The Zettelkasten Method (2019)

Time for the daily/weekly/monthly note taking and productivity thread!

On a serious note, I actually like these threads. Earlier in the year I decided to look into better note taking and task management, and it became an entire month of me gradually becoming more and more stressed about it. HN was actually a great source for this, mostly because a lot of the people on here seem a bit less "into it" than dedicated sources, and help bring me back down to earth.

In the end, my solution was simple. Stop trying. Of course, because I get a bit obsessive over this kind of thing (who could have guessed that a man who spent an entire month thinking about note taking can be obsessive), I couldn't just stop. So instead, I set myself a reminder to come back to it in a month, knowing full well that by then I'll be obsessed with the next thing and will keep putting it off.

I write this in case anyone else is going through the same dilemma. Just take a break, get a notebook where you can jot down ideas for how you will jot down ideas, set a reminder, and move on with your life. Unless your enjoy this sort of thing, in which case, have fun :)

Currently conscientiousness is considered part of the big 5 which seem to be stable through your life. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

I couldn't find if it can be trained during bringing up of a kid.

The best I have been able to tell is that productivity is like lifting weights, where you have to be always changing up your routine to "shock" the muscles into growth once you hit your plateau. Productivity is a series of brain hacks to keep yourself from falling asleep at the wheel. Like with a relationship, you have to always be doing new things to keep it interesting (don't stop dating your significant other.)

The value of stan systems is...

1. Take notes (documentation) on things.

2. Refer back to those notes (duh, might come in handy later when you find yourself doing the same thing.

3. Keep these notes in the same place.

Do ONLY the above and you probably get enough benefits to be worth it without dropping out because you failed to find the one true way.

Sounds stupid, but the hours I could have saved myself by writing things down for future reference add up. I can't just simply link to documentation, because the time I save is by documenting the spaces between the documentation. Stuff the writers didn't think to write because they already knew everything. But I'm not doing this simple thing if I have already said f*ck it, I give up, because I found the sword in the stone but it didn't choose me. I can't be king, so I go back to filling out spreadsheets.*

Try reading the GTD book. What could have been a flowchart, maybe bundled with some potential downsides/gotchas-and-how-to-avoid-them, somehow became this nonsense 300-page sleeping pill.

The focus on technical solutions, Roam vs. Obsidian vs... obscures the fact that regardless of the software - maintaining a useful, up-to-date, well cross referenced corpus of knowledge is a lot of effort. The effort must be constant and ongoing, few will have the stamina to keep it going.