GTD recommends to set as few deadlines and calendar dates as possible, and I still think that's the right way to go. If you can, you should work items on your todo list in the order that best suits the context and current abilities.
Case study: Frederico Vittici of MacStories recently wrote about revising his own system to eliminate deadline times from his system as unnecessary overhead that he'd picked up long ago. It was a case of an item from "someone else's system" which was adding stress for no benefit.
All organizational systems are really custom-fit jobs. Look at others' systems and understand the individual techniques and how they fit together. Then apply those to your situation. This is a bit like the advice to not just take someone's complicated dotfile setup (vim, shell, etc.) and add it to your own wholesale. Instead to learn and apply piece-by-piece, understanding that sometimes several pieces must "go in together" to make everything work as intended. (this also applies 100% to every single software team's process in my entire career, btw.)
That's how you end with never ending and dying projects. Projects which are dragging for years and decades because the creator just does not "feel it" and at the end abandon them and never releases them. Thinking about the end goal is especially in creative work highly relevant. And a deadline is a good tool for this, as it forces you to think about. And a deadline can be changed, if done with good reasoning.
> GTD recommends to set as few deadlines and calendar dates as possible
GTD also makes a great point about reviewing and analyzing. And a deadline is a tool to force one to review and analyze a project, it's state and goals.
Basically, weekly reviews are tactical, where you can mostly mechanically prioritize the upcoming week and clear out your inboxes. Monthly are more strategic, where you take a wider look at the status of all projects, consider modifying, canceling, or reprioritizing them. And annual reviews are the same thing but addressed at the highest level of your life; you might think of it as a formalization of New Years Resolutions.
Since adopting a schedule of these reviews I have felt much more in control of my projects and work, and the time investment is about 1 hour a month to do.
I agree though, a periodic project review is a must.
I also find scheduled "brain dump" check list super helpful. Basically, a bunch of questions amounting to "what am I forgetting", by listing all the generic categories I'm responsible for (like "Am I forgetting to pay a bill", "are there any house maintenance items outstanding"). Allows me to unload anything that I'm unconsciously holding on to in my working memory.
https://www.amazon.com/Extend-Your-Mind-Praxis-2-ebook/dp/B0...
- Every “project”, no matter how small, gets its own folder. This means I’m no longer hunting for files (“Did I save that to my desktop? Is it in my email?”)
- Replicate and manually “sync” the folder structure between programs (in my case, OneNote for notes, OneDrive for files, and Microsoft Tasks for…tasks). This gives the freedom to use the best tool for the job, rather than trying to find one tool that does everything, but means you still have a consistent organization structure.
These both seem somewhat obvious in retrospect, but they’ve been very helpful for me.
First personal knowledge management is not a new field, it was just called "note taking" before.
Second the place where you really need to manage knowledge is at your job. Using a system that requires discipline at work is usually a bad idea as most people are not disciplined. Also at work information is spread around different applications which makes sorting all information about everything into folders difficult
Finally if that method works for the author then good, but I also have also method that works for me which is : try to take notes of almost nothing
A system that has a higher success of working is developed organically, from the bottom up. I’d say Zettelkasten is one such example, though its primary beneficiaries are researchers in text-heavy fields (e.g. sociology).
For task and calendar management GTD has everything I need, and try to keep the system as simple as possible, usually in paper and just moving a few things to digital if it really adds value. Then the project reference material itself can be more messy and be used to generate new next actions and other GTD items, as long as GTD itself is kept tidy the chaos in the reference material doesn't have much impact in the general planning.
- ~612 BC Ashurbanipal di Nineveh tablets, sort of structured tag-based library with more than 30k tags found, mostly used to note transactions and other daily life activities
- ~245 BC Callimacus pínakes, another sort of tag-based index for the Alexandria giant library
- ~1545 Conrad Gessner libraries of Babel, personal notes closely similar to "modern" ZettelKasten
- 1673-94 Leibniz's Scrinium Literatum another far similar to Gessner's one and ZK
- 1934 Paul Otlet & Henry La Fontaine Mundaneum, so-called the modern web ancestor
- 1960 Niklas Luhmann's ZettelKasten
Those are just few I remember but there are many others and surely many more not lost in the history. All claim to be universal and all have an ultimate goal: store&retrieve information as easily as possible to produce new one, to evolve. All are closely similar in principles (usage of meta-information, cataloguing techniques of various kind, keep individual "entries" small for easy isolation and composing etc). The web (1.0 so called) is the first general and global example of those systems. All fails though at a certain point.
