#10

After seeing some of the beautiful pages and things people have created, I often fall into what I’ve been calling productivity paralysis where I don’t feel I’m at a final version of a system, so I add nothing to it while I ‘finish setting it up’. I lose a lot of time trying to get everything just right - even though I think I’m honest enough to know it’ll never be perfect.

I watched a video about digital minimalism by Harshibar that talks about getting distracted by your technology. The money shot is when she says something about using social media and other distractions as ways we trick ourselves into feeling productive without actually doing anything of value.
That concept struck a nerve with me, in that I think of theme tweaking and templating as ways of fooling myself into thinking I’m being productive. “I’m working on the PKB, so it must be valuable - riiight?”

I’m nowhere near over the mountain, but I’m hoping that at least recognizing the warning signs is a good first step. Every time I open VSCode I make sure it’s for a precise and deliberate reason. I got rid of a ton of todo app accounts I really was not using anyways.

Recognizing that imperfect content is better than no content was a major shift in my personal journey.

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#11

I think what you’re talking about is just the most current form of procrastination. Because we’re discussing it in the context of a particular tool we tend to sometimes opine about the “old days” when people didn’t have these tools.

You know what we did when we didn’t have a digital file cabinet to adjust and readjust? We did the same thing with our physical file cabinet. We created a new category and insisted on going through each existing file to see if anything that we had should go in the new file we’d just created. Or we recopied our fragmented notes into the new leather bound notebook that we’d spent hours shopping for. Or tried out the new pen we bought because we’d heard it was one that our favorite author used. Or shuffled and recopied our note cards.

My point is simple (and I’m preaching to myself here) when you don’t want to do the work that you’re supposed to do, you’ll find ways to avoid it. The problem is always the person, not the tool they’ve chosen to utilize.

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#12

I’ve always heard the term “self-masturbatory” instead of “pornographic,” but, yeah. It’s a big problem with the bullet journal community too, unfortunately. It’s actually one of the reasons I did the live notetaking session with Nick Milo — I wanted to show people how I avoid this by staying laser-focused on outputs & what I’m planning to use the information for.

Realistically, I view this as the same problem students who “highlight everything” have. It’s not a problem with the nature of highlighters — it’s a problem of metacognition.

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#13

@davecan What you said is exactly what I am looking for, outlining is just the first step, it is never perfect but it paves the way for next stage. I also try to ask questions and find the answers to them after the first inspectional reading of every chapter, that can help with finding themes in the text.
I am trying to do it on paper too, but it is not going to be automated or searchable (typing it would be to much work IMO).
But I think the decisive factor is automation and the workflow can be improved. For example I should be able to just write few lines describing every section in every reading of the book and putting chunks together can be done after looking and comparing them, In a long text it is not practical to go back and forth multiple time, It should be done in to or three reads I think/hope. Finding themes should be very easy if notes processed first. Also maybe we should set a different procedure for different kind of books. For example gathering author’s arguments and evidence is not very important for a textbook kind of book or a general historical one.

#14

Thanks for this really nice example. These topics you mentioned are super-relevant to me because I also study security.

#15

Didn’t know this term exist :grinning: It’s true. In Obsidian, this exaggerated “thinking about thinking” is definitely a thing.

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#16

I was just thinking of linking to your video! Around the 1-hour mark you talk about how making pretty notes isn’t the job and that really resonated with me.

Even after making positive changes through the LYT framework I’m still fighting my instincts to fiddle with all the things™ and not actually engage in the content. It’s totally a way I procrastinate or get hit with productivity paralysis, like @Erisred mentioned because everything has to be perfect before I can engage with it.

@Flegeth I sometimes handle this by asking myself questions. Why do I need this thing this way? How does it help me? and so on. That gets me to refocus.

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#17

I was going to make same comment… if you are watching productivity videos and trying out a ton of tools, that may be “Productivity porn”, but if you are over engineering you own PKM that may be the M-word! (I think the word “self-“ was redundant!

In all seriousness, everyone suffers from Procrastination and it comes in many forms. These tools and systems are a way to keep us focused, so it is valuable to watch what you are doing.

I think Markdown is a step forward for me — i to minimal formatting, mostly headings and indented bullet lists and a little bold if I remember. Simple is good.

I tag tasks that I know I am procrastinating on with how many minutes it will take, like #5min or i might use a tag of #avoiding.

Usually behind procrastination is some fear - fear of being wrong, of being judged, of being not good enough. Try to label your procrastination for what it is. But don’t make it good or bad, it just is.

It could be you didn’t get enough sleep, ate junkie food, had too many pints with the lads the night before. It could be the task is not even valuable.

Define a basic system and stick with it. Periodically, not continuously, make a deliberate change to the system.

I hope some of these things helped, it is simply what helped for me.

