Indeed it's rather remarkable how many of these figures like Vannevar Bush, Alan Kay, Douglas Engelbart, etc., never actually shipped much. Now, you could argue that they were ahead of their time and couldn't ship, and for some of these people you would be right. But c'mon now, Alan Kay is still kicking, and still talking about how programming should be reinvented. Douglas Engelbart lived into the 2010's. It's more that these fantastical futuristic ideas, if they were released, would probably not live up to their sales pitches. They're all chasing the high of Engelbart's famous demo. And their followers, who are perpetually waiting, who attempt interpretations of these thoughtleaders ideas and get dismissed as flawed manifestations, well they are essentially the parish. They're waiting for the second coming.

This isn't to say that none of these people have accomplished stuff. They have accomplished an extraordinary amount. But they are fundamentally salesmen, salesmen for the future. And salesmen only have a job as long as they have something to sell.

On reading this, I felt like I already sort of knew this, and this internet stranger validated my thoughts.

In essence, journalling is similar to a psychotherapy session.

The clarity of mind you get after a journalling session comes from structuring things in your head, not in your TfT tool.

Yet, as one would expect, people project that feeling onto a tool — which leads to more time invested.

Ultimately after the N-th session, when you try to use the tool to get more of that feeling — you get the opposite, burnout, and then people switch to a new TfT app for the same cycle.

These benefits are why "Daily Pages" were vital to Roam Research's success. Not the bi-directional links or graphs as many think.

"Daily Pages" get you closer to a new therapeutic session, which is what you want most of the time.

I use :

  - paper notebooks. 
  - remarkable 2 
  - markdown/notion + NeuraCache [I'm a founder] for flashcards and spaced repetition

I have never been happier with my setup.

> People have this aspirational idea of building a vast, oppressively colossal, deeply interlinked knowledge graph to the point that it almost mirrors every discrete concept and memory in their brain. And I get the appeal of maximalism. But they’re counting on the wrong side of the ledger. Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt. Every link doubly so.

What I _have_found it very useful for is D&D notes. People, places, objects come up on a re-occurring basis and it is often useful to have a description, encounters, relationships to other people/places/things in a page, or even just a place to list all of those things! You can easily go from session journal -> a bunch of new pages about things, or updates to existing ones in a brief review after the session. It took me a while to actually do the organization but the upkeep is now easy, and I will have a place to recall the name of the inn we we stayed at in our first session in Fantasyville.

I'm stopping with all of that - zero results and tons of wasted time (and fair ammount of subscription money). If I spent all that time tinkering with LaTeX at least I would leveled up my skills.

Judging from comments on HN, I'm not alone and quite a few of us went down weird notetaking rabbit holes. I'll just stick with few scratch plaintext files and handwritten legal pad notes to capture stuff as I work and then transfer/delete stuff at the end of the day without any special system behind the whole process.

I have this whole app sketched up where the idea is you just focus on writing notes and thoughts in one continuous stream, jumping around topics as you go like most professionals do, and then use searches and filters you can save to render different contexts easily from the single stream.

So you can switch between reviewing your work 1 on 1 history and your Christmas gift ideas with a change of a filter. You don’t have to worry about organizing anything, it’s all just a single stream of content and then searches.

I’ll likely never build it, but I’m convinced that would be the way I want to write notes. I don’t want a knowledge graph, I want a stream of consciousness capture tool with a way to use tags searches and filters to make sense of it.

Oh also: I want to write some notes in handwriting on my iPad, and then ocr and clean up those notes to be liked I typed them, but still preserve the original handwriting. I desperately want to be able to hand write notes sometimes, type them sometimes, have them all in one place, and have that place be a stream of consciousness and searchable.

One day.

I just use it to store my stuff. I don't spend much time organising it.

I had trouble organising my data in folders, so I tried Bear Notes, and it helped.

From there, I just came up with a few conventions to deal with the problems that emerged over time - similarly to how someone would define their personal folder-hierarchy. For example, having a page for every contact helped, because I often find myself looking for "that thing that Tom showed me".

But the biggest advantage is that whatever I'm looking for is in one location, only a short full-text search away.

---

> Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt. Every link doubly so.

I have 5000 notes - most of them are useless. But it costs me nothing to keep them.

I do agree with the first part of this sentence, but I think that the second is a little more nuanced. The first few 'links' among nodes in a knowledge graph I do think generally represent more debt (probably less than the node itself, though). As the links increase and the knowledge graph gets denser, I feel that things start to flip and each individual node/link actually gets increasingly easy to recall.

