I have a blog post that I've been sketching out in my head about this whole area of Tools for Thought, future of computing, cybernetics, etc. Basically I find that the thoughtleaders of this space seem to always claim that the true manifestation of their ideas is just out of reach (Project Xanadu, memex, object oriented programming, etc.), but then never deliver this true manifestation.
Indeed it's rather remarkable how many of these figures like Vannevar Bush, Alan Kay, Douglas Engelbart, etc., never actually shipped much. Now, you could argue that they were ahead of their time and couldn't ship, and for some of these people you would be right. But c'mon now, Alan Kay is still kicking, and still talking about how programming should be reinvented. Douglas Engelbart lived into the 2010's. It's more that these fantastical futuristic ideas, if they were released, would probably not live up to their sales pitches. They're all chasing the high of Engelbart's famous demo. And their followers, who are perpetually waiting, who attempt interpretations of these thoughtleaders ideas and get dismissed as flawed manifestations, well they are essentially the parish. They're waiting for the second coming.
This isn't to say that none of these people have accomplished stuff. They have accomplished an extraordinary amount. But they are fundamentally salesmen, salesmen for the future. And salesmen only have a job as long as they have something to sell.
You might have just stumbled upon the Ozic secret of the Silicon Valley. Most of the guys who have made it rich so far did so on the ideas of others (while those who had grand ideas didn’t ship them).
When a core tenet is making things other people want, you tend to uplift folks who have no great thoughts of their own to sell.
I can imagine an Orwellian doublespeakessay on Steve Jobs called, “Saying No As The Only Act of Creation”.
Manager, meet thy Master.
PS: Was reading some Thiel approved Girard today, he mentioned something about the nihilism in society in which the secret of success being all about signaling success.
> PS: Was reading some Thiel approved Girard today, he mentioned something about the nihilism in society in which the secret of success being all about signaling success.
You make some good points in here, but I don't think it's the full story.
From my perspective (first eng at Notion), I think what the sales pitch that really captures people's imagination is these situations where "the whole is equal to more than the sum of it's parts". That's what Engelbart and Kay really demonstrated with their work. It preys on the Gambler's fallacy too, just like AI: building something hoping for an unexpected outsized reward.
Where these inspirations start to fall flat is when you start focusing on solving an actual problem. Notion, for example, didn't really solve any specific problems in the beginning that didn't already have a solution available. Most people are interested in solving a problem so they can move on and never return to it. They don't bother to sharpen their axe if they only have one tree to chop down, so they just get the job done and move on.
But what about the one person who tirelessly sharpens their axe so they can chop down a tree in one swipe? What is actually motivating this person to spend all of this effort just to chop down a single tree? Maybe this isn't the perfect analogy, but my point is that many of these ideas start out more like an art project than a startup company. Because too much focus on solving a problem leads "good enough is the enemy of great".
Going from art project to actual product requires a lot more work that people tend to realize. And in my experience, that process tends to siphon away a lot of inspirational energy. At least, this has been my personal experience. Having left Notion almost 2 years ago, I've been finding it hard to motivate myself to build another sausage factory.
This sounds like the linked post: some people build the game engine, others build the game.
I think what happens is that people use a tool and they find a flaw, and they come up with an idea which will not have it. They build it, great! But then their tool also has flaws, due to things they didn't predict or trade offs - to make one part more elegant, maybe another part must suffer.
I feel often the most productive is to live with the flaws and do incremental improvements to reduce them. Creating a whole new tool is often futile - unless it's revolutionary, adopting won't be great, or won't boost your productivity that much to account for the time you sank building it.
Academics (and "Hackers"/Visionaries) in every field are doing the same thing every day. It is called (open) experimentation/Imagination/Theorisation.
Tools for thought are no different. Computers/HCI are still in their infancy and these ideas (xanadu…) are just not mature yet. What's the rush?
Even already mature paradigms are not easy to popularize in this domain. Take Obsidian. It is really just hyperlinked text files (at the core). Yet, most people, 30 pages after hyperlinks got popular, will fail to comprehend its utility.
We are still in the phase of tools of thought where even outliners are a novelty. Try adding a "semantic" DB on top of that outliner, and some will call it "a new fundamental model" [1].
My point is : For most (truly) new ideas/methods, it is normal that the manifestation is (ever) out of reach. It is like Charles Babbage reaching for the computer. It was completly out of his reach. Yet, his vision had value for the future.
Kay and his collaborators shipped Smalltalk, which was pretty widely used at one time, and which was also highly influential on Objective-C, the language of choice for OS X/macOS and iOS from 1996 to the introduction of Swift in 2014 (many devs are still using Objective-C).
That is fair, but why has he not shipped anything else? He's been content to sit back on his laurels for the past 40 years and make broad statements about OOP and the future of programming. Clearly Smalltalk was not the pinnacle of software development.
Like I said earlier, you probably haven't looked at Alan Kay's work in depth.
What did he do after Smalltalk? If it seems like nothing, it may be because you weren't the target demographics. He cared about teaching children computational thinking. Squeak, Etoys, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay#Subsequent_work
Sounds to me like a lazy and, frankly, disrespectful take.
Take Alan Kay. Smalltalk shipped. It's still shipping to this day. Right up until 2018 he was working: http://www.vpri.org/ Is it his fault that Smalltalk didn't conquer the world?
Is it Engelbart's fault his demo hasn't been taken seriously for fifty-four years?
> Indeed it's rather remarkable how many of these figures like Vannevar Bush, Alan Kay, Douglas Engelbart, etc., never actually shipped much. Now, you could argue that they were ahead of their time and couldn't ship, and for some of these people you would be right.
No, I'd argue, they were able to ship. To a surprising degree, given what they had at the time. Perhaps you know who they are and what their influences are, but I don't think you've looked at their work in depth if that's what you came away with.
Alan Kay et al shipped Smalltalk and the Alto machines at a time when personal computers weren't even a thing. That means inventing all the hardware and the software concepts.
Engelbart et al. Shipped all the modern ideas of computing that you take for granted today--networking, mouse, bitmap displays. In 1963, six years before people landed on the moon.
"We had to make our own computer display. You couldn’t buy them. I think it cost us $90,000 in 1963 money. We just had to build it from scratch. The display driver was a hunk of electronics 3 feet by 4 feet."
> But c'mon now, Alan Kay is still kicking, and still talking about how programming should be reinvented. Douglas Engelbart lived into the 2010's. It's more that these fantastical futuristic ideas, if they were released, would probably not live up to their sales pitches.
I have a more generous take on this. They talk about these things still, because deep ideas are hard to convey. We've copied some of the surface ideas, but we still are missing some things. I thought I knew what OOP was from my experience with C++, Java, Objective C, and Ruby, but it wasn't until I looked at Smalltalk that I saw the ideas were actually quite different.
All this to say that, we agree they're visionaries, but I disagree that they didn't ship. They did indeed ship, at a time when they had to invent the tools and concepts to build what they built.
I wonder if the trouble is not whether or not they are salesman but whether or not they are effective “managers,” for want of a better word. Many of the products we use today are built by companies of tens of thousands of people. Realizing Bush’s, Englebart’s, or Kay’s visions demands motivating and orchestrating armies of people with diverse skill sets.
Are any of these three known for their skill at orchestrating teams or organizations? Compare to some of the more famous scientists, engineers, etc., they’ve led large organizations. Like, Jeff Dean, Steve Jobs, J. Robert Oppenheimer, etc.
A brief look at the first few paragraphs of Vannevar Bush's Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush) would clearly establish that the answer to your question is yes.
Yeah Vannevar Bush is maybe an unfair example because he was truly before his time and he did build some stuff. I just felt he was worth pointing out as one of the originators of the whole knowledge graph tool for thought movement. I don’t know if he would have actually executed in modern times.
I think this is true to an extent. Some of these people did start out as managers but I think they realized whether consciously or not that the selling of ideas was far more beneficial than actually creating software.
Van Gogh didn't develop in an artistic or cultural vacuum. He received lots of criticism over the years and worked with the Parisian avant garde. He had peers to receive feedback from.
True artists ship to real artists..“Make things that people who’d like to make things people want want” (Like this Website). The unreasonable effectiveness of higher order recommendations.
His roommate the successful artist Paul Gauguin? Tried to borrow Sunflowers but
“Van Gogh was upset and replied that Gauguin had absolutely no right to make this request: "I am definitely keeping my sunflowers in question. He has two of them already, let that hold him. And if he is not satisfied with the exchange he has made with me, he can take back his little Martinique canvas, and his self-portrait sent me from Brittany, at the same time giving me back both my portrait and the two sunflower canvases which he has taken to Paris. So if he ever broaches this subject again, I've told you just how matters stand".
> Pointlessness of Organization: my Calibre and Zotero libraries are a mess. But is that bad? Is there any point to organizing them? I can always find what I need, either by searching or browsing, because I have a spatial sense of where each book is in Calibre’s big grid view. If I went through everything in Calibre and Zotero, and fixed the titles, added missing authors, publishers, publication years, fixed the cover images—what then? What have I gained? Nothing. It is a waste of time to organize things too much.
On reading this, I felt like I already sort of knew this, and this internet stranger validated my thoughts.
