Comment by ibn_khaldun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ibn_khaldun | Hacker News Reader

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This, this is the post to read.

It is indeed a tarpit that traps people who mean well and legitimately want to Get Things Done. The knowledge work/"second brain" community will have you convinced that everyone who you run into online is a PhD candidate. The irony is that a lot of people intend to "simplify" their workflow but end up reaching for more things to pile onto it. The breaking point for me was the first time I loaded Obsidian. It is a nice program but it incentifies Doing Too Much, at least for my taste. Granted, what influences a person to even care about how they take notes varies. The chaps over at Zettelkasten.de actually advocate for a very simple approach to note taking that can work anywhere. Personally, I've found that it's best for me to do the bulk of my work in a Plain Text environment -- plain like the text box that I am using to type this comment plain.

Alhamdulillah.

As much as pragmatics would point in this direction, saying "let's be realistic here .. etc.", perhaps nurturing that part of us that dreams in alignment with Vannevar Bush's dreaming up the "memex" or Douglas Engelbart's vision of "augmenting the human intellect" is still valuable if the urge is strong enough. Maybe the seeds of the next information revolution are lurking in such dreams .. especially given the progress we've made in NLP.

I felt the same way about Obsidian. It seemed really helpful on the surface but after a few days of using it, I realized I was spending more time recording everything and making sure to use the correct backlinks than I was actually learning anything. Just bookmarking pages gets you the majority of the benefit of meticulously organizing your notes, while requiring next to zero effort.

IMO, the advantage of apps like Obsidian is that you don't have to organize everything meticulously.

1. You just create a new note, 2. give it some tags in square brackets "[[Tag]]" 3. and if it direcrly related to a note you recall making, make that connection

That's it. With time the amounf notes grows, and the amount of interesting connections grows too.

It is also important to note, that the process should note be automated. If you want to learn something, you need to make the time to write the note yourself, as opposed to simply copy/pasting.

Bookmarking a page doesn't mean you absorb its contents, and I don't think a few days is adequate time to perfect these techniques.

I'm the same as you, but a month or so in and still learning. Personally it's a price i'm willing to take for what will be a lifelong mission

A lifes work of bookmarks isn't very helpful in the grand scheme of things

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