People love doing things that feel like work, but aren’t.
I’m terrified of picking up new systems like this without having a purpose. I could spend hours building out a graph, admiring all of MY knowledge, but not really have any intended use for it other than telling others about it and how I’m going to use it someday.
You're in a perceptive loop concerning this particular object (systems like this) then. You see future-self behaving as past-self did.
You can keep doing that, looping. People who are natural contingency planners do this all the time--they map their past onto future-self. Flexing this muscle because it's strongest.
However this is also a good way of preventing yourself from re-exploring new objects through a different lens.
Or asking people, "here's what I tried--what are you doing differently?"
If you can treat it as a skill with unlimited outcomes per-experience, rather than a forced repetition of past-self, you get a huge mental plasticity bonus. Once you've gotten to that point you can also find yourself building your own tech with fewer crippling concerns about future outcomes. It's a great unlocking method.
This is a pretty astonishing insight! @themodelplumber1 do you have more information about this? Either a blog post you have written, or a book you read (or wrote!) on the topic?
Edit: ... and I checked out your profile and bookmarked your blog in my feed reader. Awesome!
Hi @rendall, in exploring this subject more broadly you may find it useful to search for "metacognition". See also the book "Ultralearning", https://RoamBrain.com, Tiago Forte, NessLabs...
Also google "growth mindset" -- cultivate a mental state where it's not about ruminating about past failures, but rather focus on what you learned from past experiences (what doesn't work) and use that to iterate on your future self.
Same; I've been using various note taking approaches over the years, but my "problem" is that I rarely actually have to go back to a note, they are usually only relevant for one task like e.g. writing a blog post or implementing a feature.
So while I'd like to retain my knowledge and research somewhere, at the same time I don't actually use it???
But some writing I've done that will be relevant in the next years is writing ADR's (Architecture Decision Records) in my application about technology and architecture choices I've made, so I can look them up later, use it to train new people, and have a basis to challenge a decision on as well. That's more practical for my personal situation.
But maybe one day I'll be doing something more academic and will need a way to collate research and the like.
I would say that one of the goals of note taking is to make it so that you don't need to go back to them. If you write notes about a book you read, not copy-pasting the exact quotes, but writing your understanding, you'll be more likely to remember it later. And if, at some point you want to remember more, then you actually go to the note and check.
I completely agree. Note apps are focused on categorization when 90% of note taking is creation, not retrieval. I have a new app that’s focused on creating notes as quickly as possible, working offline, and syncing to all your devices (web too). I’d love to include you in the alpha we’re launching this week, just send me an email and we’ll add you. This is open to anyone else as well!
This is why I always come back to Apple's humble Notes app after trying the others. It's simple and dumb enough that it gets out of the way and just lets me write notes on my mac or my phone and everything is quietly synced for offline use.
Once I start thinking about how I'm going to use the note, I go down a rabbit hole of style / format considerations and it gets in the way of the idea I was trying to capture. So now I give myself permission to just write a note and if it does need to morph into something more structured, it's only a copy-paste away to a fancier tool.
This way of notetaking is the first time I feel the "actions that feel like work but isn't" overhead is below a critical threshold. I don't plan anything, I don't do reviews, I spend no time working with or around the tool, I just stick to a couple simple principles and jot things down, curating connections as they arise.
that is not an unreasonable fear. I'm reminded of something I read once.
there are two kinds of people:
- those who make lists and use them.
- and those who make lists and lose them.
I would say 90% of the todos and ideas I jot down and overorganize don't lead to anything. But the 10% I do - they keep the wheels from coming off my life. (to be fair, there is a very low cost of capture, and I do it all electronically)
I agree with this ratio. I generate a ton of ideas for projects or hobbies, but writing each one down and putting it away (in Trello, Joplin, GitLab issues, etc.) lets me move on with priorities rather than getting pulled into new things all the time.
Do you know Vannevar Bush? Most note taking tools/systems are an approximation of a memex. I think it's worthwhile to develop a system along the lines of a memex because sharing knowledge effectively is how we all become more effective.
I recently stumbled upon [0] this quote from Walter Benjamin:
> Und heute schon ist das Buch, wie die aktuelle wissenschaftliche Produktionsweise lehrt, eine veraltete Vermittlung zwischen zwei verschiedenen Kartotheksystemen. Denn alles Wesentliche findet sich im Zettelkasten des Forschers, der's verfaßte, und der Gelehrte, der darin studiert, assimiliert es seiner eigenen Kartothek.
My translation:
> Already today the book, as tought by academia, is obsolete as transmitting information between two card file systems. Anything of substance is in the Zettelkasten of the researcher, who wrote it, and the scholar, who studies it, assimilates it in his own card file.
That's a good quote. I've been trying to figure out what a programmable wiki would look like and I always end up with something that looks like a smalltalk VM.
I think it's possible to build a personal memex now. I'm looking at couchdb, lucene, apache tika, deno, and node.js as the initial set of tools to mash together and expose through the browser. CouchDB and Lucene will be used for persisence and searching along with Apache Tika for extracting metadata and doing OCR on images and PDFs. Deno and Node.js will be used for executing code on the server and the client. Deno can be used for sandboxing and exposing each person's knowledge base to programmatic control by other people like a federated search engine where people can share interesting code patterns for acting on knowledge bases and exposing hidden patterns.
Combine with some basic machine learning models and you get a pretty useful personal toolkit for knowledge enhancement.
Also, a quote by another good thinker
> Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them. - Alfred North Whitehead
I’m terrified of picking up new systems like this without having a purpose. I could spend hours building out a graph, admiring all of MY knowledge, but not really have any intended use for it other than telling others about it and how I’m going to use it someday.