big problem for me was this is completely different from school where you just learn stuff for 4 months, vomit everything on a test and then never re-use the notes again. I find the way I took notes at university competently inadequate because it's basically impossible to retrieve specific information.
After playing with a bunch of stuff I find I need 2 features :
1. hierarchical notes : instead of folders, notes are below other notes.
2. A good search function.
3. (optional) I also want markdown so I can write code blocks easily since I'm a programmer
I'm trying Dendron right now because it hits all 3 points, but honestly Zim Wiki is dead simple and is unreasonably effective if you don't care about markdown.
I'm always on the hunt of my ideal open source, lightweight, non-cloud, cross-platform, mobile-friendly hierarchical note taking app, but I know I'm asking too much, maybe I'll never find it. Meanwhile I use plain text editors.
These notes are invaluable.
Small question: how do you expect "automatic sync" to work "between platforms without a cloud"?
People think differently, people have different purposes and goals, people have different constraints on their time, their memory, their field. Can you procrastinate on note-taking? Sure. So can you on writing, and publishing, and building an audience, and writing papers, and doing the dishes.
Can people have a fantastic creative output by just opening a blank page and jotting down their thoughts? Sure. Can other people write great books with an elaborate notetaking system? Of course. There are plenty of people out there with terrific, obsessive note-taking and reference systems, Kubrick being one of the prime examples.
As someone with what looks from the outside to be an overarchitected note-taking system ( https://publish.obsidian.md/manuel ), it is a system that works great for me, and it is a system that makes me more creative and helps me discover ideas I would have never been able to articulate without. I used linear sketchbooks where I would write and draw whatever for years, filling hundreds of notebooks, and it came nowhere near my obsidian setup in terms of output and effectiveness.
I'm not sure how I know this, I just know. It's like that xkcd about the words that wikipedia really likes.
Let me rephrase. How many such projects exist?
Let me rephrase. How many digits does that number have?
The dig is that many note-taking enthusiasts work for the system rather than the system working for them.
I almost feel like this should not even be a topic. Using tools to help organize thoughts - why do we care if it helps people? - not all brains work the same. What is wrong about organizing one's thoughts and spending time doing so??
I can see the argument that one can get lost in a meta-loop of sorts, but that's probably true of anything when you take into account procrastination - or certain brain types - that are prone to loops. For some people loops feel good, right? I say this as somebody who is lightly on the spectrum.
Even the pushback against knowledge management as a practice is perplexing - there was a time where Peter Drucker, for example, thought knowledge work would someday be all there was left to do.
That said, I can't help but wonder if there really is something bigger/some kind of trend going on here and I can't quite put my finger on it. Is this something evolutionary? Are we trying to evolve/seek a better way as an organism?
Is anybody else seeing/feeling the same trend?
I tried note-taking and spaced repetition for a while. To the extent that it replaced mindless HN reading, it was positive but I can also see how easy it is to pour in buckets of time without much benefit. It's a very thirsty pursuit - there's always more you could do and you never reach a clear stopping point.
In this case, it becomes procrastination
> there's always more you could do and you never reach a clear stopping point
Do we need to do more and procrastination is just a signal that we don't want to do something
Saying that notes are completely useless is just stupid contrarianism, clickbait. But it is true that making and maintaining one's notes can be a form of procrastination. On the other hand, if you write too many notes, it can become difficult to find what you are looking for. There are different applications for note-making, each coming with different advantages and disadvantages. Choosing the right one... again, is important, but also can be a form of procrastination.
Things become even more difficult in an organization, where note-taking is a part of your job, and you have to cooperate with other people. And just like bad programmers generate spaghetti code, bad writers generate... spaghetti wikis? A large organization can have literally million Confluence pages, with tons of duplicated content, with no one removing the obsolete content, so when you search for e.g. "how to configure proxy", you get dozens of answers, most of them containing information that was correct five or ten years ago, but it no longer true.