For a specific example: learning how to conjugate a verb in a foreign language and learning a bunch of words out of context is going to be hard to retain over the long-term. However, combining those into a fill-in-the-blank kind of sentence once you know enough actually becomes easier and supports knowledge of all that you've learned. This is just a simple example but once you know about it, you start seeing it everywhere, regardless of the topic under study.

Anyway, I enjoyed the article. I have gone all-in on Anki and sometimes I get concerned that I'm missing out on the newest software. Articles that remind us that the best system is the one that you use are important to have around.

Viewing it on my laptop, the CSS font size is set to 2 rem, which means each letter takes up four times as much space as default body text (which is 1 rem, usually 16 px -- so this is 32 px size). Even worse, if you zoom out, it detects that and compensates by setting it to 2.5 rem (40 px), or over 6 times as large in area! It's trying to force bizarrely big-headline-sized body text, even against the user's wishes.

I've seen this bizarre creeping growth of font sizes across some personal blogs over the last decade, but I've never seen a case this extreme.

(And remember that, for comparison, traditional OS UI elements tend to be around the 12 px size and sometime even smaller, so a 32-40 px size is truly gargantuan.)

That's all I do. It's simple, convenient, and doesn't break my flow with unnecessary complexity. I just write and link.

That kind of Zettelkasten note-taking workflow is what caught my attention and it's currently the only way I can take notes.

People who create complicated note-taking workflows using databases and such, they're very bizarre people to me. I can't do any of that without recoiling. But I can dump information into my graph and link it all together all day if I got into the flow. It's just "natural".

> And yet I don’t use them. Why? Building them was fun, sure, but there must be utility to a personal database.

There is utility in doing things that are fun. Even if that fun thing does not increase your productivity. There are deeper issues if enjoying how you spend your time is a problem.

> Pointlessness of Organization: my Calibre and Zotero libraries are a mess. But is that bad? Is there any point to organizing them? I can always find what I need, either by searching or browsing

If you know where to look and how to find your stuff, you're sufficiently organized.

> migrating everything from my filesystem, from Calibre, from Zotero, from my browser bookmarks, etc. is a huge process

This is a common claim, but the truth is that there's no need to move, say, files into a new system. The simplest thing to do is keep a note listing where you can find stuff outside the new system. Been doing that for years, and it's never failed.

Finally, I don't like the conflation of tools for thought with spending large amounts of time on useless things. People use cars to get away after robbing banks. The question is whether the problem is car ownership or how criminals use their time.

Literally my Year2022Review took a few keystrokes and under a few minutes to process.[1]

WuWei is the way.

Live in the terminal both in DayJob and Personal; UseVim; no FileExtensions; CamelCase = thought = node; ISO8601 DateTimeStamp every node; Mimimal DataStructure or VimOutliner prn; Fck Markup MarkDown, PlainText is LazyGenius; FrictionlessSystem, ZeroMaintenance

Capture in GuiBrowser

CaptureBookmark DataUrl

javascript:(function(){let text=""; if(window.getSelection()!=''){text=window.getSelection().toString()+"\n";}prompt("Press Ctrl+C, Escape", text+"\n"+document.title+" "+location.href);})()

[1] Year2022Review Method in local ./.exrc in 128G sd card

Have cursor on 2022 then ,b in NormalMode

where nmap ,b :r !. ./backlinks.sh <C-R><C-W><CR>

and ./backlinks.sh is

#!/usr/bin/sh term=$1 for file in $term do echo $file rg -l -i $file -g '!.*' | sed 's/^/\t/g' done

Neurotypical people don’t normally think in terms of connections.

Many of my peers (ended up interviewing probably 100 of them) for example felt that the standard testing questions of “X is to Y as A is to _____” were thrown in to give everyone a break.

Neuroypical people can even struggle to understand analogy while to the ND folk they can be as fluid and understandable as breathing or walking.

This is why I think there are significant gaps in the market as OP pointed out.

To get there it takes someone who:

- Thinks with connections as a “first class citizen” (this might even just be the subcategory of kinaesthetic learners)

- Has the programming skills to create a useful tool for scratching their own itch

- Has the awareness that other people might have the same problem, and further has the interest in doing (10?x) the work to make it generally useful for others

- Has the marketing skills and/or the connections required to get visibility and traction

Then to take it to the next level they have to prove that there is a market for it. If none of us understand that the market is small to start with, it would be understandable for someone to see 10% of that market as a complete waste of time since it’s 0.0/\d*/1% of the market they assumed they were targeting.

