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Comment by charles_f | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand that, at some point don't you just forfeit what you haven't done in a month or two and get back onto a manageable list? I mean keeping track of everything is a philosophy, but to the point where the vast majority of your system is just noise, what's the point?

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This is why I don't let my to-do lists automatically roll over. If it wasn't important enough to copy to today's to-do list, then maybe it's okay if it's never done. But I do keep them around in some form, because maybe the old to-do items had some interesting ideas associated with them that I might want to re-visit later. Or keep the 'cool ideas' and 'tasks to take action on said cool ideas' separate.

https://www.nuke24.net/docs/2024/202410-to-do-lists.html

> Noise is either a sound of too short a duration to be determined, like the report of a cannon; or else it is a confused mixture of many discordant sounds, like the rolling of thunder or the noise of the waves. Nevertheless, the difference between sound and noise is by no means precise. — Ganot

http://www.websters1913.com/words/Noise

> Ganon

I was wondering what an action-adventure villain was doing in the dictionary

> Ganot

Oh, that sounds more like a real person.

Thank you.

Perhaps my locating of the quote is redeeming

https://archive.org/details/elementreatisephys00ganorich/pag....

> Ganon

For a second I misread it as Gowron, and my mind started replaying the quote above in an angry Klingon voice.

At record time, don't know what is signal and what is noise. Separation of signal from noise is not persistence problem, it is presentation problem. Model is sophisticated: number of delays against action intended time, etc. flow into whether task is noise. Being in list is protection against amnesia but not protection against prioritization.

Noise is good. There's nothing wrong with noise. Internet is noise. You only need a good search engine or discovering technique. For Org users there are plenty of different choices - Org-Roam and org-roam-ui; built-in org-agenda, tags and todo stickers; Denote; Khoj, plain grepping, etc.

Noise is bad. Horrifyingly and anxiety inducing. The Internet may be noise, but you never actually see it directly. If one could, it would likely drive them insane. Search engines and other discovery methods is how we view it, and why it works at all.

That's what I'm saying. I don't see all my notes at the same time; I never try to see the entire picture nor do I ever worry about composing a new note, thinking it would just get lost in my mess. My knowledge graph looks like a complex web of interconnected nodes. I have over two thousand indexed notes and a few thousand plain-text, unindexed ones. The tools I've listed above do help you to find what you need easily. I treat my notes as my "personalized Wikipedia" - I don't need to know how it is organized or structured, where specific things physically exist, or in which file a specific text of a note sits. It is noise, but it is useful noise, because I have instruments to "extract music" out of it.

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