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Comment by hobo_mark | Hacker News Reader

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).

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"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.

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.

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