I may be entirely off the mark. I’ve been thinking about this for a few years during my transition to software development and having conversations as I go but a lot of these thoughts are still internally-compassed.

The true value (at least to me) lies in the fact that all my information is stored in a human-readable and interchangeable format. It makes you independent of vendor whims. It enables the creation of custom tools if and when you need them.

The fact that I can click on shiny links just satisfies my desire for toys :)

Beyond that, I have a fondness for wikis that permit breadcrumbs from excerpts back to a main documents. Giving the right information in the right place, with a centralized main resource that is carved up. This strategy is super useful to prevent dead instruction sprawl.

I once read (in someone else's wiki) that all documentation is a memorial to some time in the past. That really stuck with me for years now. When you hit "save" it's already in a state of decay.

I am talking about sharing of information and maintenance of knowledge stores though, and that perhaps is a different beast than cataloging ones own interests.

I started with just notes in bear, crosslinking when i saw fit, until that turned into 300 notes where I couldn't find anything. Tags and folders never stuck, and I abandoned those pretty quickly.

That's when I switched to obsidian, with a few very broad top level folders (projects, logs, zettelkasten, writing). Over time, this filled up too, and the zettelkasten got split into wiki and zettelkasten. The zettelkasten filled up, so I added index notes and structure notes and a numbering scheme.

The only plugins I use are some templates and the graph analysis plugin to help me find things I haven't linked yet. As said, most of the logic is in my workflow / way of tagging things. I don't care about being organized as much as I care about regularly using the vault.

Now that I'm relying more on research and external reading, I am integrating readwise and developing a workflow around that.

I'm sure though that if I were to document my setup, it would seem overengineered and impossible to use and over ambitious, but the fact is that it's very organic for me.

While there is some truth to the feeling that many people over-engineer and get overwhelmed with plugins and methodologies, I know many of us who just silently enjoy their vaults and plow away and are perfectly productive. If anything, I would indulge in the recurring urge to get to know better systems, but the foremost thing is having fun. I really enjoy my sunday mornings where I just write and throw things in there. I've had a 2 months pause, where I mostly kept to daily logs and drafts, but I'm about to go back to "proper" content management.

Furthermore, I can easily publish the vault and have a site that is not a chronological blog with edited posts. My writing is messy, iterative, raw, sprawling, multimedia, and pressing publish still gives me a clear signal "you finished something."

My vault is here: https://publish.obsidian.md/manuel

One big limitation is time: it takes a lot of time to write things in, say, Roam. You need to be getting commensurate benefit for the time invested. If you aren't sure what the benefit is, except "one day maybe I'll read through all this again and then..." it's probably not worth it. You can make write-only documents anywhere, no need to organize and hyperlink them.

On the other hand, sometimes the amount of friction in using a tool is the issue. Something can be completely impractical when it's doable in principle but has high cost, vs when it is pervasive and effortless. Software that actively searches for associations with what you're currently writing and presents them to you could be much more valuable than software that lets you follow hyperlinks if you want, but you don't actually bother doing it.

Finally, I'll say there's also the fact that humans need to accrete habits slowly over time. If you find/build a notetaking tool with 10,000 plugins, well ok, knowing that the plugins exist is one thing, but you won't actually use them or get value out of them until your brain has indexed them and you've formed a habit that is triggered by a recurring context you will find yourself in.

I largely use EN for the GTD system. The first GTD step is just capturing info. EN still does this better than any other tool.

EN used to be better at managing large data - but the last major release broke all that. For some reason they favored the new user over the power user.

Some of the things I used to use EN for are now baked into the OS. For instance, the latest release of MacOS now has text search on images. The rise of icloud also got rid of many of my use cases.

What I am doing now is putting files in files and notes in notes. I am converting some notes to files.

I took to heart the scalability issues in EN, and decided to run several note taking apps in parallel. After a while I will just pick a winner.

Sadly - I have not found a replacement for data capture. EN seems to be the only tool that converts email to a note. I might keep the free version of EN around for this task, but I am still looking for a replacement.