About once every year or two, I remember something I read maybe 15 years ago and realize it would be absolutely perfect for some reason, but I can't find it. And being an engineer and an HN poster, my brain immediately leaps to "Oh, if only I ran a system that archived everything I browsed so I could build my own personal search engine that could search on just what I've ever looked at."
Then I smack it down, because that is a crap-load of effort to recall a link every year or two. And let's be honest, the marginal value of that link isn't all that great either... in the moment the need may seem large, but sitting here typing about this I couldn't tell you even a single such thing I've forgotten about, because that's how important they are... just more ephemera in the stream themselves.
My MP3 collection is a bit of a mess. I've cleaned up the worst instances of "Band, The" "The Band" "Band" "Band - The" sorts of duplication, but that's about it. My book collection is similarly messy. Heck, even my family photos are basically sorted only by year and not much else. So what? I can fix it. I can fix it all. But it's hard to even so much as recover the time I'd put into it once over, let alone in multiples.
(Much more important, especially for the family photos, is not losing them. So I've got a backup solution. But it's just a fire-at-directory solution, not all gloriously organized by type either.)
So I've learned to just sort of let the desire to have greater organization pass over me, Litany-against-Fear style. It's just a siren call.
I'm through at least three complete reorganizations where I even dusted off old backups and collected all photos (because I felt I was deleting photos too liberally last time), de-duplicated (and de-quadruplicated) them all, and built the new "forever" structure.
It sucks that I just know I'll do it again at most five years from now.
Photos are a good example of why a filesystem hierarchy is insufficiently expressive. You might want to search for pictures of me at parties, or pictures with me and my wife, or pictures from 1999, or pictures of LA, and the same photo might belong in all of those searches. No single category will ever be a good place for a photo.
That's a good example because it leads to truth that NO up-front tagging will ever anticipate all the searches you might make in future. There are so many possible searches.
I figure that a combination of wetware and software is the current sweet spot. My brain usually has enough associations and context to turn every photo search into a time or place filter - "I think it was downtown last year" or "some time in summer at home" or "it had my wife in it". The photo storage system need only provide search/filter on date and place to narrow it down to a few hundred thumbnails, plus machine-learning to tag people. Which is basically what iOS provides, no more, no less.
Any other up-front categorization or tagging is basically wasted effort.
For me, I wrote a bulk tool that renames my photo file names by reverse geocoding the GPS information via Open Street Maps. That way I can do text search for place, as well as 2d map search. It's at https://unto.me
I’ve been looking for a good tagging system for image and video files, something I can use to quickly and easily go through a stack of files and tag them, then search by tag later. Bonus points for being able to recompress on the way through, since phones seem to have terrible compression ratios compared to offline compressors.
That does seem like a really good solution. Google Photos will prompt you, if I recall correctly, to identify a few faces, and then automatically id the rest. That's fantastic, if you don't have to worry about putting their privacy in Google's hands.
I personally agree with your point (and find the loose textual search offered by phones these days to be mostly adequate).
But reading your comment gave me a thought: filesystem hierarchies are indeed insufficient, but what about filesystem hierarchies with liberal use of hardlinks?
That seems equivalent to a graph to me, and yes, I'm unaware of any kind of search that a graph does not permit. Indeed it could be the basis for a system that, in my opinion, would dominate any of the existing knowledge graph / tool for thought products. It would consist of three more pieces:
* A database for backlinks. (Links from file X to file Y would only be possible when X has an appropriate file format -- `.txt`, `.md`, `.org`, etc.)
* A search grammar with the following primitives:
* find children of (links from) query results
* find parents of (links into) query results
* take the disjunction (OR) of queries
* take the conjunction (AND) of queries
* group queries with parentheses
* The ability to pipe files found via ordinary shell commands into that grammar.
Given the size of most peoples' knowledge graphs, you wouldn't even need to keep a text index (ala Lucene) -- `find` and `grep` would be more than sufficient.
For me photos are solved problem now. I no longer do any cleanup on them, just assume that Apple AI will show me best photos when I search for them. I think that it is simply good enough already.
Digital photos are easy to organize... I store everything in d:\masterarchive\yyyy\yyyymmdd\ folders, and have since 1997
Tagging them with embedded IPTC tags is the way to go. DigiKam works (mostly) as a substitute for the late Picassa. (I'd use that, but the last version has a nasty bug in that it sometimes swaps faces in the recognition database, which then tends to corrupt it all).
The major problem I've had is that in the beginning I didn't really have enough free disk space to keep up. That is no longer an issue, nor is it likely to be again.
Google Photos search function leverages some automatic categorization, it's pretty good. I wish I had some way to run something at that level over my Lightroom 5 catalog.
Does your smartphone not already do that for you? iPhone does, I think Android does and I think iPhoto on macOS does as well. It wouldn’t surprise me if Google online photos or Facebook do also.
(That is, let you search using words for things in the photo or themes like “winter”).
Bookmarks are a good middle ground between saving everything and not being able to find something you read later.
It is integrated in the browser's address bar as autocompletion/search and if you can vaguely recall some words from the title you can find it.
I've been using this system for years, works great with Firefox sync and Firefox on Android too (to remember articles I discover on both mobile and desktop in same place)
> My MP3 collection is a bit of a mess. I've cleaned up the worst instances of "Band, The" "The Band" "Band" "Band - The"
MusicBrainz Picard cleans and labels your music automatically using sound signatures, even when the file has no metadata. You can just give it your files and let it run, rarely have I felt the need to monitor it. It gets stuff right 99% of the time, the rest 1% is easily fixable whenever you come across it.
> "Oh, if only I ran a system that archived everything I browsed so I could build my own personal search engine that could search on just what I've ever looked at."
For sure. I get the appeal of Having Everything Organized. It's conceptually compelling. But I think the right way to look at it is in terms of minimizing total cost of retrieval and filing.
As an example, take physical paper. Receipts, bills, anything that ends up in one's mailbox and doesn't immediately get recycled. I used to oscillate between two approaches: over-elaborate filing systems and just ignoring the problem and letting the mail pile up in snowdrifts.
Eventually I realized that my love of elaborate systems was a giant fucking problem for my actual life. I thought about it like I was designing a production system. I very rarely needed to retrieve old documents; most of it was for "just in case" conditions. I needed to frequently file things, and if the cost of filing was too high, I wouldn't pay it. So I bought 8 filing boxes, each 3 or 4 inches high and big enough to comfortably hold legal-size paper. Each one is marked with a year, and almost everything for that year just gets tossed on top. A few exceptional kinds of paper then have their own separate file folders (e.g., tax documents, my current landlord, key retirement paperwork, key medical stuff). Once a year I throw out the contents of the oldest box and relabel it.
This works great. It turns out I almost never need anything from an old box. When I do, it's a quick rummage in one spot. With infrequent, hard-to-predict retrieval, storage-optimized organization is the best organization.
I have been handling physical organization by prioritizing filing. My reasoning is that if the house is a mess, filing isn't keeping up with retrieval, and I need to reduce friction on filing, because dealing with the mess is consuming more time than inefficient retrieval.
For paper, I don't have much trouble. Things go on the fridge if I will need them soon, or in one small sterilite plastic file box. It's nowhere near half full and I would not be surprised if it lasts 10+ years before I need any more storage for paper.
As an experiment I've been working on sorting things by category in a more general way, like the dewey decimal system rather than true categories, to remove the overhead of half full containers used to sort things. They're based on observation of what was already stored vaguely together rather than starting with an idea.
One common category is BAM, bulk artificial material. This includes paper towels, laundry soap, paint, water repellant spray, etc.
Another is TAM, tapes attachments and materials, containing tape, steel wire, foam, webbing, carabiners, key split rings, screws, and all similar things often having to do with either attaching things together or long things sold by the foot.
With wider categories I have fewer places to memorize, and organization within a category isn't that critical because they can be rummage-searched, without the overhead of a buch of individual drawers or boxes in some ever evolving system. It's just a formalization of random boxes of junk.
Yes, same spirit for sure! Rummage-searching is very effective as long as the total rummage space is low, like a single box.
The main place where I'll depart from that is with higher access frequency. E.g., I have a box that is sort of "LRU tech stuff". In there my various cables are sorted by type into gallon ziplocs. Finding the right kind of USB cable is something I do too often to want to pull it out of a 50-wire snarl.
Oh I didn't think of that. LRU makes a lot of sense, especially since it's just the default big mess with an expiry.
My first line of defense with tech is volume reduction on the stuff itself. Bluetooth over cables, software over hardware, USB-C over everything else, resisting any kind of random tinkering gadgets in favor of phone apps and zero-friction stuff I'll set up and never bother to upgrade, etc.
If you never buy random stuff just because it looks cool, then when you really do want something you can afford to future proof it and sometimes get one thing that replaces multiple separate things.
I have one box dedicated just to power(Which I may split up into separate cables and batteries boxes) that has all my USBs not in active use.
USB-C has been fantastic. If you don't do a lot of fancy stuff with high data rates, it's an amazing way to collapse down the number of unique objects.
> Each one is marked with a year, and almost everything for that year just gets tossed on top.
This is what I do. Things organize themselves organically this way - the important stuff bubbles to the top, and the rest is already sorted by linear time.
