Hacker News Reader

Comment by tnolet | Hacker News Reader

I’m always fascinated by people obsessed by productivity and its range of tools.

I consider myself pretty highly productive. Typical week had 8+ meetings, calls, follow ups, research, thinking time and sometimes coding. Typical CTO and CPO stuff. I tend to get 90% of important things done. If not more.

I’m fairly busy, but just use my inbox with search, Apple notes and Apple reminders. Works fine for me.

Am I just missing out on something?

View on HN

It's not really about productivity. It's about creating a sense of control over your life. The reason there is an industry around this is because the need is never sated, and the productivity methods are switched around like fad diets because the underlying issue (anxiety and lack of satisfaction) is never corrected.

This becomes obvious once it comes to your attention that the people who are supposed to be experts in this, apply their productivity towards selling more productivity. Which is delightfully perverse.

In reality, if you are embarking in projects that are important to you, you rarely need that many reminders and get by with the simplest system (such as what you are describing) or none at all. All trivial other tasks can fit in a single list. And the things in your personal life that are actually meaningful, such as fulfilling relationships, are not something you can Zettlekasten your way into beyond setting a reminder for some birthdays.

You either read, or should read, "four thousand weeks" ;)

4000 Weeks was a game-changer for me. I found the takeaways liberating, and more in-line with my perspectives in general.

My ‘system’ now is just focusing on one major goal outside of the regular work/family stuff.

I use tools for quick capturing of ideas. I always keep a pocketmod and a pen on me. Notebooks at home. Voice Memos and Voiceliner for when ideas hit late at night.

Jonny Decimal synchronized with Dropbox. Org-mode for digital notes. Organice for mobile access.

Nothing rigid though, process should not get in the way of just living.

I'm 70% done with the book. Definitely a game-changer and already one of my all-time favs. One of those books that I need to buy and own a physical copy (I usually just read ebooks)

I gave it to a friend of mine, who also found it profound, and now they have given it to someone else. I probably will buy another copy.

I would be willing to take productivity porn seriously, if the people obsessing over it were provably exceptionally productive (like, I don't know, "here's how I learned multiple languages and musical instruments while finishing a physics PhD as a single parent" or whatever).

For example, even the creator of SuperMemo seems a fairly average person and not the polymath/hyperpolyglot one might have expected him to be (or at least I could not find any indication of that).

Likewise, what has David Allen actually done beyond writing the same book half a dozen times?

As far as I can see this stuff mostly exists to fill a need for structure, but it does NOT make one exceptionally productive (also accounting for the time that needs to be invested in the tools and techniques themselves).

Re SuperMemo: Well, there is his huge wiki[1] in which he writes pretty long articles about a wide range of topics. So I'd say he is very productive.

[1] https://supermemopedia.com/wiki/Main_Page

I tried, I just wasted a few minutes clicking "Random Page" and ALL results are about the supermemo software itself, most are support emails republished as wiki pages.

like the other guy said "wide range of topics". If you click random you just go to short article after short article about the app?

Click one of the articles from the front page. The short articles about the app are because the wiki is also used to answer questions from users of the app.

"One researcher famous for his extensive use of [Zettelkasten] was the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998). Starting in 1952–1953, Luhmann built up a Zettelkasten of some 90,000 index cards for his research, and credited it for enabling his extraordinarily prolific writing (including over 70 books and 400 scholarly articles)"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten

Then, we have had decades to observe whether this approach (that I assume to be familiar to at least many in his field by now) actually made sociologists more productive (at whatever it is that sociologists do), or not.

I tried Zettelkasten, but I think it’s a good solution to a problem I don’t have. I take notes to remember and find information, not to publish it. ZK is more geared toward sharing with others.

Ahrens says as much in his book - the primary goal of Zettelkasten is writing.

No, ZK is only for you. It's like a personal wiki which you use for thinking.

I think that’s much closer to “Linking Your Thinking”. Short version: your PKM is a wiki. Make lots of index pages like “Restaurants Index”, with a master index that maps to all of them.

ZK wants to apply a linearity that just isn’t relevant to the things I want to record.

Luhmann also used lots of index pages in his own original Zettelkasten.

It's also important to keep in mind that in the kind of research he did, concepts were a bit shorter.

I'm partly the opposite. A lot of life advise I see comes from people at the top, meaning they have all the resources they need and are looking for a way to maximize their time. Their methods may not be applicable to randos like me, so I tend to dismiss it.

Stories by people that were once at the middle rungs and made it to the top through better organization would be a lot more interesting and relatable.

Depends :) Maybe you are awesome in managing all that in your head (which would be an exception to the norm). Or maybe you think you are handling at pretty well, not knowing how much better you could handle it. I noticed you only referred to work. GTD is a life-centric system, valuing personal stuff as much as work stuff. Some people use all their brain powers to manage all of that, and then have very little less to keep up with the responsabilities/expectations that are part of a healthy personal and family life. That, for me, its what always made GTD stand apart from other systems.

This is fair. I do use the same system for family and personal stuff. Separate inbox and separate Apple Reminders list.