Shortly, this entire topic is quite frustrating, at least for me. There is a problem. There is no obviously right solution. There are people promoting their favorite solutions, which often do not work for you. But at the end of the day you need to choose something. If you start making notes and change your mind ten years later, it can be quite a lot of work to convert your notes to the new format. (I just keep my old notes as read-only, and started making new notes in the new system.) Frustration makes people express strong opinions.
More so recently, I have seen more and more push back against what people are calling, "Toxic Productivity."
I could see an argument for psuedo-pathologizing one's attempts at trying to find the "best" note-taking system under Toxic Productivity.
TL;DR
Our relationship with productivity is unhealthy and we are doing it to ourselves by trying to over-optimise (min-max) everything. Yet, when we realise that we are all mortals, nothing that we do really matters in the end.... which can be both scary, but also liberating.
There is also an awesome Time-management for mortals - https://dynamic.wakingup.com/pack/PKDAFBB
Its an anti-thesis to productivity (as much as the title sounds otherwise).
Dead Comment
So what I sometimes do is a hybrid model: I take the notes, thus satisfying my brain that the thing is no longer something it needs to chew on... and then basically discard the notes. Not quite literally, I don't literally chuck them in the trash. I might keep them around for a while in case I do need something out of them. But they don't contribute to my "to do" list, metaphorical or literal, much at all.
Yes. Every once in a long while, something falls through the cracks that I should have picked up. But the reality is that for me, YMMV, this approach is a huge net positive. I am able to constantly re-evaluate what's important right now without a lot of mental baggage, and usually, when I'm in the moment deciding what's important in this moment, I'm vastly more accurate in my assessment than I would have been trying to prognosticate a month ago.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32984424
And as a corollary, it could be the Anticipation of difficulty in tackling a daunting task that makes you avoid it, rather than the actual difficulty in tackling.
So, the best way to getting into the flow state and getting things done (pun intended) is to force yourself to just do it.
And also reducing as much friction as possible. For me, that means, reduce temptation to style and ultra minimal note categorization.
• New Note in my OS's default, no-frills note app.
• Start typing.
• Done.
I can always search it later with keywords. Getting it out of the brain is already an immensely feeing act, anything else is bonus.
(I do some post-notetaking categorization but it's not systematic and I allow myself to just leave it in the default bucket of uncategorized notes.)
For example, a meal plan generator was an expense I justified because it grossly simplified meal-planning and shopping. Removing that bit of friction made me much more likely to stick to my plan to more healthily.
Source?
1. Write down every nontrivial observation in a flat text file.
2. When that file gets longer than a few pages, transcribe it into a new file while leaving out or combining or rephrasing everything that now seems trivial.
3. Repeat until you've either memorized everything or don't need the info anymore, then delete the notes.
In retrospect this is similar to spaced repetition, but with a subjective "this feels trivial now" interval instead of a fixed interval.
One thing I cannot shake is, there are things that I know I learned, but I can no longer remember. Without a prompt, a shred of something from the past - a note, a book, something - I often cannot recall it anymore.
People with brains that suffer from memory loss/recall issues/Alzheimer's/dementia/long term retention - etc. - how does doing #3 address that? I feel like maybe you don't need to look at it all the time, but couldn't having that around as a reference still be a prompt for you at some point later in your life, where maybe you can't just remember everything?
What I've found useful is creating index files that have just the highlights for the major "blocks" of thought. Then it's like skimming my thoughts. I just need the triggers to prompt recall. If I can get the pump started with the main ideas, or key information, the details will flow.
I also tend to take copious notes about everything, but I don't pressure myself to actually use them. They serve a different purpose. Because it takes conscious effort, the act of note-taking convinces my subconscious that the information of important, and improves my recall, at least for a little while.
Not the same process as above. The index files are optimized for reading and to promote recall. The detailed notes are optimized for writing and to promote retention in long-term memory
I guess, to the article's points, I feel like note-taking is a personal endeavor. If you're doing it because you think you "should," it's probably not useful. But as you are trying to know your own mind and develop your own productivity, it's a tool that can address some specific challenges. What it ends up looking like should be very tailored to your mental processes.
#Wednesday #BeforeAHoliday