Excerpts from a conversation about personal information management
sachachua.com
sachachua.com
These days, the only question I have to ask myself is "in what context do I want to rediscover this note?". For example, I don't usually sit around thinking: "Didn't we discuss this SSH-related problem with Jeffrey and Anna back in May? Let me go to the may-2024 folder of my notes and grep through them...". Instead, I would just go to either of these notes titled: 'ssh' or 'Jeffrey' or 'Anna' and search for backlinks, where I will surely find my notes related to that discussion, even if they're spread out across multiple days and many notes in multiple places. And it doesn't really matter where specific notes are - which file, what nested hierarchy of headings, etc.
Zettelkasten really does work. You just need a quick an easy way of cross-linking different notes. I highly recommend this little book called 'How to Take Smart Notes', it's fairly small, you can go through it within an hour or so. And remember the famous quote of Richard Feynman: "Notes aren't a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process"... If you don't find a good way of taking notes, you won't be doing a good job of thinking.
(EDIT: Similarly, over the years I had a few cases of some TODOs I forgot about because I accidentally made a whole subtree stop parsing with a stray character. Rare as it is, I'm beginning to wonder if I shouldn't switch to modal editing a la vim, as those mistakes tend to happen when moving through the outline with "speed keys".)
In general, Org works well for me, but damn if the fragility of plaintext doesn't bite me every now and then.
For that, I have .dir-locals.el file in the root of my notes folder with a single line: ((org-mode . ((eval git-auto-commit-mode 1))))
Even if I accidentally make a change, there's always trackable history
My git-autocommit technique only for tracking unforeseen changes - I was using Orgzly on Android, and one day I tried using its sync feature and it borked up a bunch of my notes, creating duplicate files, etc. I didn't like that.
Do you run org-lint on the save hook? I wonder if that'd be too distracting, or if it can be done silently unless some errors detected.
How can I install org-roam? Looks difficult.
Org-mode by itself, if you've never used Emacs before, can certainly be challenging - it has too many features. One of the best overviews of the Org-mode's built-in features is Rainer König's playlist on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVtKhBrRV_ZkPnBtt_TD1... He also has a Udemy course https://www.udemy.com/course/getting-yourself-organized-with..., but I've never tried it myself - by the time he published it, I was already well-versed in Org-mode features.
Besides these, Org-mode is extendable with other packages. I, for example do my pdf-annotations, presentations, anki-card editing, http endpoints testing, dotfile management and many other things in Org-mode.
Tangentially,
> I have over 30,000 tasks in my Org Mode overall. 23,000 of them are TODOs. Several thousand of them are still currently open. I'm never gonna see them all. Even if I wanted to, I'm never gonna see them all.
If the approach is to let low priority items roll over, that just seems like a recipe for dropping the ball.
Are people getting through 133 items in a day? That's 216 seconds per item.
As someone who has compulsively accumulated lengthy to-do lists and buckled beneath the phantom of hopes and intentions of varying importance and ambition I find it enlightening that the possibility of completing a task other than those that are important enough to not have to write down to begin with can be measured by their meaningfulness and address according to this measure.
I gather that the .0050% of information that I consume daily is what is of the greatest priority and the remaining 99.995% is synthesized and iterated over the next day until it reemerges as something important. I suspect that Wiegley completes on average about 5 important things each day. This sounds like a solid baseline.
Maybe the 133 items are 120 items of one minute work each, and the rest are conditional or optional task you will not do that day.
Then stop managing them with fancy computers and just do them.
This is to say, if you don't keep on top of current work, the agenda view quickly turns into an ever growing wall of shame.
I have a pretty weird love-hate relationship with it because of that.
I was wondering what an action-adventure villain was doing in the dictionary
> Ganot
Oh, that sounds more like a real person.
Perhaps my locating of the quote is redeeming
https://archive.org/details/elementreatisephys00ganorich/pag....
For a second I misread it as Gowron, and my mind started replaying the quote above in an angry Klingon voice.
When "something" comes up, it's not always clear to me whether it's urgent or not, important or not. Getting it out into a list frees my mental capacity.
For example, I got a reminder to renew my passport yesterday. Not urgent, but important. Goes onto a list. I'll eventually prioritize and schedule it in my weekly review.
The key (for me) it aggressively devote attention to pruning these lists.
Those few "active" items and some more "standby" items are easy to list and read by themselves, but unexpanded, they're also non-actionable. And what I learned is, trying to expand even a few of them more than one level down quickly becomes overwhelming, and creates big overhead - as I work on one thing, the task breakdowns for the rest go stale, requiring additional effort to fix them. It surprised me just how fast this happens (and how quickly it leads me to stop looking at my own plans).
