I think reading docs, understanding a new system which someone else has designed, and fitting one's brain into _their_ organisational structure is the hard part. Harder than designing one's own system. It's the reason many don't stick with an off-the-shelf app. Including Org mode.
I think this is a vocal minority. Outside of internet comment sections, most everyone I know doesn’t care that much about their todo list software.
The most productive people I ever worked with all had really minimal productivity software. For one person it was a Google doc with nested lists. I know several people who preferred physical sticky notes or 3x5 note cards.
A lot of the people I’ve worked with who built elaborate productivity systems and custom software weren’t all that productive. They seemingly spent as much time doing productivity rituals and rearranging their productivity software stack as they did doing actual work. I count the really heavy Notion users in this category because I’ve recently been pulling my hair out dealing with a couple PMs who think “reorganizing Notion” and adding more rules for Notion is a good use of their time each week.
The most extreme example I remember was the eccentric coworker who was building an AI-powered productivity tool that was supposed to optimize his todo lists and schedule them according to his daily rhythms. He spent so much time working on it that our manager had to remind him daily to stay on track with his real work. He was obsessed with “productivity tooling” but the productivity was secondary.
Not everyone is like this, but it happens a lot.
I read about all these complex systems for notes and second brains and whatnot.
All procrastinating imho.
The stuff they, and many smart people like them, are putting in their public notes are sometimes becoming the authoritative bibliographies of little specialized subjects. Their notes get referenced in journal articles.
edit: also, as far as I know, the goal of having a Zettel system is to be as lazy as possible. To have all your notes extremely networked so you can find them pretty quick, you can get surprised about what's in them because old stuff gets surfaced, and you can always find a place to add the thought you're having or the notes you're taking. You save all of that time digging though stuff and filing stuff and losing stuff, which you can use to take a walk in the park or something. To accidentally write a few books just because you had all your notes about some goofy subject you're obsessed with in one place and one day you're like "that must be about a quarter million words."
edit2: also, also, this conversation is very quaint. 10-20 years from now we will all have zettelkasten and we will never look at them at all because we will use AI to interface with them. I'm sure thousands are already in that world, I'm certainly working on getting there.
Regarding productivity/to-do systems: on one hand I agree -- I know a few people for whom it's clearly a form of procrastination and really just need to get on with it. On the other hand, I myself was one of those people, but in hindsight I just hadn't found the right system yet and had real, legitimate issues with the systems I had been trying. Turns out, YouTrack is damn-near perfect for me. I use it both for work and for my personal life and I really, really love it, even for basic to-do lists. The things I was missing from standard to-do lists was the concept of relationships ("depends on," "blocked by," etc) and the ability to schedule multiple projects together on a Gantt Chart. Put those two features together and what needs to be done when and in what order is pretty much inarguable, which is precisely what helps me stay productive, as looking at a huge list and feeling overwhelmed about what to do next -- especially if I'm trying to be efficient or strategic -- freezes me in my tracks.
Regarding second brains: I completely disagree that they're not useful. My Obsidian vault is genuinely one of the single most useful things I have ever done for myself. There's nothing fancy about it, I don't use most of the features, but having a massive vault full of notes is truly indispensable in knowledge work.
It's like a special extra bad form of procrastinating too, because they've essentially gamified procrastination to make it feel productive.
I also don't need my immediate todo list on a calendar. I organize my to-do list simply as "Immediate", "Future", "Distant future", and then put things under heading. Sometimes I add a due date if there is one.
I just had a few markdown documents in a "todo" folder, eg <work>.md <project1>.md etc. Recently I changed it to org-mode because that's a syntax designed for the purpose. https://nvim-orgmode.github.io/ works excellently.
Never been an emacs user in my life. I spent about 5 minutes perusing https://orgmode.org/org.html and was able to do the same.
I use syncthing to sync it between my devices. https://www.orgzlyrevived.com/ works great on android.
DESCRIPTION: not secret
DTSTART:with week
X-mydata:
ENCODING=Ascii85;FMTTYPE=application/octet-stream
<~6q($A;Fs\a8P`)B+EM+(Eb0>"6r[)a5uLZCGA2/4+D>\9EcVQ~>
DESCRIPTION: secret
DTSTART: with hours
I understand the privacy concerns, I can host a nextcloud in a secure location if I need it.
It was helpful to create new mental models, but I now much prefer using my actual brain to organize my thoughts.
The way you chose to describe keeping engineering notes as "second brain fad" is telling. It says you mindlessly tried to follow an organization scheme even though you felt no need to adopt an organization scheme.
In other words, you somehow hopped onto a solution searching for a problem you didn't had.
That's perfectly fine. Fads are defined by those who, like you, onboard onto something for all the wrong reasons and without spending any time thinking about what they are doing and why they are doing it.
Of course, those who end up searching for problems that fit a specific solution end up not finding it. That's the fad part.
In the meantime, engineering logs are indeed time tested and a tried-and-true technique. Those who use it to solve problems they have will naturally see their problems solved by them. That's why you see blog posts like this, and people commenting on how they scratched their itch.
It’s fuzzy - but my recollection was Mann was a fairly renown productivity influencer (although I guess we wouldn’t have called it that then), who had an apostasy about it all.
It's wild to think that was almost 20 years ago when Getting Things Done was going through tech circles as the organization method dujour. (I also equate the same time period with learning Ruby on Rails.)
Merlin did not have anything to do with Lifehacker.com. Gina Trapani[4] founded Lifehacker[3]. But, Lifehacker often covered and was inspired by Merlin's work.