As a heavy user of TfTs (and one who finds immense value in them as a personalized reference guide more than anything else), I've come to a similar conclusion. If search is good, not much else matters (the bad search in Roam was one of many things that led me to leave it). I'm not exploring my own notes for fun, I'm digging through them for something actionable and usually have a vague idea of what I'm looking for. Linking, tags, and other organizational tactics (even just a directory scheme) are only there to assist that.
Anything more than that is a recipe for burnout - and I've definitely been there.
Because there's a certain element of dopamine release associated with this act of digital tidiness. And for a lot of people it's a good way to provide the illusion of feeling productive while stalling on the act of creation... which is hard.
My non-obvious observation after five years in this field:
In essence, journalling is similar to a psychotherapy session.
The clarity of mind you get after a journalling session comes from structuring things in your head, not in your TfT tool.
Yet, as one would expect, people project that feeling onto a tool — which leads to more time invested.
Ultimately after the N-th session, when you try to use the tool to get more of that feeling — you get the opposite, burnout, and then people switch to a new TfT app for the same cycle.
These benefits are why "Daily Pages" were vital to Roam Research's success. Not the bi-directional links or graphs as many think.
"Daily Pages" get you closer to a new therapeutic session, which is what you want most of the time.
I use :
- paper notebooks.
- remarkable 2
- markdown/notion + NeuraCache [I'm a founder] for flashcards and spaced repetition
+ I've been in group and individual therapy for three years now.
I've found the same, the catharsis of writing the "Daily Notes Pages" [0] is probably the main benefit of these systems.
In my case, the immediacy of handwriting has been a better fit than typing for this purpose. I also use the reMarkable 2 with a linked pdf planner [1] that I built, and with some custom collections I find it hits about 90% of what I'd use a "proper" TfT for. Obsidian and Logseq still look pretty seductive, but I know I'd spend most of my time in the weeds configuring plugins etc.
I'm hoping the rM2's OCR and export capabilities improve over time so that we could combine the benefits of quick, effortless capture on that device (via handwriting) with automated categorization, linking and search (on my laptop, maybe via Obsidian/Logseq/etc). There's a lot of potential if someone can effectively bridge that gap! It's something I hope to explore some more this year.
> In essence, journalling is similar to a psychotherapy session.
Thus why I journal. I don't do it daily, but when I do, it gets my thoughts out and I find that once they are out, it just helps to put words to something that you might be feeling.. well, isn't that what you pay a therapist for, right?
Our tools differ, but our end goal is more or less the same. I keep it as simple as possible, because as you said, burnout is real.
I also agree that the one most useful habit is a daily log. It hits the sweet spot for me in terms of low friction + benefits in organizing information.
> People have this aspirational idea of building a vast, oppressively colossal, deeply interlinked knowledge graph to the point that it almost mirrors every discrete concept and memory in their brain. And I get the appeal of maximalism. But they’re counting on the wrong side of the ledger. Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt. Every link doubly so.
One idea suggested by Antinet Zettelkasten is to set up an analog system that acts as a "second brain." Interacting with these boxes of notecards is supposed to be a form of discourse, enabling surprising associations and strengthening existing memories.
The argument against a digital form is that this kind of interaction occurs at a neural level that just is impossible without deliberate reflection of handwritten material.
It's important to mention this system is worthless to merely contain information. The point is to publish works that synthesize these ideas. Otherwise, it's just a form of knowledge Pokemon.
Feel like the fresh take is really that you can’t just synthesize new ideas by rearranging the ideas that you suck up from the inter-nets, no matter how much offline fermentation you put them through. Similar to how “publish or perish” merely results in incremental, nearly worthless ideas being sold as breakthroughs. Maybe people need to internalize twitter as a source of jokes amd entertainment, not insight. Maybe alcohol and psychelics need to be seen as brain damaging instead of vision inducing.
I've tried to use a "personal wiki" in professional life and found that I did not really use the functionality. What re-occurring concepts need to be linked back to? AWS? APIs? Perhaps I'm just not a very good professional note-taker, but my brief experimentation didn't really feel useful.
What I _have_found it very useful for is D&D notes. People, places, objects come up on a re-occurring basis and it is often useful to have a description, encounters, relationships to other people/places/things in a page, or even just a place to list all of those things! You can easily go from session journal -> a bunch of new pages about things, or updates to existing ones in a brief review after the session. It took me a while to actually do the organization but the upkeep is now easy, and I will have a place to recall the name of the inn we we stayed at in our first session in Fantasyville.
I started using one professionally and found it fairly helpful. Mostly I just type all my meeting notes and useful things I discover into my daily notes, and try to tag the top-level node with at least the name of the project and maybe the people I’m meeting with. Then I can go to the project page and see a history of the discussion, which has been helpful on numerous occasions: instead of “I think I remember someone saying that foo service is going to be deprecated soon”, I can tell my teammates “Alice from the baz team told me two months ago that foo service will be deprecated in favor of bar, here’s a link to the doc outlining the reasons”. Probably 80% of the benefit just comes from having searchable daily notes, but the linking is pretty nice too.
Also helpful in 1:1s with people, I can easily see a record of all interactions I’ve had with a person so it reminds me to follow up on things when we chat.
If you're deep into something like AWS at work, it seems useful to tag all the individual services you encounter in your work so you have a record of where you've used it or investigated using it. One tag for AWS doesn't sound useful. A tag structure like AWS-EC2 should let you search for every service without one overarching tag.
This kind of thing is best done in a collaborative tool, of course.
I've spent a good (unproductive) part of 2022 tinkering with notes/TfTs and I'm stuck with "optimizing" note-taking for more than few years (started with zettelkasten and Roam Research I guess).
I'm stopping with all of that - zero results and tons of wasted time (and fair ammount of subscription money). If I spent all that time tinkering with LaTeX at least I would leveled up my skills.
Judging from comments on HN, I'm not alone and quite a few of us went down weird notetaking rabbit holes. I'll just stick with few scratch plaintext files and handwritten legal pad notes to capture stuff as I work and then transfer/delete stuff at the end of the day without any special system behind the whole process.
I appreciate the warning & hazard, but I wish it were coached in a little humility too. For every comment you cite:
> Judging from comments on HN, I'm not alone and quite a few of us went down weird notetaking rabbit holes.
I see one person who did find their way. Often they recommend something fairly mild & not ultra-aggressive, but thinks like getting links or having weekly templates seems like it can be a huge help.
I'd like to see some mildness mixed in with this naysaying curmudgeonliness.
I agree and I guess I wasn't clear in my comment. It didn't work for me, but for other people and/or use cases it might, no doubt.
Seeing others quit TfTs and intricate zk systems on HN helped me realize that I should probably do that too, again given my situation. So, just sharing my experience, not trying to preach :)
These are two extremes, there's a major gulf in the middle, and this is something that doesn't lend itself to min-maxing. The content creators have convoluted setups that take more time to use than they're useful for because they're selling their content. My setup is simple, and after solving the major problems I had with overly simplistic systems (bullet journals, evernote, markdown files, etc.) like difficult retrieval, lack of portability, etc. over the years, I got into Roam (very early 2020?).
I went hard on organizing and templating things, and eventually found it to be more overhead than it was worth. I starting paring back since then, and moved on to Obsidian (still useful for evergreen-style notes) and Tana (more for planning and organizing projects). With a very simple organization, I'm more able to quickly store and retrieve information, and I've come to a pretty happy medium. It's not perfect, but it's saved me enough time to make the investment useful for me.
But maybe you don't have a personal use for note-taking. For someone like me, with ADHD and a horrifically bad short-term memory, note-taking saves me tons of time, daily. There's just the (not easy!) matter of prioritizing what you're storing, minimizing the overhead that comes with storage and retrieval, and minimizing the steps to retrieval.
Plaintext just works. Figure out a grouping structure and stick to it. mine is just yyyy-subject (2022-travel, 2022-rust). Long documents with subheaders and dates.
Currently on google docs. I like the mobile apps and syncing across devices. its just text in under a dozen files.
Backup strategy is ctrl--a / ctrl-c / ctrl-v.
I have taken a preference for drawing small diagrams in staples composition books last 2 years. A 2 column table of contents with numbered pages as the first page of the book. Made lookups super quick. My usage took off.
I dont write much on paper. Just draw small cohorts of words with some sentences on most pages. This layout helps the knowledge to self organize in graph like structure for my mind. Very useful when watching videos and in meetings.
I gotta be honest, with Logseq note-taking comes very naturally, at the speed of thought; it's helped me become a more effective writer and thus thinker.
Capture now, fast. Organize on the fly with searches and filters.
I have this whole app sketched up where the idea is you just focus on writing notes and thoughts in one continuous stream, jumping around topics as you go like most professionals do, and then use searches and filters you can save to render different contexts easily from the single stream.
So you can switch between reviewing your work 1 on 1 history and your Christmas gift ideas with a change of a filter. You don’t have to worry about organizing anything, it’s all just a single stream of content and then searches.
I’ll likely never build it, but I’m convinced that would be the way I want to write notes. I don’t want a knowledge graph, I want a stream of consciousness capture tool with a way to use tags searches and filters to make sense of it.
