This is ridiculous. Are people this short-sighted? I keep hearing about people going back to paper agenda or simple text files for todos. I would understand if they said they couldn't find a better solution, but many of them claim that this is an improvement over any digital solution.
Again, nobody seems to be tackling this. Not even YC mentions this problem.
The only ridiculous thing is how digital is overblown. Paper is a very good tool.
As for simple text files, well, I'm yet to see any startup coming even remotely close to beating Emacs + Org Mode with optional Dropbox sync. But IMO that's the culture clash - plaintext is about actual productivity and usefulness; startups are about bullshitting people with shiny things to get a nice growth curve.
You seem to have implicitly made a jumbled mass of claims without supporting any of them. I can't quite tell what claims. It seems you contend that you need more complicated solutions for a better task tracking solution than paper or text files can offer. At some point, you reach the point of not getting any more marginal utility by making your planning system more complicated. The mental energy you put into the dealing with the machinery of your task tracking system could go into actually solving the problem. Bill Gates, shockingly, built Microsoft without a GTD planner. Trump became president of the united states without one. I don't find this premise at all convincing.
Paper, as mentioned by the article, can stimulate different parts of the brain. No app can match that.
You seem to react with shock to the notion without addressing the actual shortcomings in any constructive way.
> Bill Gates, shockingly, built Microsoft without a GTD planner. Trump became president of the united states without one. I don't find this premise at all convincing.
I can walk all the way to Argentina. Does that make planes any less useful?
> Paper, as mentioned by the article, can stimulate different parts of the brain. No app can match that.
Bullshit.
> You seem to react with shock to the notion without addressing the actual shortcomings in any constructive way.
I can't believe nobody has managed to tackle perhaps the most important problem (GTD) using computers. I truly can't accept that this is true. I must be missing something.
You are correct. My comment was not constructive at all. There's nothing I want more than a discussion about making the world better through proper GTD tools.
I've been keeping notes in plain text files[1] for the last 15 years. It's a really good system and doesn't require 8 million in funding to make a startup around it.
Text files take up almost no resources, are quick to work with in every way, have superb portability, are automatically date/time stamped and can be siphoned into a database any time you want get crazier with organizing or tracking them.
Paper is its own unique experience that is neat and stuff, but photos or scans of paper are ultimately kind of wasteful from a data perspective, as well as difficult to OCR-- and the way I see it, if you're not saving your stuff in data form at all, is whatever you're writing really a good use of your time?
Again, nobody seems to be tackling this. Not even YC mentions this problem.