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tickler_file
Generally the tool isn't the problem: NEVER put ticket numbers into long term storage as in a few years you won't be able to reference them. That is version control, design documents, and anything else that isn't the ticket system itself. You can talk about who is working on ticket 12345 and the problems they face, but if anything is going to be written down you need to summarize the ticket without a number.
Like the old joke about the programmers spouse who died a virgin because every night all the programmer did was sit at the edge of the bed talking about how awesome it was going to be when they finally did it.
What about quality? Often, people are very productive, because they sacrifice quality for speed, especially the "annoying" longterm-values of products/decisions.
> They seemingly spent as much time doing productivity rituals and rearranging their productivity software stack as they did doing actual work
It's a different kind of productivity. Just not as valuable for the company.
One of the perks of just-a-text-file-with-a-bunch-of-addons is that it enables progressive disclosure - it takes no learning curve to just get in and use the tool on a basic level, but additional complexity (and power) can be introduced over time.
The problem with a purpose-built app is that there's a minimum level of new concepts to learn before the tool is even minimally useful, and that's a barrier to adoption.
A good example of this in action is something like Markdown. It's just text and will show up fine without you learning anything, but as you pick up more syntax it builds on top - and if you learn some markup syntax but not others, it doesn't prevent you from using the subset you know. There is a clear path to adding new knowledge and ability.
Obviously one needs to be an Emacs user first
Not true I use the Neovim plugin https://nvim-orgmode.github.io/. It supports everything I tried from the official org manual. https://orgmode.org/org.html
I use syncthing to sync it between my devices. https://www.orgzlyrevived.com/ works great on android.
This makes it so infuriating that the top comment on Todo systems is almost invariably "just org-mode lol". Same as remote editing "just TRAMP lol".
I am not going to completely change my editor and rebuild two decades of optimization just to use two Emacs tools.
On-topic: TickTick or Todoist with a slimmed-down "Getting Things Done" system works really well. Almost no learning curve, and you get to free up so much mental bandwidth vis a vis remembering things and prioritizing things. And you don't have to do hamfisted tricks to make a 'simple' .txt system work. Bliss.
Change your editor and rebuild two decades of optimisation in order to use Emacs, two Emacs tools, and also every other Emacs tool out there. Org Mode, TRAMP, Magit, gptel, eglot, flycheck, elfeed, ERC, Emms, EWW … there are a ton of reasons to use Emacs.
Or you can keep using less-capable systems and being annoyed when folks recommend that you upgrade.
For example, I'm perfectly content to use nvim as my primary editor, and this was born out of having to develop for and administer literally tens of thousands of linux servers professionally. I have all the plug-ins and configuration necessary for productivity on my development machines, and when I'm on a remote system ad hoc editing a configuration it already has a built-in lightweight version of the editor I'm already used to.
If I switched to Emacs locally, I'd still have to maintain a working knowledge of vi and context switch when in a remote shell. Changing to Emacs would require more cognitive bandwidth when the whole purpose of "switching for org mode" is to reduce mental load.
Even ignoring the possibility of installing Emacs on remote systems, there are still alternatives:
1. You can run remote shells within Emacs, and edit files remotely using TRAMP. When you are editing a remote file, shell commands run from Emacs run on the remote system.
2. You could use Evil, the Emacs implementation of vim. Then you would use the same bindings everywhere.
3. I have been running Emacs locally for literal decades now, but I still remember and use vi frequently, both locally and remotely. It’s really not a problem.
I feel like there must be an editor version of the Blub Paradox.
Or I get to choose the most logical option yet: keep being annoyed when haughty people keep trying to push a downgrade on me as a supposed 'upgrade'.
Fair point on the surface, it's missing the key aspect of what Emacs actually is. Emacs is not just an editor - to a degree it's philosophy is that your computing environment should be malleable. Those two decades of optimization don't get thrown away; they get encoded directly into the system. Instead of learning to work around the limitations of separate tools, you're investing in a platform that can absorb and amplify all that accumulated knowledge. The question isn't whether you want to abandon your workflows, but whether you want to be limited by them forever.
The key insight is reframing it from "starting over" to "finally having a place where all that expertise can compound indefinitely."
I mean, I get it - not everyone wants their editor to be infinitely customizable; sometimes you just want something that works out of the box. Yet I do honestly think every programmer should give Emacs a serious try at some point in their career - not because they'll necessarily stick with it, but for the same reason why everyone should learn at least one OOP language and get introduced to an FP language. It expands your thinking about what's possible.
Even if you go back to your previous tools, you'll understand computing differently, having seen what a truly malleable environment looks like, the idea of a truly personal computing environment - one that grows with you rather than constraining you. Dismissing Emacs as "just another editor" misses what makes it fundamentally different.
I completely understand your impulse (been there myself), but I'd encourage you to keep an open mind about what Emacs actually offers. When you get a chance maybe explore the philosophy behind it. You might discover something unexpectedly rewarding.
org-mode though... It's called Emacs' killer app for a reason. Even if I only used Emacs for org-mode it'd be worth it. And I don't even use the productivity features.
The only reason why I still use Emacs daily is org-mode.
Todo software is too opinionated. It’s not flexible enough to allow you to break rules. You can’t move things around in a way that allows you to control visual white space between entries. Everything “is something” (a task, an event) vs just being (text.)
We all love a good excuse to build something small-to-medium sized for our own perfect "tailor fit" preferences.
All the excuses about other tools not being adequate are just what we need to say to ourselves to justify the time ;)
What's interesting is AI is going to change this. Entering a prompt for an app that has all the features you want is already pretty trivial, and will only get better.
This is also why it's so difficult to get teams on the same page about project management in their respective workplaces.
And possibly regret it 3 months later...