Related and perhaps extreme example that taught me much is when I took a medium-sized ticket that seemed perfectly doable in two to three work-weeks, and attempted to break it down all the way to actionable TODOs no larger than 2 to 4 hours worth of work. I wanted to see if this would streamline my work and allow me to make a more precise time estimate for the whole ticket.
I probably spent a day or two on the breakdown itself, complete with estimates and dependency links for every item - starting Z requires X and Y to be done, Y is done when A and B are done, etc. Standard project management stuff - lets you compute critical path and prioritize accordingly, and even draw a Gantt chart. My 3-week project ended up having some 150 tasks in it. Initially it looked great, but just a day or two into actual work, I found myself redoing large parts of the breakdown. Every two or three ticked-off tasks, the newly-gained knowledge made it apparent some task dependencies were to too strict, or entirely unnecessary. Large subtrees had to be split, shifted around or deleted, or had to have their estimates adjusted, all while new actionable tasks had to be added (and broken down). And that doesn't even includes the time spent readjusting the list after being pre-empted by some unrelated, critical-priority tasks.
All that planning quickly became a huge maintenance overhead. I only ever started making progress on the project itself when I stopped paying attention to my lists. That experience has taught me to stop breakdowns much earlier, and to stop eagerly breaking everything down to the same level - however good estimates I got this way, they weren't even needed for anything, and at the same time, they were constantly invalidated by added re-planning overhead.
These days, I don't break down work ahead of time beyond what's apparent and useful at the moment. I went from ahead-of-time to just-in-time.
Another factor is, it seems I'm really bad at the whole separation of planning and execution stages. My mind doesn't work that way, and can't stay in "execute this list one item at a time" mode for very long.
Makes no sense to torture yourself over something you can literally change tomorrow.
Also, "something you can literally change tomorrow" is very much wrong, for the usual obvious reasons: I couldn't possibly afford a 90% salary cut, and neither could my family. Given standard life choices, past a certain age your career becomes a shackle.
Of course there are significant tradeoffs to be made, since there are infinitely many potential tradeoffs in life.
The term of art for this strategy is "size to the horizon". Imagine you're looking across an open plain. The trees and rocks closer to you are bigger and you can make out more detail. The ones further away are still abstract.
You have to know exactly what to do with the things right in front of you, but you have to keep only a general awareness of that which is distant.
Now pretend that I cut and cut but can't bring myself to reduce x.txt to less than, say, 50 items, every one essential to complete by today. What do I do then? I copy x.txt to y.txt, and reduce x.txt to just what I plan to do for the next 4 hours. If that's still too long, I copy y.txt to z.txt, x.txt to y.txt, and reduce x.txt again. You could always start lower in the alphabet (a.txt) if you want more "space".
You get the idea. The point is, with text files, if it's got too much in it, create a backup version of that file and cut it down to size. Repeat as necessary until your todo list is manageably long.
He links to https://github.com/brabalan/org-review - what is that? What is org mode and org mode review? What is a sketchnote and how do you create one?
Seems org-review is one such extension.
And a sketchnote is a visual note, something where you draw/sketch your information. Basically a more freestyle diagram or something to tell a short story.
I’ve collected quotes for years: pretty fun to review from time to time.
My giant pile is my inbox. I refile each task in one of the above boxes when I’m reviewing it. And when I’m doing, only today boxes is important (up 10 items where only two only 3 or 5 are inportant)
I use Autosync on android and a script that runs on my laptop. This works great for the text files, but the attachments/data files (say like screenshots) are a pain to find and open on mobile. Second, they're even more painful to add from mobile.
I'm fine with quite elaborate set ups if it solves this problem.
Realistically, I dont see the mobile experience improving much. Given Emacs' utility though I dont mind it.
Then projects, todos, agenda items etc can go from TODO -> DEFER and I know that they're "not now" items. That has seemed sufficient for me. Tracking exactly when they're reviewed has been too much, and not everything needs a scheduled time in the future for review.
But I know the feeling. I've seen videos about people who have special physical filing cabinets for notecards that take up an entire tabletop. They have to figure out how to number these things, which can open up a can of worms and lots of differing opinions.
This can seem farcical at times. Sometimes the knowledge-management world can seem like a manifestation of OCD or perfectionism.
But to be clear, I don't want to discount in any way that such approaches could work for many people on many projects. My general take is that if a person is being mindful about the _effort in_ versus _benefit out_, they'll probably end up in a pretty good place.
For YouTubers in a niche of a niche, sometimes there is a positive feedback loop to just go deeper down the rabbit hole. For example, once a content creator has "committed" to a paper-only Zettelkasten system, what are the chances they are going to "mellow out" and move to a hybrid paper+digital system?
