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Excerpts from a conversation about personal information management
- pushcx 2y agoIt seems this is excerpts from a video or screenshare. Does anyone have a link for that? I’m curious to see some of the things the speaker refers to.
- pinko 2y agoThis is an excellent, if meandering, discussion -- lots of great nuggets in there I want to follow up on. Thanks for sharing!
- deskr 2y agoI think this is interesting but I'm totally out of the loop. He links to https://github.com/brabalan/org-review 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?
- pushcx 2y ago[Org mode](https://orgmode.org/ https://orgmode.org/) is a popular emacs plugin for organizing notes and todos. I don’t use it so I can’t be sure, but the reference to review is [probably this](https://orgmode.org/manual/Stuck-projects.html https://orgmode.org/manual/Stuck-projects.html) about doing a weekly review of one’s tasks and projects, probably in line with [the practice](https://gettingthingsdone.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Weekly_Review_Checklist.pdf https://gettingthingsdone.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Wee...) from the Getting Things Done productivity system. [Sketchnotes](https://rohdesign.com/sketchnotes https://rohdesign.com/sketchnotes) are an artistic visual summary.
- clircle 2y agoHN does not render markdown
- slightwinder 2y agoorg-mode is an extension for emacs. It's centered around a plaintext markup-format which is specialized for organization and note-taking, hence the name. It has several other extensions build up on the core-extension, and it's format, many coming from the original project itself. And it has later branched out into other areas, like literate programming, personal databases, etc. 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.
- tolerance 2y agoWiegley's "Today's agenda has 133 items on it," now joins David Foster Wallace's "I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today," in quotes I wish I could recite to others to express how I think and feel. 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.
- ActionHank 2y agoAs a systemiser using GTD I have an ever growing list of items to get to should I complete items for the day, but I don't understand how you could expect to address 133 items in a day. 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.
- bosie 2y agoYes but I use OmniFocus for habit learning or reminding myself to take eg meds. Taking 7 meds or supplements in 20 seconds is doable :)
- tolerance 2y agoI haven't given the article the dedicated read that I intend to yet but my impression is that he does not expect to address all 133 items and it does not matter. 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.
- xpe 2y agoWhile the authors both use org mode, this includes a broader discussion that includes various ideas and tips, including the books "Atomic Habits", "Getting Things Done", and "Building a Second Brain". (Updated, since my previous comment thought it was only about org mode).
- 7402 2y agoThis is a satire ... right?
- xpe 2y agoHaha, no. 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?
- tra3 2y agoFor a YouTuber it's more advantageous to keep switching between various systems to keep generating more YouTube content. > 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_system_(Zettelkasten) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann#Note-taking_sys...
- xpe 2y ago> For a YouTuber it's more advantageous to keep switching between various systems to keep generating more YouTube content. 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.)
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- xpe 2y agoI was hoping there is an audio/podcast version of this, but I haven't found it yet.
- iLemming 2y agoThe note on semantic and operational distinction of notes is interesting. I personally ditched hierarchies when I switched to Org-Roam. I used to think all the time where a specific note would belong - should I organize my notes by dates? Should I use the datetree feature of Org-Mode? Should I put everything in one file or split between multiple files grouping notes by some categories or tags. 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.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoThe point about linting still stands, though. I recently had to grep for a note I was really sure was there, but didn't show in the roam-find- autocomplete. Turns out, at some point I must've accidentally put a stray character that made properties section stop parsing, dropping the note from the system. Another case is when I occasionally add what I intend to be roam note as a new org file, and then forget to press the shortcut I have to give the file an ID. (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.
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- shaftoe444 2y agoJust forget stuff like a cool person
- xpe 2y agoI'm storing this quote into my second brain right now. I'm heisenseriousjoking. Filing something away makes forgetting very cool indeed; I know I can look it up later.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoDo you then actually look it up at the right time? I often don't. My anxiety increases with the number of uncompleted items on the list, until it eventually stops me from looking at the list ever again. Filing something away becomes a license to forget.
- xpe 2y agoAh, well, isn’t a “to do” item, so no anxiety needed. I’ve collected quotes for years: pretty fun to review from time to time.
- skydhash 2y agoIf your todo list is becoming too long that’s when you need to break it by project and calendar frames (today, tomorrow, this week, next week, this month, next months). It’s a presentation problem, that you can solve with a task manager or a planner. 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)
- codemac 2y agoDoes anyone handle org-mode for attachments + mobile sync? 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.
- tra3 2y agoNot that I am aware of. The mobile story with emacs is pretty painful. I use dropbox + beorg (iOS). If I have to deal with attachments off spelunking through the dropbox folders I go. Realistically, I dont see the mobile experience improving much. Given Emacs' utility though I dont mind it.
- codemac 2y agoorg-review is interesting, but I just added another TODO state: DEFER 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.
- cynicalsecurity 2y agoThe approach in the article by strictly controlling everyone with AI sounds absolutely dystopian. I wouldn't want to work in such a company.
- treetalker 2y ago“Do not-doing and nothing is left undone.”