Oh also: I want to write some notes in handwriting on my iPad, and then ocr and clean up those notes to be liked I typed them, but still preserve the original handwriting. I desperately want to be able to hand write notes sometimes, type them sometimes, have them all in one place, and have that place be a stream of consciousness and searchable.
- voice to text, rapid fire, get all my thoughts out in big paragraphs
- once every few day re-read
+ add heading to sections
+ add a couple hashtags
+ but otherwise leave it in a terrible spelling mistake ridden, grammarless mess
--------
> Every note is an extra cost
For notes where remembering / reviewing are important (i.e. todo lists), I've found:
"Bullet Method",
which is essentially keeping an analog journal of bullet notes.
It really makes you slow down and track what is important , so you have a nice clean journal
This sounds like something you could implement most (or all?) of in minutes with either of two methods: (a) a single text file with grep and, optionally, your own custom tags; or (b) a dedicated email account and client. With (a) you get a stupid-simple system with no setup, myriad sync/backup/versioning options, and unlimited scale; with (b) you get every device and OS conceivable, file attachments, and infrastructure you’re already using anyway.
It wouldn't take much work to make filter lists first-class citizens in Logseq, if you want to try hacking it in: https://github.com/logseq/logseq
It would be a good feature to have, and it's better than starting from scratch.
> I desperately want to be able to hand write notes sometimes, type them sometimes, have them all in one place, and have that place be a stream of consciousness and searchable.
Logseq doesn't currently have saveable filter lists, but you can create pages with any title which will still collect and display direct and indirect references to that title/tag. This gets you 80% of the way there already, if you get used to the workflow.
> Oh also: I want to write some notes in handwriting on my iPad, and then ocr and clean up those notes to be liked I typed them, but still preserve the original handwriting. I desperately want to be able to hand write notes sometimes, type them sometimes, have them all in one place, and have that place be a stream of consciousness and searchable.
Much of the backlash to these tools seems to assume that they require significant devotion and time.
I just use it to store my stuff. I don't spend much time organising it.
I had trouble organising my data in folders, so I tried Bear Notes, and it helped.
From there, I just came up with a few conventions to deal with the problems that emerged over time - similarly to how someone would define their personal folder-hierarchy.
For example, having a page for every contact helped, because I often find myself looking for "that thing that Tom showed me".
But the biggest advantage is that whatever I'm looking for is in one location, only a short full-text search away.
---
> Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt. Every link doubly so.
I have 5000 notes - most of them are useless. But it costs me nothing to keep them.
> Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt. Every link doubly so.
I do agree with the first part of this sentence, but I think that the second is a little more nuanced. The first few 'links' among nodes in a knowledge graph I do think generally represent more debt (probably less than the node itself, though). As the links increase and the knowledge graph gets denser, I feel that things start to flip and each individual node/link actually gets increasingly easy to recall.
For a specific example: learning how to conjugate a verb in a foreign language and learning a bunch of words out of context is going to be hard to retain over the long-term. However, combining those into a fill-in-the-blank kind of sentence once you know enough actually becomes easier and supports knowledge of all that you've learned. This is just a simple example but once you know about it, you start seeing it everywhere, regardless of the topic under study.
Anyway, I enjoyed the article. I have gone all-in on Anki and sometimes I get concerned that I'm missing out on the newest software. Articles that remind us that the best system is the one that you use are important to have around.
A side note, but is anyone else experiencing a font size so large as to make it almost unreadable?
Viewing it on my laptop, the CSS font size is set to 2 rem, which means each letter takes up four times as much space as default body text (which is 1 rem, usually 16 px -- so this is 32 px size). Even worse, if you zoom out, it detects that and compensates by setting it to 2.5 rem (40 px), or over 6 times as large in area! It's trying to force bizarrely big-headline-sized body text, even against the user's wishes.
I've seen this bizarre creeping growth of font sizes across some personal blogs over the last decade, but I've never seen a case this extreme.
(And remember that, for comparison, traditional OS UI elements tend to be around the 12 px size and sometime even smaller, so a 32-40 px size is truly gargantuan.)
I actually had the opposite reaction -- on most websites I have to zoom in to 150 - 200% to get it to be readable (HN is at 175% for me). Here I had to do no zooming.
I use Logseq currently. I just simply write in my Journals or a page, then I add the backlinks on a whim, and leave it be. Whenever I need that information again, it will be found by using the backlinks, if I don't remember what I'm even searching for.
That's all I do. It's simple, convenient, and doesn't break my flow with unnecessary complexity. I just write and link.
That kind of Zettelkasten note-taking workflow is what caught my attention and it's currently the only way I can take notes.
People who create complicated note-taking workflows using databases and such, they're very bizarre people to me. I can't do any of that without recoiling. But I can dump information into my graph and link it all together all day if I got into the flow. It's just "natural".
I am pretty sure you hit the spot. I do not even write notes these days. I just work and if it is important enough for me, I trust my brain to recall. If it can't recall, I search the web. However, this time I have different context so each new search is unique. I discover different ways of doing things. Sometimes, it's better than what I used to do. As a result, I only focus on high level problem solving. This way, I don't care about small details and remain faithful to general context. What do I gain from this? Long term ability to solve problem. Each problem I solve, makes me think more on my thinking process. As a result, I optimized surroundings in a way it helps me think and reason rather than note and forget.
> And yet I don’t use them. Why? Building them was fun, sure, but there must be utility to a personal database.
There is utility in doing things that are fun. Even if that fun thing does not increase your productivity. There are deeper issues if enjoying how you spend your time is a problem.
> Pointlessness of Organization: my Calibre and Zotero libraries are a mess. But is that bad? Is there any point to organizing them? I can always find what I need, either by searching or browsing
If you know where to look and how to find your stuff, you're sufficiently organized.
> migrating everything from my filesystem, from Calibre, from Zotero, from my browser bookmarks, etc. is a huge process
This is a common claim, but the truth is that there's no need to move, say, files into a new system. The simplest thing to do is keep a note listing where you can find stuff outside the new system. Been doing that for years, and it's never failed.
Finally, I don't like the conflation of tools for thought with spending large amounts of time on useless things. People use cars to get away after robbing banks. The question is whether the problem is car ownership or how criminals use their time.
Great article and highlights the cyclical hype of PKMS. I use FountainPens and Paper. RandyPausch was/is a TimeManagement guru and inspires. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/ KeepItSimple. PaidFor SubscribedTo literally every MajorPkms DigitalGarden Wiki MindMap GewGaw aka ToolsForThought out there. But thoughts are cheap along with storage (SdCard) and backup (RsyncBackupScript) There is simply no reason not to enjoy ExternalizeThinking with DigitalTools (and have it centralized) Now for the last 9 years feel like I am making my own language and talking to itself.
Literally my Year2022Review took a few keystrokes and under a few minutes to process.[1]
WuWei is the way.
Live in the terminal both in DayJob and Personal; UseVim; no FileExtensions; CamelCase = thought = node; ISO8601 DateTimeStamp every node; Mimimal DataStructure or VimOutliner prn; Fck Markup MarkDown, PlainText is LazyGenius; FrictionlessSystem, ZeroMaintenance
I was sparked on this “one graph” idea real hard when I learned about graph databases (which I still say has one of the biggest marketing hurdles to overcome since graph and database mean very specific and well-rooted things) and I will say something that was a blind spot until recently:
Neurotypical people don’t normally think in terms of connections.
Many of my peers (ended up interviewing probably 100 of them) for example felt that the standard testing questions of “X is to Y as A is to _____” were thrown in to give everyone a break.
Neuroypical people can even struggle to understand analogy while to the ND folk they can be as fluid and understandable as breathing or walking.
This is why I think there are significant gaps in the market as OP pointed out.
To get there it takes someone who:
- Thinks with connections as a “first class citizen” (this might even just be the subcategory of kinaesthetic learners)
- Has the programming skills to create a useful tool for scratching their own itch
- Has the awareness that other people might have the same problem, and further has the interest in doing (10?x) the work to make it generally useful for others
- Has the marketing skills and/or the connections required to get visibility and traction
Then to take it to the next level they have to prove that there is a market for it. If none of us understand that the market is small to start with, it would be understandable for someone to see 10% of that market as a complete waste of time since it’s 0.0/\d*/1% of the market they assumed they were targeting.
I may be entirely off the mark. I’ve been thinking about this for a few years during my transition to software development and having conversations as I go but a lot of these thoughts are still internally-compassed.
The value in bundled "Tools for Thoughts" isn't just that you can interconnect everything - unless you actively research and want to synthesize something new, that's in fact overvalued.
The true value (at least to me) lies in the fact that all my information is stored in a human-readable and interchangeable format. It makes you independent of vendor whims. It enables the creation of custom tools if and when you need them.
The fact that I can click on shiny links just satisfies my desire for toys :)
As limited as OneNote is, I find it the place I keep returning to.
Obsidian was extremely off-putting to me when I last tried it out, as the node parents themselves could not be documents. Or I couldn't figure out how to use them that way! Maybe it's just me!
Beyond that, I have a fondness for wikis that permit breadcrumbs from excerpts back to a main documents. Giving the right information in the right place, with a centralized main resource that is carved up. This strategy is super useful to prevent dead instruction sprawl.