> special physical filing cabinets for notecards
It sounds like you're a bit dismissive of it. The creator of this system Luhmann was a very prolific writer [0] which he credited to this system.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann#Note-taking_sys...
That's a factor, yes, but before I will grant that it is more (or less) advantageous, we would need to have a much longer conversation. (Right now, however, I'm not particularly interested in running experiments and drawing conclusions about how to best optimize YouTube content creation.)
Right, I'm aware of Luhmann and Zettelkasten and ZK-inspired systems. I'm glad it works for him and many others.
Still, if one goes down the rabbit holes of ZK and knowledge management systems, you will sooner or later find some videos that leave the realms of productivity and venture into the farcical.
This is important to recognize: "There is a common mistake people [make] when [using] PARA, Zettelkasten, GTD, Bullet Journals [...]. / They assume each system is universal. / These systems were [NOT] built for mass consumption." - 2022 blog post by Zain Rizvi titled "PARA vs. Zettelkasten: The false binary" https://www.zainrizvi.io/blog/para-vs-zettelkasten-the-false...
John Wiegley has authored a number of highly used open source tools and libraries. So has Adam Porter (although perhaps not as much as John).
I wasn't comparing them globally with all SW engineers. My point was that they likely have accomplished more than most, if not all, the commenters in this submission. I, personally, would be cautious in criticizing their workflow unless I can demonstrate something better. Otherwise it's just armchair criticism.
> [comparisons to] commenters in this submission
I wouldn’t make claims as to the level of accomplishment here, not least of which because I’m not willing to pick any one definition of accomplishment.
For example, I’ll avoid the temptation to conflate visibility and popularity with productivity.
> be cautious in criticizing their workflow unless I can demonstrate something better
Yes, making assessments based on comparisons against alternatives is important. And I’m inclined to give their approach attention and consideration, especially for people with their mindset and skillset. But generally, I’m not willing to grant any particular level of broader applicability for a given audience.
So I would reframe this discussion as a question: “Which of their practices are likely to work for [me/my team]?”
Like so many things in life, valid generalization is hard. Especially hard when no one knows the correct answer, so instead we assess better and worse. So, reinforcement learning. And RL in complex environments with large action spaces can be very data intensive!
>This can seem farcical at times. Sometimes the knowledge-management world can seem like a manifestation of OCD or perfectionism.
>But to be clear, I don't want to discount in any way that such approaches could work for many people on many projects. My general take is that if a person is being mindful about the _effort in_ versus _benefit out_, they'll probably end up in a pretty good place.
>My general take is that if a person is being mindful about the _effort in_ versus _benefit out_, they'll probably end up in a pretty good place.
:(Because I use Emacs for my note-taking, I can quickly browse relevant GitHub issues, PRs, Jira tickets, Emails, etc. - without ever having to open or search for anything in the browser.
I can run code snippets in different languages and send HTTP requests and analyze and even visualize the results. I can have tables with spreadsheet-like calculations. I can turn my notes into Anki cards and synchronize them so I can then review them on my phone - spaced repetition is a great tool for memorizing things. I can create PDF annotations - right there, inside my notes - PDF document would be displayed in the next pane. I can store links to specific places in our codebases and annotate code without having to change the code or add comments. I can type something like 'RFC 6962' and immediately start browsing the relevant document (again, right there where my notes are). I can type a question to an LLM and get the answer inlined. I can look up any Wikipedia terms or search on Google, DDG or GitHub - and again, without switching to the browser. I can translate sentences and whole paragraphs between languages.
And the greatest thing about this all? I don't have to pay a damn dime to anyone - these tools are free. And I don't have to worry about some company taking my data hostage. I don't have to worry about converting my notes to a meaningful format - it is all just plain text. I can easily convert my notes, analyze them, gather stats, encrypt them, send them to LLM engine for processing, force Emacs to read them to me out loud. The possibilities are virtually unlimited.
More like having every intention to achieve glorious victory in battle with your sword, but never getting to it as you keep finding ways to make the sword even sharper. That's legitimate trap, yes.
Most are so afraid of this trap, that they just live on the battlefield and keep fighting with their dull, wooden swords; when asked if they heard about sharpening - or steel - they mumble some quotes from Arthur C. Clarke's story, "Superiority". And it's true, many people fall into this trap. Some are never heard from again. But then others occasionally share their sword designs and sharpening tricks, which end up improving weapons for the whole army. Then there are those who pop in and out, tinkering in the field, upgrading their blades until they become rocket propelled chainsaws or other weird shit.
The truth is, if you're not satisfied with your Army Standard Issue Sword and want something better, you'll need to fall into this trap once or twice. That's how you learn how to upgrade your own gear.
Or, in short: exploration vs. exploitation tradeoff. If you want to get shit done, you need to find a good balance. Maximizing either of the two is a failure.