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#18

@Archie

inspectional reading

:eyes: A wild Adler reference! :metal:

His principles and processes are exactly what I’m getting at. :slight_smile:

I am trying to do it on paper too, but it is not going to be automated or searchable

If you have iOS: Capture your favorite book quotes with this brilliant new app

Also I’m experimenting with the Nebo app on iPad w/ Apple Pencil, it is extremely good at correctly guessing my chicken scratch and converting it to readable and copyable text. It also shows you what is being interpreted at the time it is written. Not perfect of course but it seems to get about 99% correct which is shocking since I write terribly lol.

It should be done in to or three reads I think/hope

My goal is a single read and then done. Not counting potential 1-second and 5-second prereads of course.

maybe we should set a different procedure for different kind of books

The last half or so of Adler’s book is dedicated to exactly this IIRC.

2 Likes
#19

Agree w/ @EleanorKonik on the metacognition issue.

I disagree that it is exaggerated. Or rather, it can be but it is necessary to use metacognition. The point is that blindly highlighting is not applying metacognitive tools, its just collecting and hoping things click. Oh wait that sounds familiar… The Collector’s Fallacy • Zettelkasten Method

We have to think about how we think so we can develop our workflows and order our notes (representing our thoughts) in a meaningful way. (on that note, as Feynman said the writing is the thinking, and according to Alan Jacobs in How To Think thinking is the effort we put in before we make decisions, so to some extent our workflow is our thinking to an increasing extent and it is difficult/impossible to separate them – the tool influences and structures our thinking as much as the other way around)

We can go too far with this of course, into what @EleanorKonik points out becomes masturbatory thinking where we are focusing on it as the end goal rather than as a means to achieve a goal. We get lost in our own thoughts instead of producing meaningful work – we become unproductive.

It’s very difficult for me to resist the siren song sometimes, especially when we have online forums that reward us for talking about taking notes instead of rewarding us for taking notes. :laughing:

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#20

It turns out Merlin Mann appears to have coined the “productivity porn” term (he called it “productivity pr0n”) and then later realized it was harmful and abandoned his site entirely.

As his influence grew, he popularized a new term for the genre that he was helping to create: “productivity pr0n,” an adaptation of the “leet speak,” or geek lingo, word for pornography. The hunger for this pr0n, he noticed, was insatiable. People were desperate to tinker with their productivity systems.

What Mann and his fellow-enthusiasts were doing felt perfectly natural: they were trying to be more productive in a knowledge-work environment that seemed increasingly frenetic and harder to control. What they didn’t realize was that they were reacting to a profound shift in the workplace that had gone largely unnoticed.

…

Not long afterward, Mann posted a self-reflective essay on 43 Folders, in which he revealed a growing dissatisfaction with the world of personal productivity. Productivity pr0n, he suggested, was becoming a bewildering, complexifying end in itself—list-making as a “cargo cult,” system-tweaking as an addiction. “On more than a few days, I wondered what, precisely, I was trying to accomplish,” he wrote. Part of the problem was the recursive quality of his work. Refining his productivity system so that he could blog more efficiently about productivity made him feel as if he were being “tossed around by a menacing Rube Goldberg device” of his own design; at times, he said, “I thought I might be losing my mind.” He also wondered whether, on a substantive level, the approach that he’d been following was really capable of addressing his frustrations. It seemed to him that it was possible to implement many G.T.D.-inflected life hacks without feeling “more competent, stable, and alive.”

(it’s a good article capturing how we are often trying to treat the complexity symptoms resulting from society’s shift into the Information Age without understanding the shift itself)

As Andy Matuschak wrote more succinctly:

People who blog about note-taking systems don’t produce them. … I don’t think it’s an accident that Luhmann wrote “Communicating with slip boxes” near the end of his career.

So the question then is: to what extent are we engaging in productivity masturbation/pornography by spending time online writing about our systems and swapping system ideas and tinkering with our systems and then reporting back to others so they can cheer us on and tinker with their own systems so they can report back to others so they can be cheered on and …?

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#21

Maybe it’s some kind of hobby. Some people enjoy playing games, some people can talk for hours about fishing or politics. And we spend time here talking about notes, organization and productivity. Because we are all social beings interested in it. And there’s nothing wrong with that (when it’s in a moderate amount, of course :grinning:). We got time. We can’t be 100% productive-working-robots all day. (truth is, we should not even try to be like that, but that’s thing for different topic)

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#22

I suppose, depending on your perspective, it’s either straightforward socialising or an orgy.

What it isn’t is improving your productivity.

But, if people are focused on personal productivity, they can take advantage of such conversations to do so.

Which implies that generous
contributors are teaching altruistically.

#23

Yeah exactly, that book was very helpful for me. I think process of capturing ideas is as important as the PKB that notes goes into it.

That looks like a very promising solution, unfortunately I don’t have any apple device, so I have to find something like this on Android.

That would be very nice if possible, but I tried it and very soon found out that slowing reading down for the first read is very frustrating for me. So one time of reading without any burden and the second one for annotation.

Yes but as good as that book is it is kinda out of date in some regards. I wish something like that was available for digital age. It is like figuring out how to use Zettlekasten method via computer.

