My notes are never long-form, and I envy people whose notes look publication-ready. I think in lists and mnemonics.
My work involves so much context-switching that I ended up building a weird system just to keep continuity. It’s basically an outliner inspired by MaxThink for DOS. At its core, it’s text plus structure: a tree you can revisit non-sequentially, with time anchors when they matter. It helps me survive interruptions and gaps without losing decisions, context, or long-running threads, and it helps me correlate my digital notes with my paper notebooks.
To support the “thinking” part, it also has some goodies for shuffling, sorting, splitting, and joining lists in place to help with ideation. I’m working on the fourth incarnation now.
I recorded a demo a few months ago to share with a friend. It’s not my best recording because I was recovering from hand surgery so typing was weird: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9HX3G69Xdo
I may open-source it once I’ve worked the bugs out.
I think self-cataloging is fundamentally masturbatory. On its face, there's nothing wrong with keeping notes or searchable records. But letting the record become the goal - organizing, re-organizing, polishing, theorizing - feels wrong in a way I can't articulate.
Self-cataloging can be become a method of procrastination. But that doesn't mean that there is no value to be found in methods like Zettelkasten. The activity of looking through your own Zettelkasten has the potential of creating associations and sparking ideas. That can be very valuable and requires some care of your notes. But trying to find the perfect taxonomy for your own notes is foolish mistake. The technical limitations of the original Zettelkasten, makes refactoring the notes to the current approximation of the perfect taxonomy such a huge task, that it is usually avoided.
A nice example of a limitation that supports creativity.
Maybe if you organized your notes you could articulate your thoughts better!
jk, I agree. I use logseq synced across devices, but I barely know any of the shortcuts and never made any kind of brilliant web of personal knowledge. My notes are always available and are searchable, which is enough for those rare occasions when I need to find something obscure and for those common occasions when I want a tried and true cocktail recipe. Maybe I'll hyper-organize it one day and find a billion dollar idea lurking under the surface...but probably not.
IME there's two main reasons to keep notes: (1) to save time in the future or (2) to force myself to think about something.
(2) often happens after I read fiction, usually to figure out why I liked / disliked the story. These notes are mostly disposable but occasionally useful when the book comes up in conversation years later.
On the other hand, (1) is more like notes on how-tos (recipes, software setup), written with the intention of needing it again. But this is pretty infrequent, maybe a quick skim every year or two. So even these don't need to be super thorough.
> feels wrong in a way I can't articulate.
Anyways, all that to say I think the "wtf-am-i-doing-with-my-life" feeling comes from the realization that I'm wasting hours on a document that'll save future me maybe 5 minutes at best.
...Which is how I feel about NixOS after spending most of this week tinkering / tracking down documentation. Might be worth it if I had a fleet of machines to maintain but probably not worth it for my laptop + server, even if I did yearly reinstalls.
This goes over my head a bit, but I suppose they are discussing the concept of something like a personal wiki; if so, https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/about.html is my favourite.
Yes, and PKMs in general. Like labeling your emails by topic in Gmail. The problem is that the 'toil' keeps piling up, while the value gained is increasingly hard to see.
I'm also not sure if I fully get what the author is going on about, but at least part of it seems to be "don't over-taxonomize and over-architect your note-taking and knowledge management systems, locking yourself into an inflexible format/schema too early just kills it in the long run."
If I'm correct that that's part of the thrust of the article (and I may not be), then I definitely agree with the author. The first time I tried to use Obsidian I burned out because I went all-in on the bi-di linking, tagging, knowledge graph, etc., and it quickly killed my motivation. Now I just dump text in and rely on search to find what I need, only adding links in retrospect once they are needed, and now I actually use it and get value from it.
As someone who thought they used obsidian somewhat well, I feel like a caveman/casual after reading that.
I mean that as praise, it reeled me in as both a puzzle (what am I even reading right now) and a conclusion (the bleeding edge of obsidianmd space is like XKCD straws).
fmeyer|1 month ago
My work involves so much context-switching that I ended up building a weird system just to keep continuity. It’s basically an outliner inspired by MaxThink for DOS. At its core, it’s text plus structure: a tree you can revisit non-sequentially, with time anchors when they matter. It helps me survive interruptions and gaps without losing decisions, context, or long-running threads, and it helps me correlate my digital notes with my paper notebooks.
To support the “thinking” part, it also has some goodies for shuffling, sorting, splitting, and joining lists in place to help with ideation. I’m working on the fourth incarnation now.
I recorded a demo a few months ago to share with a friend. It’s not my best recording because I was recovering from hand surgery so typing was weird: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9HX3G69Xdo
I may open-source it once I’ve worked the bugs out.
sdwr|1 month ago
funcDropShadow|1 month ago
A nice example of a limitation that supports creativity.
overtone1000|1 month ago
jk, I agree. I use logseq synced across devices, but I barely know any of the shortcuts and never made any kind of brilliant web of personal knowledge. My notes are always available and are searchable, which is enough for those rare occasions when I need to find something obscure and for those common occasions when I want a tried and true cocktail recipe. Maybe I'll hyper-organize it one day and find a billion dollar idea lurking under the surface...but probably not.
Frotag|1 month ago
(2) often happens after I read fiction, usually to figure out why I liked / disliked the story. These notes are mostly disposable but occasionally useful when the book comes up in conversation years later.
On the other hand, (1) is more like notes on how-tos (recipes, software setup), written with the intention of needing it again. But this is pretty infrequent, maybe a quick skim every year or two. So even these don't need to be super thorough.
> feels wrong in a way I can't articulate.
Anyways, all that to say I think the "wtf-am-i-doing-with-my-life" feeling comes from the realization that I'm wasting hours on a document that'll save future me maybe 5 minutes at best.
...Which is how I feel about NixOS after spending most of this week tinkering / tracking down documentation. Might be worth it if I had a fleet of machines to maintain but probably not worth it for my laptop + server, even if I did yearly reinstalls.
TazeTSchnitzel|1 month ago
gwern|1 month ago
I have a little rant about it - "‘Tools for thought’ winds up being a lie: there’s tools, but not much additional thought." https://gwern.net/blog/2024/tools-for-thought-failure https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CoqFpaorNHsWxRzvz/what-comes...
(My answer, of course, is that almost all of this scutwork is well within the capabilities of a frontier LLM today. We just need to apply them.)
Analemma_|1 month ago
If I'm correct that that's part of the thrust of the article (and I may not be), then I definitely agree with the author. The first time I tried to use Obsidian I burned out because I went all-in on the bi-di linking, tagging, knowledge graph, etc., and it quickly killed my motivation. Now I just dump text in and rely on search to find what I need, only adding links in retrospect once they are needed, and now I actually use it and get value from it.
voxleone|1 month ago
MrVandemar|1 month ago
You know, that thing that they are trying to kill.
someone7x|1 month ago
I mean that as praise, it reeled me in as both a puzzle (what am I even reading right now) and a conclusion (the bleeding edge of obsidianmd space is like XKCD straws).