Comment by sixdimensional | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sixdimensional | Hacker News Reader

This is strange. Lately, I've had a number of people in different situations (especially at work) tell me of similar efforts pushing back on organized process or.. organized anything, including note-taking, task tracking and more. Is there some kind of attempt at a mental revolution here or is this some kind of response to people being overloaded and not wanting to carry the mental burden/weight/let it go?

I almost feel like this should not even be a topic. Using tools to help organize thoughts - why do we care if it helps people? - not all brains work the same. What is wrong about organizing one's thoughts and spending time doing so??

I can see the argument that one can get lost in a meta-loop of sorts, but that's probably true of anything when you take into account procrastination - or certain brain types - that are prone to loops. For some people loops feel good, right? I say this as somebody who is lightly on the spectrum.

Even the pushback against knowledge management as a practice is perplexing - there was a time where Peter Drucker, for example, thought knowledge work would someday be all there was left to do.

That said, I can't help but wonder if there really is something bigger/some kind of trend going on here and I can't quite put my finger on it. Is this something evolutionary? Are we trying to evolve/seek a better way as an organism?

Is anybody else seeing/feeling the same trend?

Honestly probably just the contrarian pendulum swinging. The answer of course is that the exact right amount of PKM is whatever amount is helpful for you at this particular moment. But imagine how few clicks that blog post would get!

Contrarianism gets clicks and large visibility. Doesn't matter the topic. Many people have built their livelihoods on it.

I can't speak to any wider trend but I read this article as a pushback against the hype that maybe makes note-taking out to be a more powerful tool than it really is.

I tried note-taking and spaced repetition for a while. To the extent that it replaced mindless HN reading, it was positive but I can also see how easy it is to pour in buckets of time without much benefit. It's a very thirsty pursuit - there's always more you could do and you never reach a clear stopping point.

I think there are 2 interesting points here: > pour in buckets of time without much benefit

In this case, it becomes procrastination

> there's always more you could do and you never reach a clear stopping point

Do we need to do more and procrastination is just a signal that we don't want to do something

People are annoyed. It is almost impossible to have a discussion about learning, without someone proselytising about Zettelkasten. Similarly, a few years ago it was almost impossible to have a discussion about intelligence, without someone proselytising about Dual N-Back. So, hopefully, this fashion too shall pass.

Saying that notes are completely useless is just stupid contrarianism, clickbait. But it is true that making and maintaining one's notes can be a form of procrastination. On the other hand, if you write too many notes, it can become difficult to find what you are looking for. There are different applications for note-making, each coming with different advantages and disadvantages. Choosing the right one... again, is important, but also can be a form of procrastination.

Things become even more difficult in an organization, where note-taking is a part of your job, and you have to cooperate with other people. And just like bad programmers generate spaghetti code, bad writers generate... spaghetti wikis? A large organization can have literally million Confluence pages, with tons of duplicated content, with no one removing the obsolete content, so when you search for e.g. "how to configure proxy", you get dozens of answers, most of them containing information that was correct five or ten years ago, but it no longer true.

Shortly, this entire topic is quite frustrating, at least for me. There is a problem. There is no obviously right solution. There are people promoting their favorite solutions, which often do not work for you. But at the end of the day you need to choose something. If you start making notes and change your mind ten years later, it can be quite a lot of work to convert your notes to the new format. (I just keep my old notes as read-only, and started making new notes in the new system.) Frustration makes people express strong opinions.

> Is there some kind of attempt at a mental revolution here or is this some kind of response to people being overloaded and not wanting to carry the mental burden/weight/let it go?

More so recently, I have seen more and more push back against what people are calling, "Toxic Productivity."

I could see an argument for psuedo-pathologizing one's attempts at trying to find the "best" note-taking system under Toxic Productivity.

I recommend Oliver Burkeman's 4000 weeks or Cosmic Insignificance Therapy as an answer: https://overcast.fm/+Kebt26Yx8

TL;DR

Our relationship with productivity is unhealthy and we are doing it to ourselves by trying to over-optimise (min-max) everything. Yet, when we realise that we are all mortals, nothing that we do really matters in the end.... which can be both scary, but also liberating.

There is also an awesome Time-management for mortals - https://dynamic.wakingup.com/pack/PKDAFBB

Its an anti-thesis to productivity (as much as the title sounds otherwise).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com