I once read (in someone else's wiki) that all documentation is a memorial to some time in the past. That really stuck with me for years now. When you hit "save" it's already in a state of decay.
I am talking about sharing of information and maintenance of knowledge stores though, and that perhaps is a different beast than cataloging ones own interests.
- Obsidian: FS dir -> FS file (plain text) = Obsidian Page (automatic ordering) -> headers in the page (manual ordering + level)
While I agree in principle that some non-leaf node should be allowed to have content, really you can see that headers/sections in Obsidian map well to the OneNote page-level organization. I wish I got a choice though...
[^1]: Out of the box. OneNote also has a major plugin bundle known as OneTastic.
[^2]: OneNote has _cosmetic_ headers in textboxes which isn't very useful.
This is what I like about obsidian. Ultimately nobody has a consistent set of capabilities they want because the whole space is pretty underdefined (exactly as the article is saying). But we still want something. So Obsidian is a kind of bring-your-own collection of features, and the mobile app works good enough too. It’s kinda like vim or emacs where people customize it however they want.
I reckon as the space evolves more clarity will appear and more opinionated schemes will become popular.
I'm someone who feels very happy about my sprawling obsidian vault, combining journal, project notes, wiki, flashcards, zettelkasten, drafts, finished writing. I use pretty much no plugin, but I do have different methodologies that have emerged in multiple waves.
I started with just notes in bear, crosslinking when i saw fit, until that turned into 300 notes where I couldn't find anything. Tags and folders never stuck, and I abandoned those pretty quickly.
That's when I switched to obsidian, with a few very broad top level folders (projects, logs, zettelkasten, writing). Over time, this filled up too, and the zettelkasten got split into wiki and zettelkasten. The zettelkasten filled up, so I added index notes and structure notes and a numbering scheme.
The only plugins I use are some templates and the graph analysis plugin to help me find things I haven't linked yet. As said, most of the logic is in my workflow / way of tagging things. I don't care about being organized as much as I care about regularly using the vault.
Now that I'm relying more on research and external reading, I am integrating readwise and developing a workflow around that.
I'm sure though that if I were to document my setup, it would seem overengineered and impossible to use and over ambitious, but the fact is that it's very organic for me.
While there is some truth to the feeling that many people over-engineer and get overwhelmed with plugins and methodologies, I know many of us who just silently enjoy their vaults and plow away and are perfectly productive. If anything, I would indulge in the recurring urge to get to know better systems, but the foremost thing is having fun. I really enjoy my sunday mornings where I just write and throw things in there. I've had a 2 months pause, where I mostly kept to daily logs and drafts, but I'm about to go back to "proper" content management.
Furthermore, I can easily publish the vault and have a site that is not a chronological blog with edited posts. My writing is messy, iterative, raw, sprawling, multimedia, and pressing publish still gives me a clear signal "you finished something."
The author has some really good points, and I think anyone building or using a tool like this should be able to take a hard look at what the tool is actually doing for them personally, vs what it seems like it could potentially be useful for.
One big limitation is time: it takes a lot of time to write things in, say, Roam. You need to be getting commensurate benefit for the time invested. If you aren't sure what the benefit is, except "one day maybe I'll read through all this again and then..." it's probably not worth it. You can make write-only documents anywhere, no need to organize and hyperlink them.
On the other hand, sometimes the amount of friction in using a tool is the issue. Something can be completely impractical when it's doable in principle but has high cost, vs when it is pervasive and effortless. Software that actively searches for associations with what you're currently writing and presents them to you could be much more valuable than software that lets you follow hyperlinks if you want, but you don't actually bother doing it.
Finally, I'll say there's also the fact that humans need to accrete habits slowly over time. If you find/build a notetaking tool with 10,000 plugins, well ok, knowing that the plugins exist is one thing, but you won't actually use them or get value out of them until your brain has indexed them and you've formed a habit that is triggered by a recurring context you will find yourself in.
I've found most apps too slow or too complex. So much that I've spent the last 3 months building another one, kinda like the author. Maybe my use case is different than most as I only spend 20% of my workday on the computer, but I'm convinced there are others like me. Roam Research was compelling and I paid the $500 two years ago. But found the friction and 12 second load time too slow. I downloaded my graph and realized it's only 250k of text -- maybe I'm a light note taker. Either way, sticking text on a server side rendered webpage seems reasonable. I have my entire graph on one page. Most of the time, ctrl-f will find what I need. Trying to do autotagging and some fun things with open ai. It's unpolished but online if anyone wants to give it a go. Just a hair above plain text files. grugnotes.com -- tech stack is django, htmx on google cloud run. Haven't done much coding in past 10 years, so skipped all the js frameworks and loving it.
Ha! No, I’m just a hack trying to catch meme wave and my goals for it align well with grug brian dev. That’s the htmx guy — Carson Gross. If you’re not familiar with htmx, go check it out! Bad ass little library and almost the only external JavaScript I’m using.
By coincidence I am moving off of Evernote right now. I broke down everything I used Evernote for right now to plan the roll off.
I largely use EN for the GTD system. The first GTD step is just capturing info. EN still does this better than any other tool.
EN used to be better at managing large data - but the last major release broke all that. For some reason they favored the new user over the power user.
Some of the things I used to use EN for are now baked into the OS. For instance, the latest release of MacOS now has text search on images. The rise of icloud also got rid of many of my use cases.
What I am doing now is putting files in files and notes in notes. I am converting some notes to files.
I took to heart the scalability issues in EN, and decided to run several note taking apps in parallel. After a while I will just pick a winner.
Sadly - I have not found a replacement for data capture. EN seems to be the only tool that converts email to a note. I might keep the free version of EN around for this task, but I am still looking for a replacement.
> EN seems to be the only tool that converts email to a note.
Do you keep the original mail format? As far as I can see (and I recall), Evernote just embeds the original mail and attaches an HTML copy as well (so you can view it).
The EN email note is somewhat kludgy. It was better before the last major upgrade. Before the last upgrade it was seamless to other EN notes. I suspect but don't know what broke.
BTW - they kept around the EN classic app because so many things broke. For a while I was going back and forth between the two.
The EN competitors want you to convert email to a PDF.
One of the competitors said they would have to have an email server to convert email to a note. They said this is hard.
I am OK that it is hard for everyone except Apple. Apple does already have an email server. Why are they forcing me to convert the email to a PDF?
It's hard to do right, because the mail format has to deal with MIME types, and all kinds of ancient kludgy stuff. They send mail in multi-part, and you see the part that your mail client wants to render. Sometimes they send only html, sometimes you get text and html. Sometimes it's a an image embedded in the e-mail message.
On top of that every mail service wants to do something different.
Part of the appeal for "Tools for Thought" is that by using them we feel we are taking action towards being productive, regardless of whether that turns out to be true of not.
The falacy comes, I believe, from the combination of two facts: 1. much of the intellectual work we do these days simply takes time. No amount of writing can accelerate that beyond our biological limit of learning, so we might as well just sit and think. 2. Just sitting and thinking is considered unproductive and regarded as lazyness, so we believe we should be writing even more instead.
In that regard, using tools for thought may be pointless, since all we need is time to think. But perhaps that pointlessness serves a purpose. Like a guardrail in a highway, tools for thought are not something we "really need", but they're there to at least keep us on track in case we were to drift away while our minds move forward.
Using or not using paper is not at all similar to working out or resting. When you're thinking with paper in front of you, you're free to not use paper or switch back and forth in a matter of seconds. It's a strict improvement, the downsides are all logistical.
The point of the article is that we don't like being idle. We'd rather spend our idle time "pretending" we are being productive, and tools for thought are what we use for that.
Being actually productive (quality > quantity), I argue, is a process that takes physical time. Absorbing information, internalizing it, and summarizing it with our own understanding requires a lot of energy.
This process cannot be massively accelerated. Same as with physical fitness, one can operate close to optimum and see and maintain great results, but one cannot operate better than optimum given one's own physical constraints.
For intelectual work, defining what "operating close to optimum" means is much harder because the quantity of output is usually the metric, and that varies so much from discipline to discipline and person to person. I believe many of us are already operating close to optimum (reading and writing, attending meetings, presenting our work), so there is no point in investing even more towards productivity. But the falacy is that because we don't have a proper metric for productivity, we believe investing even more is worthwhile since it increases output, and so we perceive ourselves as better.
I don't see AI changing the picture for us because the problem is not what we are doing, but how we perceive to be doing it. That's what's up with tools for thought and personal wikis.
I believe that a fine-tuned autoregressive language model such as GPT, enhanced with your personal notes, has the potential to serve as a highly effective cognitive aid, potentially even fulfilling the role of a "second brain" that many of us are looking for.
It's not scalable, but as an existence proof of what you're saying, my partner and I fulfill this role for each other - we each are tasked with remembering different facets of our lives (e.g. I know the plot and cast of every movie we've ever watched, she remembers to pay taxes :).
It seems pretty obvious we're heading for that utopia/dystopia where everyone is assigned a personal assistant loaded onto a pervasive mesh (your glasses, watch, phone, computer, desk, house). On the one hand it sounds great to have an AI assistant that knows what I know, a model of how I think, and the ability to fill in the gaps instantly. On the other, it's so ripe for abuse/deepening inequality, the idea almost qualifies as "don't create the torment nexus".