Here's the productivity blackpill — most "productivity" improvement are dwarfed by immediate skill improvements. Want to be a better insert relevant profession? Get good at skills relevant to profession, don't try to improve some abstract "productivity" that's 10 steps removed from the actual craft.

You're probably not missing out on much. You've hit the 80/20 long ago.

> Am I just missing out on something?

Complex GTD systems are useful in unorganized workplaces where things are left to individuals to solve.. It's a way of juggling constantly changing priorities. So if you don't need them, it's likely that your workplace organizes well.

Or for people that simply don't have as good executive skills, a trait that seems to be more variable than is commonly accepted.

I have a job, a side business I'm trying to get profitable, house, garden, 4 kids and wife. Stuff keeps pulling on me constantly. Things need to get done in every aspect, and events planned and done.

Without productivity tools, my life would be a stressful chaos.

Being busy does not = being productive. That is not to say you aren't productive, I don't know you. But it is easy to be "busy" while not getting anything done at all.

I certainly have those day / weeks as is normal in any startup or work environment. But they tend to not be super frequent.

For the people who get a little bit too into it I think it's a kind of a displaced attempt to bring some measure of control over a life that feels out of control. It sates anxiety.

E.g. you cant control how your boss treats you but you can control how you organize your tasks.

I delved deeply into this world and over time, have largely gone back to almost precisely what you do.

I use Apple Notes/Reminders for most things. Calendar is critical. Lastly I do use Trello, similar to Cal Newports recommendations, just so I know how to organize my sets of tasks. But seriously, Apple Notes is a godsend in its simplicity.

I organise things similarly to you. I created montaigne.io as a means to create and publish a website, blog or portfolio directly from Apple Notes.

Congratulations, you don't have ADD

Sounds like a specialized productivity tool would be of little help there, since no tasklist can withstand the problem of just not being able to get started on a task. And something like GTD is only going to be another burdensome and anxiety-inducing task for someone with executive dysfunction.

A simple but constant reminder system (perhaps with a smartwatch or phone) can be of more use.

Breaking task down into small single actions can be very helpful for those with executive function disorders.

This is part of GTD.

And then if you use a system malleable enough to reduce starting effort to 0 across anything (project or task) you do... you just about solve that problem

How can a productivity system reduce the starting effort of any task to zero? There’s such a thing as activation energy.

Sure, you can try breaking a task down to its smallest component, but not all problems can chunk like that. And even the smallest component will take non-zero work.

I would be curious to learn about a system that could actually accomplish that.

Bit by bit add all the links, phone numbers and information to do the task to the todo, once it is all right there then it becomes much more possible.

You are correct that many tasks cannot be made that small, if they cannot be achieved then the task becomes locate and ask for assistance.

> How can a productivity system reduce the starting effort of any task to zero? There’s such a thing as activation energy.

For my side projects and explorations I use org-roam, Nix, and direnv.

So activation energy is:

- org-roam-find-file, type, "so me proj string", enter

- C-c C-n to go to heading

- C-c C-a f to open project directory attached to heading

- envrc-mode sets buffer local PATH values according to flake.nix 100% reproducible environment

So tying this to my productivity system with org-mode and org-agenda is either org links that can execute arbitrary elisp like:

    elisp:(org-roam-find-file "so me proj string")

Or more often these days emacs bookmarks which can be set with C-x r m by default.

These combine to rule out the biggest factors preventing from moving side projects forward:

- build issues or the chance of them that inevitably arise with anything less than 100% reproducibility

- a way to talk about and organize each project and ascribe meaning to groups of projects because each is an org-roam node

- a radical assault on anything monotonous I feel the computer should be doing for me or anything that annoys me at all

- the freedom to wander aimlessly and make progress, yet never lose a given starting place

This depends on exactly which executive functions are impaired, which are not always the same even for those with an ADHD diagnosis.

That is incorrect. Organizing information about commitments and plans is an enormous help.

ADHD has two primary symptoms:

1. Executive Dysfunction

2. Limited working memory

Organizational tools can help with #2, and can also help break down tasks to be less daunting, which can help sometimes help #1, but only if the executive disfunction is being managed with other means like medication.

No, it sounds like you have worked out a good process as opposed to obsessing over tools.

To expand, when I teach people productivity, I keep it simple. I am familiar with both GTD for tasks and BASB/PARA for knowledge. Both approaches boil down in to having a central location to put stuff, organizing stuff around based on how immediate it is, and then having a regular review process to trim excess.

It's very similar to scrum. Dump everything into the backlog, organize it around what's going to be the most actionable, and then periodically trim/refine it.

> I’m fairly busy, but just use my inbox with search, Apple notes and Apple reminders. Works fine for me.

That's the key. It works fine for you. It wouldn't come close to working for me though. I've had to dedicate many hours building a system that works for me.

That said, I've never been into productivity porn. I've spent my time figuring out what wasn't working and how to fix it. Reading about 'productivity' is an unproductive use of my time.

No. How many successful people have credited their success to some productivity technique? It doesn't matter, and worst case it wastes time.

What's most likely happening is that a bunch of people need to stay more organized than you to keep track of what you're throwing out there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com