#24

I tried to post about this, but nobody paid attention because I didn’t use the word “pornographic.” :grinning:

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#25

@davecan I’ll be interested to hear your longer term opinion of using Nebo for iPad note taking. I went through a Nebo phase, probably 2 years ago, and at first was very taken by the accuracy of handwriting to text conversion, and I thought that’s what I wanted. I came to realize that this conversion made me unhappy, because my notes no longer looked like my notes. That is, a part of my note taking process involves the physical act of writing, sketching ideas, etc., and I form a picture in my mind of particularly relevant – perhaps “evergreen” in Obsidian-speak – notes. Nebo had the effect of erasing this link in my brain, so I ultimately dropped it in favor of GoodNotes. GN maintains my handwriting, but hides the writing-to-text in the background so you can still do remarkably effective searches.

I think this notion of the note creation act has broader relevance in the context of this discussion. The act of creating and curating notes to some extent is the work of PKM, so perhaps the porn label isn’t fair. I think some amount of care in the look and feel of your notes can help cement them in the place that matters, which is in your brain. Notes that I’ve spent real time on have left a mark in my brain, and are more likely to pop up when I’m thinking.

That said, it’s helpful to hear how other people approach this. I’ve been using Obsidian now for 9+ months, and had to try a variety of things before I settled on a flow that works for me and feels natural. It has taken some practice and experimentation…

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#26

This resonated strongly with me. I was strongly constrained by the following feeling: Before I can start with my PKM, I need to know as much as possible about Obsidian and the associated best practices as well as the zettelkasten method before…

Specifically, I was concerned with the following obstacles:

A) Usage of tags

  • First question I had : use tags to group topics?!
    • but: clear choice of keywords necessary
  • rather: use tags to declare status of the note
    • fleeting-note
    • evergreen-note
    • daily-note
    • meeting-note
    • question
  • Grouping notes via MOCs

B) Metadata

  • Should I include the metadata after YAML front matter?
    • but then I can’t filter e.g. in the graph view…
  • Instead rather have own section with metadata?
  • I still don’t know how to best embed metadata in a zettelkasten… :neutral_face:

C) Number of vaults

  • A single vault containing everything (raw ideas, fleeting notes, evergreen notes, meeting notes, …)?
  • Or one vault with meeting notes, literature notes, … and a separate zettelkasten?

D) Filenames

I have now switched to just going ahead and working with two vaults. In the first vault I collect my literature notes, meeting notes and all other notes. Here I have an inbox where I triage. Promising notes then go into second vault which is set up according to zettelkasten method.

However, there is still a certain ambiguity inside of me: Can’t you still improve something? How do other people approach the matter?

I’m also still inhibited by the fear that one day I have to go through all my notes and make systematic changes. But here I always try to calm down: first collect 50-100 evergreen notes and then see…

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#27

I’m not wedded to Nebo, it just looked really interesting given its ability to convert to plain text for import into literature notes. I’ve not tried GoodNotes but like you I also prefer my own handwritten notes. Given your description of it I may go ahead and buy it to try it out since its only $7.99.

Are you able to copy the handwritten notes as plain text to paste into literature notes on the Mac? So far I see you can convert the notes then copy, but that defeats the purpose of keeping the handwritten version. I suppose it would be possible to copy or duplicate the note and then convert it so the original isn’t lost, but wondering if there is a more seamless approach.

Notes that I’ve spent real time on have left a mark in my brain, and are more likely to pop up when I’m thinking.

This is fair. The strongest notes in my zettelkasten are the “true evergreens” that are highly polished and contain my most refined thoughts.

#28

@waltejon I was very much the same way when I started. What I did was force myself to make a reasonably simplistic and reversible decision in each case and move forward: single vault, no tags, no folders, etc. Add each only as true value is identified.

Now I have two vaults, one for zettelkasten and one for project management (new, still fiddling with it) whereas previously they were merged. Over time I realized the two concerns were conflicting and creating a lot of mental tension and friction. Separating them allows me to treat them as completely different concerns, with different sets of plugins and workspaces and workflows. For example, in my zettelkasten I barely use tags and am very judicious in links, and use virtually no YML front matter at all, while in the project/PKM vault I am using both tags and YML much more and becoming quite promiscuous in linking, slowly becoming more like what you see in Roam. This is because the two separate concerns each encourage and reward the two different behaviors.

Even the filenames differ. My zettelkasten has a unique ID at the end of the phrase-based note title to help prevent accidental note collisions destroying knowledge (e.g. if I create a new note from an external automated tool like Alfred) while there is no such need in my PKM vault since it is almost entirely based around work project management.

But here I always try to calm down: first collect 50-100 evergreen notes and then see…

:point_up_2:This. I have some 800 notes in my ZK and climbing (300+ source/lit notes with 800+ links in them, 322 permanent/evergreen notes with 1,000+ links in them, and a bunch of ancillary notes like MOCs etc) and the struggle is always there, but once you have a set you start finding patterns that work for you. Those may not be the patterns recommended by others, and that’s ok.

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#29

If you haven’t already seen it: GitHub - mgmeyers/obsidian-embedded-note-titles only part of what that thread is about, but I found it helps