I tried something similar a while back after struggling to use obsidian myself. I unbundled and subscribed to todoist as well, switched to supernotes for notecard style notes etc.
I think ultimately it just comes down to people having different needs. It turns out I don't really need a second brain style knowledge base. All I need is a solid mobile text editor. It also turns out I only need to plan out tasks on a weekly scale. A daily scale is too granular for me at this given moment in time.
When you adopt these heavyweight systems before really understanding why you need them or if you even need them to begin with it very quickly becomes a procrastination trap where, as the article mentions, you're spending far more time managing the system for the sake of the system than you are actually using it for anything meaningful.
For a lot of things I agree organization is over-rated, but for some things it's essential. And, in any case -- collecting things whether organized or not is super important.
I think the act of capturing notes, todos, bookmarks, and other things, all involve the same _impulse_ and _function_. Whether a great idea strikes, remembering a quote from a good article you just read, or capturing an important piece of data.
It turns out, there are all kinds of things that need collecting that don't fit neatly into a practice like: note-taking or todo lists or bookmarks. Transactions, events, and formulas are three other types I use extensively. But the act of collecting is the same: at random times you need to record some information.
In an ideal world you need a button available everywhere and when pressed an input instantly materializes ready to record the desired information. It gets saved somewhere safe, accessible from any place, where it is easy to find, where it can be put to use without much effort, etc.
I think it's extremely beneficial to consolidate information in the same system if that information is processed in the same way. This is where I see a ton of redundancy between tools and it drove me crazy enough to build a solution myself, Tap [1].
A couple notes specific to Tap and the solution I've come up with:
To make this capture-anything from anywhere system work, I believe the format needs to be text. But, I don't think a structured data format with a schema definition is the answer, nor do I think markdown is a good fit.
Tap uses a format designed specifically for Tap called sowhat [2]. It's a tiny syntax for parsing tokens that carry special meaning. Above all, it is intended to be easy for humans to write. This allows collecting information via SMS and email trivial.
One criticism I have of the TfT/PKM space (as a member of it) is it often puts too much onus on the tool or system you use. The human element is often diminished in favor of replicating our brains in our notes.
So instead of making connections in your mind while using the TfT app as an external thought workspace, we put this extra process on top to make the TfT system a replication of our brains in and of itself. For most people, this is an unsustainable effort (myself included).
As I see it, the tool is simply the place we work out ideas and how we mentally relate them to one another. Whether a plaintext file or an interlinked set of notes is sufficient to achieve that end goal is up to the individual.
I agree. I see this hyper-marketing with PKM tools and it's like snake oil salesmanship. Every app is being sold as the be-all-end-all tool you'll ever need.
I like linking, but I don't try and link all the things(tm). They exist to refer me to another file that I might need to look at from this one file. Sure, I could open my file manager and open the correct file but then I have to look at two files open.
Another issue is I see often is people trying to make the system more than what it's capable of. Most PKM apps are not file managers - use your actual file manager for that. No, you don't need to link to that PDF in a note (except maybe, when you're referring to it for research purposes).
I basically just want a "daily" journal. I find that is enough because information i mostly want to retrieve was journaled on previous days near the top of the stack.
What I want though is for a note taking app to have CalDav and CardDav sync support.
It can just be read only. But I want to refer to and link to Contacts, Calendar events and E-Mails. That's pretty much all i use to "organize life". I recently set up all my calendars in Thunderbird and it's awesome to have all calendars in one view!
My two golden rules of note taking:
1) taking notes is superior to not taking notes. It structures your thoughts and helps you think. The actual note is of less value than the process of writing it.
2) beware the productivity tarpit. It’s fun to jump on the next blog post about how to get your obsidian setup right, but moving your notes from setup a to setup b generates only few insights (when you re read a note long forgotten perhaps). Movement does not equal progress.
I'm still not 100% happy with the existing tools for thought.
So far, Google Keep is by far my favorite in terms of experience, because it's blazing fast, plus it has Android widget and Google Assistant integration..
But I don't fully trust it to always be around, so I don't use it for anything long term, just shopping and to do lists, and quick notes to be copied somewhere safer later.
For calendar-like stuff, I use Google Calendar, for the same reasons.
I tend to think of privacy as a specialist tool not generally needed, so I use BitWarden's secure note feature to record anything I'd rather have encrypted.
Finally, for long term notes and journalling, I use Obsidian and SyncThing. But I dislike that Obsidian takes 8 seconds or so to load up, and has no widget to keep always-open, that's just way too much friction for something I'm relying on as a second brain.
If Keep had a markdown sync feature that would keep all notes synced to a portable folder of markdown guaranteed to be there if the service goes down or an app update breaks something, and if they had hierarchal organization features, I would probably use them for everything.
All in all, with all the talk about tools for thought, it's way behind a lot of other areas of software despite having no real technical challenges besides the difficulty of maintaining a cross platform set of apps with all the integrations and widgets and performance optimizations.
I guess that's the problem, there's a lot of tedium and no interesting algorithms, so it doesn't get as much interest.
I tried taking notes for learning and brainstorming over the years but found it incredibly difficult, not because of a lack of note taking frameworks, apps or technologies but because _sustaining_ this process is hard. Reading posts like these makes me quite envious of author’s dedication. Recently I was contemplating about a possible lightweight middle ground solution where I think a more polished software would certainly help - _highlighting_. Imagine if you could simply highlight/select any text/image on the screen of any app (ok, let’s start with the few), optionally assign different colors, tags and have those highlights automatically synchronized in a sort of a searchable personal diary format. The main feature of such tool would be cropping and indexing what’s already read and seen as opposed to having to summarize/rephrase or enrich it with your own notes. Why I think software in this case reducing friction to a minimum would help? As opposed to taking notes, identifying illuminating corner-stone paragraphs and sentences mostly feels like an implicit process that happens naturally at least in my experience.
This was a nice read and resonated with me a lot especially around how productivity gurus shill every single app out there.
I’ve always felt processes > tools and whatever tool(s) work for you, you ought to stick with it rather than get into a FOMO wheel and try every app out there. Peddlers of these apps are innumerable and YouTube definitely doesn’t shy away from recommending this sort of content.
Even simple text files in a reasonably defined file organization scheme is more than sufficient. This post also gave a name for this - collection management, which I’ve been thinking for a while. More often than not, there are these collections of items/lists that I end up having to track and the ideal bit missing is some process and a low friction tool to get there.
Another thing is the fetish for using a _single_ tool which is self-hostable which plagues the world today. While a younger me would’ve been onboard for this thinking, at this point in my life, the only thing probably matters is local-first and I’ve long given up the hope for a single tool, taking inspiration from the world of Unix tools.
* Logseq for notes. 95% of these eventually are spaced repetition flash cards. The anki plugin for Logseq is incredibly good.
* Lunatask for habits and tasks.
* Readwise reader for reading everything.
I've also never made the PKMS work. I never look at stuff. Using Logseq as a convenient place to store knowledge and quiz myself on it (the latter requiring me to consolidate understanding) has worked out really well.
Really enjoyed this read, but also couldn't help but feel sorry for the author still trapped in the labyrinth. "Just one more CMS and I'll be free..."
The jewel in the post is the rejection of Vannevar's acolytes and their hand-wrought memexen. Biology already gave me a perfectly good memex in my skull. If its shortcomings give you anxiety, take 2 YAGNI until productivity resumes.
Yup. The unbundling is so key. I find that -- ironically -- lately, despite the proliferation of tools like this, they're just like the sirens in the myths, and if I tie myself to the boat and just use what I use (zim-wiki in my case, YMMV) and just force myself to spend time there, I'm actually doing the work/fun that's most fulfilling.
I spent quite a bit of time in this particular rabbit hole. Zettelkasten, Roam, Org-Roam, LogSeq, GTD, Anki.... yet I don't think I've stuck with any habit for more than a week or two. I have the same sinking feeling with these tools as I do with programming language development.
I'm sure many others here have followed note-taking/PL ideas for years, waiting for the one that will come along and give us superpowers. It feels like we're "so close"... all these tools/languages are almost the perfect blend of concise, expressive, interactive, etc.
It's occurred to me recently that we may already be among the last programming languages and note-taking systems to be built. We've tried for decades to design notes and code in ways that suit storage access patterns of our brains. I used to think that meant a breakthrough was inevitable, but now I'm starting to see the efforts having diminishing returns.
ChatGPT and its brethren are almost certainly the way forward for most knowledge storage (and the knowledge work that goes with it). The entire class of organization problems melt away when you can communicate in plain language what you'd like to store and retrieve. As chat assistants start to become more integrated in our work, the storage phase will become completely passive. The assistant will automatically accumulate the context it'll need when we come back to it for retrieval.
Why would we design new languages and note systems when, quite literally, a general-purpose second brain already exists?
I don't mean to discount the creativity and effort of all language and note system designers today. All exploration is valuable, and there are certainly better designs out there to be found. But the best designs don't always win, and we might just be at the point where the imperfect designs that have critical mass might be the ones that stick around forever.