Long story short: there is no universal method to be followed slavishly expecting magic results, there are common needs, normally solved in closely similar ways with the tools of the time for millennia, the best option is understand the problem and the principle behind all those solutions tailoring one on our needs.
Personally I use Emacs/org-mode/org-roam and various other related package to manage my personal information, suffering a bit by the lack of a more flexible storage than files and filesystems, but still enough to manage almost anything so effectively that I can't use modern desktops/sw anymore, it's not PARA, ZK etc but just another systems, without strict rules, tailored on my needs following the similar principles of all others. Popular modern one are LYT https://youtu.be/RgwnpEBFNUg or Jonny Decimal.
for crm, bookmarks, and comms, i imagine you'd present the inboxes as projects, with a task or project associated with each resource
Was able to use it in both profesional and personal environments.
Google already indexed this page 59 minutes after posting (that's how I ended up here)
The most important principle? You find an expert who will take you by the hand and give you the success formulas. You can do that through reading in many cases in which you then add your own special tweaks to improve it. If you read a number of books in the topic of information organization, you'll realize that these people who are "experts" are really just in the same position as the people before them with their own special tweaks to improve the previous generation's work.
My current thinking about how this works is:
- Identify that there is a system
- Learn, document or describe the system
- Align your behaviors as an individual to use or change the system
The hardest part for me is the last, actually getting my behaviors to change to take advantage of an identified system.
The Reference vs Areas I've never really understood though. So that part works less well for me.
I've found it to be pretty helpful, though I don't use it for code. That simplification is worth the price of admission for me.
The thing with PARA is that information falls into different buckets according to their use, not their topic. You're in a completely different mindset when you're looking up old stuff for reference (archives), remembering that bash command you use once a month (resources), etc.
On a first impression / hunch, your decimal system seems to have the failure mode that your old finances live right next to your current finances. Thus, the size of your context / working window just grows and grows without bounds, becoming unwieldy over time. With PARA, the idea is that a project folder contains data if and only if you need it to work on that project.
A very low-cost way of trying it out is to just implement the 2nd A (archives). That's by far the most important.
That's not really the same. Note-taking is simply the act of recording something. While knowledge management aims for the systematic approach and is an established academic discipline with a very long history. Though, of course not every random system some guru wants to sell has this level of research and quality. And I wouldn't put PARA there either.
> Second the place where you really need to manage knowledge is at your job.
Depends on your job and live. Most people use PKM for their own hobbies and daily stuff. Work-Knowledge is of course also a big area, but not the only one, often not even the dominating one.
> Using a system that requires discipline at work is usually a bad idea as most people are not disciplined.
Which is the point where a system can help.
> Finally if that method works for the author then good, but I also have also method that works for me which is : try to take notes of almost nothing
So what? Can't the author wrote about their methods just because you have yours?
That sounds like a "you" problem?
Apologies if this sounds like an attack, but I see enough of it here that I think it's worth commenting on. It should be obvious that 'perfect way' means "way that the author really likes and is very confident in, and therefore wants to share it."
And not "scientifically proven" or some silliness.
I'll add Cataloging the World, by Alex Wright and Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 by Markus Krajewski plus few relatively recent articles:
- Note Taking as an Art of Transmission http://doi.org/10.1086/427303
- From Note-Taking to Data Banks https://doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2010.492615
- Facing Interfaces: Paul Otlet's Visualizations of Data Integration https://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/images/e/e2/Heuvel_Rayward_F...
There are surely many others and following those we arrive to classic PIM publications, witch is "the system to organize personal digital information" in the end!
Personally I don’t think of Tiago Forte as a productivity expert. He just happens to be a social media personality that does productivity stuff. Like other “productivity gurus” on social media, if you pay close enough attention they switch their systems regularly. Maybe it’s to have fresh content, who knows. I think it is because they fell in the trap.
It’s all FOMO at a certain point. Like the pioneers I mentioned earlier, their advice is to not be afraid to do your own thing even if the masses are going in the other direction.
Tangentially, William Kent's "Data and Reality" (the first two editions especially) also explores the larger meta-issues of moving from human-ish nuanced thinking to more limited formal representations (i.e. "The map is not the territory"). http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm
Coincidentally this other HN article showed up the same day: "25+ years of personal knowledge management" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30903940
I have my own FOSS explorations to make software related to these sorts of themes called Pointrel/Twirlip -- but still a work in progress after over forty years. Indirectly Pointrel did in a sense help inspire Wordnet though. :-) And Wordnet was core to the rise of Google (via Adsense) which claims to want to organize the world's information (even if they may have other goals as well).