The falacy comes, I believe, from the combination of two facts: 1. much of the intellectual work we do these days simply takes time. No amount of writing can accelerate that beyond our biological limit of learning, so we might as well just sit and think. 2. Just sitting and thinking is considered unproductive and regarded as lazyness, so we believe we should be writing even more instead.

In that regard, using tools for thought may be pointless, since all we need is time to think. But perhaps that pointlessness serves a purpose. Like a guardrail in a highway, tools for thought are not something we "really need", but they're there to at least keep us on track in case we were to drift away while our minds move forward.

I think ultimately it just comes down to people having different needs. It turns out I don't really need a second brain style knowledge base. All I need is a solid mobile text editor. It also turns out I only need to plan out tasks on a weekly scale. A daily scale is too granular for me at this given moment in time.

When you adopt these heavyweight systems before really understanding why you need them or if you even need them to begin with it very quickly becomes a procrastination trap where, as the article mentions, you're spending far more time managing the system for the sake of the system than you are actually using it for anything meaningful.

I think the act of capturing notes, todos, bookmarks, and other things, all involve the same _impulse_ and _function_. Whether a great idea strikes, remembering a quote from a good article you just read, or capturing an important piece of data.

It turns out, there are all kinds of things that need collecting that don't fit neatly into a practice like: note-taking or todo lists or bookmarks. Transactions, events, and formulas are three other types I use extensively. But the act of collecting is the same: at random times you need to record some information.

In an ideal world you need a button available everywhere and when pressed an input instantly materializes ready to record the desired information. It gets saved somewhere safe, accessible from any place, where it is easy to find, where it can be put to use without much effort, etc.

I think it's extremely beneficial to consolidate information in the same system if that information is processed in the same way. This is where I see a ton of redundancy between tools and it drove me crazy enough to build a solution myself, Tap [1].

A couple notes specific to Tap and the solution I've come up with:

To make this capture-anything from anywhere system work, I believe the format needs to be text. But, I don't think a structured data format with a schema definition is the answer, nor do I think markdown is a good fit.

Tap uses a format designed specifically for Tap called sowhat [2]. It's a tiny syntax for parsing tokens that carry special meaning. Above all, it is intended to be easy for humans to write. This allows collecting information via SMS and email trivial.

1. https://tatatap.com 2. https://github.com/tatatap-com/sowhat

So instead of making connections in your mind while using the TfT app as an external thought workspace, we put this extra process on top to make the TfT system a replication of our brains in and of itself. For most people, this is an unsustainable effort (myself included).

As I see it, the tool is simply the place we work out ideas and how we mentally relate them to one another. Whether a plaintext file or an interlinked set of notes is sufficient to achieve that end goal is up to the individual.

Then I smack it down, because that is a crap-load of effort to recall a link every year or two. And let's be honest, the marginal value of that link isn't all that great either... in the moment the need may seem large, but sitting here typing about this I couldn't tell you even a single such thing I've forgotten about, because that's how important they are... just more ephemera in the stream themselves.

My MP3 collection is a bit of a mess. I've cleaned up the worst instances of "Band, The" "The Band" "Band" "Band - The" sorts of duplication, but that's about it. My book collection is similarly messy. Heck, even my family photos are basically sorted only by year and not much else. So what? I can fix it. I can fix it all. But it's hard to even so much as recover the time I'd put into it once over, let alone in multiples.

(Much more important, especially for the family photos, is not losing them. So I've got a backup solution. But it's just a fire-at-directory solution, not all gloriously organized by type either.)

So I've learned to just sort of let the desire to have greater organization pass over me, Litany-against-Fear style. It's just a siren call.

As an example, take physical paper. Receipts, bills, anything that ends up in one's mailbox and doesn't immediately get recycled. I used to oscillate between two approaches: over-elaborate filing systems and just ignoring the problem and letting the mail pile up in snowdrifts.

Eventually I realized that my love of elaborate systems was a giant fucking problem for my actual life. I thought about it like I was designing a production system. I very rarely needed to retrieve old documents; most of it was for "just in case" conditions. I needed to frequently file things, and if the cost of filing was too high, I wouldn't pay it. So I bought 8 filing boxes, each 3 or 4 inches high and big enough to comfortably hold legal-size paper. Each one is marked with a year, and almost everything for that year just gets tossed on top. A few exceptional kinds of paper then have their own separate file folders (e.g., tax documents, my current landlord, key retirement paperwork, key medical stuff). Once a year I throw out the contents of the oldest box and relabel it.