I am a strong believer in taking-notes so that I don't have to face a blank canvas every time I want to start a new essay.
My issue is that when I am in "the zone", I can't write. When I am very intensely focused on a topic, I am informing my internal conversation very efficiently by skimming papers. If I interrupt that with taking notes, then I am adding unnecessary friction that slows me down.
When I write notes, I feel that my ideas race ahead of my typing speed, and my working memory is not large enough to keep these ideas in a buffer. This is an issue I have had my whole life but only recently noticed it is an impediment and only now can I describe it.
All that being said, even if this wasn't an issue, there's a trade-off between how quickly you move across text and how much of it you store on notes. There's an optimal point, of course, and this can be raised with technology, focus, and practice.
Try taking them on paper. That may reduce the friction dramatically and keep you in the zone.
I take all my notes on paper. Then at the end of the day I put them into the computer. For some notes, that means writing a little more than I had put on paper. For other notes, it means they don't deserve the transition.
A big change for me was not to curate the notes beyond the above. That is, I have a huge emacs file and just use search to find things of interest or relevance.
Just realized something while reading the article, about “spaced repetition”.
For a while now I had the impression of not learning anything new and also of loosing the interest of doing so. It sort of came back to me as I am in a sabbatical period now, which gave me some mental clarity and also more space-time to think about things more thoroughly.
But, here’s the thing: I have never stopped learning new things. I have been checking HN for many years, and been reading daily SW news for the past 20 years. Many things come to my attention in different shapes and they build up in abstraction and in my memory/understanding to a wider and wider scale. Flash cards that I’d manage and check regularly would have not had the same effect as constantly checking my existing knowledge against random new areas of reality.
I am happy about realizing this, as it’s somehow difficult for me to understand my actual place in the SW industry.
I think the issue is not about tools for thoughts but how to apply tools for thoughts where the burden of signal vs noise of ideas or knowledge a seeker hopes to find in "somebody's vault of knowledge/ thoughts and not slip into a rabbit hole(time-sink) of "noisy conspiracy theories". a layer or a search engine to qualify the knowledge vault worth the time to invest to check out the signal most likely to fit or add to the area being explored by the seeker. Just like a bot scanning galaxies for matching m class planets as candidates for exploration, a bot to scan accessible vaults of knowledge or threads of thoughts. For application in case laws, it would be a valuable citation tool.
>How often, truly, do you find yourself wanting to link a task in your todo list app to a file in Dropbox
Links are much more useful once notes and todo lists are shared and published. I am surprised that not all tools for thought have standardized on ActivityPub to enable their users to connect each other's notes. People with an account could correct mistakes or link to crucial knowledge that was overlooked.
Like Wikipedia, information would grow "on its own". Important ideas could be identified, information could be collected until it is enough for further steps.
Zettelkasten is great for one person but that's for prolific people who process a massive amount of information. With the internet, a group of average people can turn into a genius by collectively collecting information and turning it into a useful form.
The printing press made it easy to quickly share finished thoughts, boosting science and bringing the industrial revolution. There should be an equal opportunity for progress when we start sharing unfinished thoughts.
What could change our attitude about privacy? We share code, but only good looking code. We share thoughts, but only finished articles and good looking tweets. This inhibits collaboration on the most difficult part of creating ideas.
AI like ChatGPT can become supportive. But why wait for a technical solution if a social solution is possible? What's better than a to-do list which is resolved or made easy because others just happen to have the necessary resources available?
While I agree with a lot of the points the author has made, TfT has really been a game changer for me in terms of how I process information. Regardless of the app (currently I'm using Tana), what's been great is I no longer dump random bullet points of information under one topic, but really strive to take an idea and make it stand on it's own (atomic note concept). It's really helped me cut away the fat that inevitably makes up the majority of what we read and get down to the "meat".
I don't know how much I'll use the bi-directional linking in the long term, maybe not at all, but at least for the moment it's really helping me retain what I'm reading and that alone is worth the price of admission (at least for right now).
Imagine a proxy that sat between your web browser and the internet, transparently recording to your local storage everything you've ever seen, in context.
Imagine Google, back when it still worked, able to search ONLY the stuff you've already seen. That would be incredibly useful.
A decade or so ago, there was an intriguing story on Slashdot about a covert operation prior to Desert Storm that simply recorded the waveforms of the power feed going into the Iraqi enrichment facility, and how that simple dataset allowed all sorts of things to be inferred.
I've tried more than once to find that story again, and simply can't, and I have pretty strong Google-fu.
If I had a log of everything I've seen, it would be trivial to find.
I tried everything--Emacs, word processing software, custom conversion scripts, you name it. A few years ago, I more or less adopted Derek Sivers' method: I keep topical plain text files (markdown, really).
He described the topical files bit here ('Thoughts On' files): https://sive.rs/dj
Now, I just organize my text files in folders and forget about it. It's all on Dropbox, so I can read/revise from any machine, and text files are lightweight and simple to keep synced copies locally.
I've used a personal wiki for several years now, and I think it works just fine. Surprisingly, I don't really link pages together all that much, but I make heavy use of tagging and categorising. I find that's been enough for me.
I don't really follow links, and mostly I just use the search bar when I need anything. I think one thing that's tripping lots of people up is they are trying to use these tools the way they think is expected of them. Instead, it's better to just make it as frictionless as possible to add notes, and as frictionless as possible to read notes you've written before.
Everything else is just procrastination with "productivity tools"
I like the idea of a second brain or similar because writing helps me to think. If I start writing (instead of free thought), I more systematically explore something. This is useful for any type of rational thought that spans an even slightly complex space.
Some are good enough at operationalizing information and thinking more systematically without tools. They don't need these tools, but may get stimulated by using/maintaining them.
The problem is that these tools are sold as a way to level up. Instead, these tools are a crutch for most, self-fulfilling meticulousness for some, and a game changer for still others.
On 'The Uselessness Of Scale': I found after spending substantial time learning, customizing, and using tools like docs/roam/notion/obsidian/logseq/bear/etc is that what I truly lacked is a medium for playful design and frictionless neural-to-text.
I found kinopio.club on a whim and it has been the highest ROI tool from getting the maelstrom of brainsauce ripped out and straight to something like paper. It's shame free, and anti-pornographic, unlike the way I feel with all these crunchy roam-likes.
My personal note taking system is based on Markdown, Vim, grep and Git.
I have a private repo for personal notes, including a `todo.md` file that I use as an GTD style inbox - I have an alias `todo='$EDITOR $HOME/personal/todo.md'` which takes me there quickly.
For me, the benefit of linked knowledge is just that I tend to forget a LOT of things, including many details of things I've learned in the past. For me, the principles and concepts remain, but all the steps and "how to do X" vanish rather quickly. So having essentially a personal documentation database (using Obsidian) that I can quickly jump into to recall lost knowledge is very important.
My "Second Brain" is not so much about making my brain better, as it is filling in the missing gaps of where my brain struggles at.
I do the same. Obsidian is just a pretty editor with a fast search/switcher, and everything beyond that is gravy. I find many people try to make it much more than it's capable of, and that's where we're running into problems.
So he is Ok with unbundling everything but collections. What is a collection? What makes todos and contacts special, but not, say, movies or books ? I don't think The line is so clear cut.
He has a point though: We need better "generic no-code" Database software. Some features of calibre (like the hierarchical tags) make me wish I could use it for many other types (and it does not work well). The same for Zotero (and I was more successful in turning it into a bookmarks manager and even a simple movie catalogue)
Playing with and building note taking tools as a form or procrastination is a real issue.
I went from Emacs Org Mode to Workflowy to Roam and the thing I like best out of all of these is not necessarily zettelkasten personal wikis but just being able to make a simple list for today, or outline an article I'm writing.
For me these tools work best when you can use them much like a physical notepad. More structure can be extracted and organized but in a pinch they can be replaced with a todo.txt.
Actually one thing I liked from this is the folder structure in his Cartesian app screenshots.
Personal → Autogeny (i’m imagining “talking points”, key recurring personal concepts), book of days (daily notes, journal). Documents and people, self explanatory. ”Thoughts” i’m unsure of but probably misc grab bag things that arent profound or important enough for autogeny.
“Trove” is a nice name for the random collection of interesting tidbits and stuff I also tend to collect in my vault
The author has good points & the idea that specialized (info-)spaces with specialized tools help. The tool imposes a big context boundary to rapidly filter through & mask out most of the big pile of everything one has. That alone is a huge gain.
Trying to maintain some overall view, some sense of importance... having shape to your spaces, having them well defined, some kind of memory palace with notable form & place to it resonates a lot with me The author nicely highlights the challenge:
> Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt. Every link doubly so. The more you have, the more in the red you are. Every node that has utility—an interesting excerpt from a book, a pithy quote, a poem, a fiction fragment, a few sentences that are the seed of a future essay, a list of links that are the launching-off point of a project—is drowned in an ocean of banality. Most of our thoughts appear and pass away instantly, for good reason.
Strong use of poetic license but stood out & I like it!
Yet... I disagree with the premise. There's definitely some expedience to having separate specialized apps for separate things. It's a great short term aid, right now, today. The suck it up & use Unity option.
But I feel like we have much more exploring to do with general purpose systems. Right now we are fairly first order, where everything kind of coexists & most interfaces lack distinct submodes, lack distinction of subspaces.
Having a common backend & common base-layer, which is extensible, growable, can begin to be shaped into the more specific regions eith distinct & differentiated capabilities will greatly help. But that common platform seems key.
Links alone may be sufficient, but alas few apps really expose that. Also fixable, apps really ought have PingBack protocol (or some similar protocol) support, to hear when someone links them & tell links they have been linked, such that we can have bidirectional links, which can greatly add navigation.
Beyond that, I think no tools really do a great job of helping us review & raise up data over time. Algorithmic tools like Google Photos can do a fairly good job of finding & reminding us of some stuff. But overall I havent seen many attempts at tackling the underlying problem here, of keeping folks in the loop and pruning, refining, revieing, whether we have specialized apps or whether we embrace the all-is-one general systems digital garden. Attention is a resource we have not honed personally, although it has been well tuned at larger mechanistic scales. I hope to see & am excited to hopefully become a part of progressing on these points!
I found the perfect system for me and I stick to it. I use a folder of Markdown text notes organized by creation date, with a text editor (ideally something like nvAlt / Uulysses / Obsidian that does indexed searches).
Titles are:
2022-12-26 Note Name.txt
That way I can find what I’m looking for, usually instantly, even though I have a pile of thousands of notes in that folder spanning a decade.
I haven't found an iOS app that allows good search in plain text files.
About every app out there uses Apples standard search control, which finds files where text occurs. Not the line(s) with the occurrence itself, no forward/previous, only a list of files that contains the text.
Maybe you'll like 1Writer for iOS. It lists files including the line you search for, and it supports the "YYYY-MM-DD Note title" syntax mentioned in the commment above. So you can point the app to the folder where you store your plaintext files.
I like Zettelkasten / bunch-of-markdown-files tools because more often than not they _expand_ on this simple idea, offering additional structure on top without aiming to destruct anything.
I use a single folder of files along with a script that can fuzzy search said folder. It works perfectly.
Knowledge is messy and doesn't really conform to a database schema. Certainly not one you would want to write :) I think a better approach would be to find a way to insert all these notes into something like ChatGPT.
The file system and a good desktop search engine can go a long way. Allows using any app or format, provided its indexable. Its not a proper knowledge graph but it allows you to trigger associations in your brain as you examine query results
Maybe the whole networked thought/Zettelkasten thing is just something that's only useful for a small subset of endeavours, and more of a hindrance for most.
Niklas Luhmann became one of the most productive sociologists of the 20th century with the help of his enormous paper-based Zettelkasten. If you look at the stuff he wrote, you can see why. He ties together publications from the fields of sociology, philosophy, legal studies, psychology, biology and surely many more, literature, journalism, film... Luhmann was a prolific reader (he did few other things as far as I know) and for him, stumbling upon a connecting thought he had ten years ago while reading a newspaper after having read a specific book, might have been crucial to maintain the density of ideas in his publications.
In short, these tools are probably only useful to you if you're in the business of generating novel ideas by interlinking a lot of other ideas that people have had in new, interesting ways. (This is the best tentative description I came up with and it's probably wrong around the edges).
If you're an engineer, or indeed also a scholar in the humanities but playing a different game than Luhmann, these tools may just be useless to you. A couple of years ago when I was thinking about this a lot, I asked one of my lecturers who was a post-doc in comparative political science about his toolset. He didn't really seem to understand the question, he told me that he sometimes writes notes on books in a Word document but mostly knows what's going on in his field and where to look for what. I later took a look at his dissertation and while I'm in no position to judge the quality of his work (it was probably pretty solid, he got it published with a reputable publisher), it seemed to have fever moving parts and threads of thought tied together than the bits of Luhmann that I've read.
My impression is that what's holding the ecosystem of tools for networked thought back right now is that the tools are not built for (or possibly even by) the people for whom networked thought may be most useful. They're trying to be better task managers, tagging systems, collection managers (as mentioned in the linked article), flashcard systems, etc. "Zettelkasten" by Daniel Lüdecke (a sociologist), the software recommended in "How to Take Smart Notes" by Sönke Ahrens (himself a professor in the humanities), which is hailed as the bible of networked thought by many (Roam, Logseq, HN I guess), looks very different from these tools. It's an obscure piece of Java software, and while I've only briefly tried it out for a few minutes, it works very differently. Smaller notes, little structure within them, no titles. It has a "desk mode" where you can pull out notes and arrange them in a tree structure for when you're writing a paper or book (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIztPpFqCBw).
I would love to see what things could happen in the networked thought space if people who need these tools the most sat down with people who can write software. I have a few ideas, but I'm afraid I'm just not enough of a Luhmann to really know what these people need. Also, I would just be procrastinating actually writing my thesis (nod to the linked article :))
Yes, one category I left out is research. Turning a big DAG of citations into a finished monograph, basically. I feel that this is one of the few areas where a TfT with bidirectional links makes sense. But I can't really judge this because I'm not a researcher, and little of what I do can be called research.
> The only friction is in clicking the bookmark to localhost:5000. It is literally two clicks to get to the daily note.
That's significant. I register a domain for every project I make early, so that I can easily reach it from the addressbar. I only have to type "th" in the addressbar and it autocompletes to "https://thinktype.app". I never even try to use it from the bookmarks bar.
Oof ... default font sizes on that blog are obnoxiously large. Paragraph font size is barely smaller than the header size.
Makes the whole thing unreadable since you are constantly scrolling to fit the next tiny chunk of text onto the screen. It is impossible to read at any sort of reasonable pace.
Same here, I don’t want to squint to read cool 10pt font, I prefer to see 16pt easily. I’m not fifteen anymore, my eyes need all the help they can get :)
Aside from the software development aspect, the OP echoes a lot of my thinking at times.
> In practice 95% of the use cases ... unbundled into disjoint apps, and the lack of centralization and cross-app hyperlinking has no real negative effects.
The reverse is also true; 95% of the use cases of disparate apps can be covered by a single app and your filesystem. You can keep your notes, journal, todo list, so on, in Notepad. nano for those who use Linux. I mean, why not? Use your filesystem to navigate things, and shortcuts to things that don't fit neatly in a category.
Do you really need Todoist to do what you can do in a plaintext file?
Now, this isn't an attempt to mock the OP. I don't disagree with most of the points they are trying to make. But most of the premises, while well thought out, are a bit flawed.
> long-form study notes are a form of procrastination.
It's the first step to taking notes. You need to distill them into chunks that you can review for later. It's rarely meant to be kept in its initial form.
> Contacts: if you have a page for a person ... use Google Contacts or a spreadsheet.
Or a text file with their name.
> Fiction Writing ... using git for version control makes a lot more sense ...
A git folder with text files.
> Organizing Legal Documents ... a few spreadsheets is all it takes in practice.
Or a folder with PDFs.
> Lists: of things ... Spreadsheets work just fine for this ...
A collection of text files is fine.
> Collection Management: this is an area where the software solutions are strangely very lacking. ...
Nope, text files.
> I need tags, that is: I need a database.
Ah, that's what OP wants. A database to Do All the Things. Seems like OP just wants a better Excel. Sorry, my cynicism was showing.
(as for Collection Management, why not a spreadsheet? It's the same problem).
I use Obsidian, and before that, I use Emacs, VimWiki, LogSeq, Roam, Dendron, etc. I find it fun - it's a hobby of mine. What I find fascinating is the myriad of ways people have come up to solve this problem, and of course, this problem space has no end of salesman.
At the end of the day, I find Obsidian as a "pretty text editor with a really fast search" useful currently. I keep my tasks in there, because 95% of my "tasks" are just text files. I leverage a plugin (Tasks) to let me sort it by date and one that lets me put it anywhere I want. (So I don't have to figure out where it belongs)
> but a nicer UI ... the UI trumps the features ... is about building a habit, for which good UX is necessary.
Exactly. Obsidian themes have a pretty UX and the plugins make plain-text a nicer UX. Tomorrow, I might switch to LibreOffice because, why not?
I use the filesystem for everything else, and for things that don't fit neatly in a category? Hard links, if it makes sense. I find that trying to collect everything and organize everything is a rabbit hole in and of itself.
It's the same problem that hoarders have in meatspace , and rich people solve by buying bigger places.
Indeed it's rather remarkable how many of these figures like Vannevar Bush, Alan Kay, Douglas Engelbart, etc., never actually shipped much. Now, you could argue that they were ahead of their time and couldn't ship, and for some of these people you would be right. But c'mon now, Alan Kay is still kicking, and still talking about how programming should be reinvented. Douglas Engelbart lived into the 2010's. It's more that these fantastical futuristic ideas, if they were released, would probably not live up to their sales pitches. They're all chasing the high of Engelbart's famous demo. And their followers, who are perpetually waiting, who attempt interpretations of these thoughtleaders ideas and get dismissed as flawed manifestations, well they are essentially the parish. They're waiting for the second coming.
This isn't to say that none of these people have accomplished stuff. They have accomplished an extraordinary amount. But they are fundamentally salesmen, salesmen for the future. And salesmen only have a job as long as they have something to sell.