This works great. It turns out I almost never need anything from an old box. When I do, it's a quick rummage in one spot. With infrequent, hard-to-predict retrieval, storage-optimized organization is the best organization.

Anything more than that is a recipe for burnout - and I've definitely been there.

In my case, the immediacy of handwriting has been a better fit than typing for this purpose. I also use the reMarkable 2 with a linked pdf planner [1] that I built, and with some custom collections I find it hits about 90% of what I'd use a "proper" TfT for. Obsidian and Logseq still look pretty seductive, but I know I'd spend most of my time in the weeds configuring plugins etc.

I'm hoping the rM2's OCR and export capabilities improve over time so that we could combine the benefits of quick, effortless capture on that device (via handwriting) with automated categorization, linking and search (on my laptop, maybe via Obsidian/Logseq/etc). There's a lot of potential if someone can effectively bridge that gap! It's something I hope to explore some more this year.

[0] https://maggieappleton.com/daily-notes [1] https://hyperpaper.me/ (as seen recently on HN :)

Thus why I journal. I don't do it daily, but when I do, it gets my thoughts out and I find that once they are out, it just helps to put words to something that you might be feeling.. well, isn't that what you pay a therapist for, right?

Our tools differ, but our end goal is more or less the same. I keep it as simple as possible, because as you said, burnout is real.

I also agree that the one most useful habit is a daily log. It hits the sweet spot for me in terms of low friction + benefits in organizing information.

> Judging from comments on HN, I'm not alone and quite a few of us went down weird notetaking rabbit holes.

I see one person who did find their way. Often they recommend something fairly mild & not ultra-aggressive, but thinks like getting links or having weekly templates seems like it can be a huge help.

I'd like to see some mildness mixed in with this naysaying curmudgeonliness.

I went hard on organizing and templating things, and eventually found it to be more overhead than it was worth. I starting paring back since then, and moved on to Obsidian (still useful for evergreen-style notes) and Tana (more for planning and organizing projects). With a very simple organization, I'm more able to quickly store and retrieve information, and I've come to a pretty happy medium. It's not perfect, but it's saved me enough time to make the investment useful for me.

But maybe you don't have a personal use for note-taking. For someone like me, with ADHD and a horrifically bad short-term memory, note-taking saves me tons of time, daily. There's just the (not easy!) matter of prioritizing what you're storing, minimizing the overhead that comes with storage and retrieval, and minimizing the steps to retrieval.

Plaintext just works. Figure out a grouping structure and stick to it. mine is just yyyy-subject (2022-travel, 2022-rust). Long documents with subheaders and dates.

Currently on google docs. I like the mobile apps and syncing across devices. its just text in under a dozen files.

Backup strategy is ctrl--a / ctrl-c / ctrl-v.

I have taken a preference for drawing small diagrams in staples composition books last 2 years. A 2 column table of contents with numbered pages as the first page of the book. Made lookups super quick. My usage took off.

I dont write much on paper. Just draw small cohorts of words with some sentences on most pages. This layout helps the knowledge to self organize in graph like structure for my mind. Very useful when watching videos and in meetings.

Going to get me a nice fountain ink pen soon.

I'd like to have everything neat and tidy, but the effort just isn't worth it.

This is exactly right.

My method for rapid journaling/ thought logging:

- use note app of choice, (for me it is Obsidian)

- voice to text, rapid fire, get all my thoughts out in big paragraphs

- once every few day re-read + add heading to sections + add a couple hashtags + but otherwise leave it in a terrible spelling mistake ridden, grammarless mess

--------

> Every note is an extra cost

For notes where remembering / reviewing are important (i.e. todo lists), I've found:

"Bullet Method", which is essentially keeping an analog journal of bullet notes.

It really makes you slow down and track what is important , so you have a nice clean journal

It would be a good feature to have, and it's better than starting from scratch.

> I desperately want to be able to hand write notes sometimes, type them sometimes, have them all in one place, and have that place be a stream of consciousness and searchable.

Logseq doesn't currently have saveable filter lists, but you can create pages with any title which will still collect and display direct and indirect references to that title/tag. This gets you 80% of the way there already, if you get used to the workflow.

Logseq multi-device sync is now in beta, as well.

You can try Nebo.

I think most obsidian users will agree. I never quite understood the hype behind it. 'second brain' stuff never really made sense to me.