I prefer paper when I need to reason deeply, with drafts and schemes. Once my thoughts on paper mean something, I organize them digitally.
Just use fucking paper, man
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Re: Just use fucking paper, man
#32There's only one method of doing to-dos that has worked for me. This method can be used with paper, Obsidian, Apple Notes, or any other app. Every week I create a weekly note, and write my to-dos for the week. I may add more items to it during the week. If any items didn’t get done I roll them over to the next weekly note or drop them. That’s it. I usually write my to-dos from scratch without looking at the previous…
I do the same, and I'll probably automate it soon since I use a fresh markdown doc.
The only thing that remains the same is the header has 'yearly goals'.
It's easy and I can jettison the previous week's unfinished tasks (hey they didn't get done so were they really important?).
Re: Just use fucking paper, man
#33I use a simple todo.txt and have everything I need on there. I use notepad to work with it. I get shit done.
I also prefer just a txt file or pinned Keep note for todo lists, but I maintain about a dozen different lists, and not everything gets done. Occasionally I will do an audit and remove things.
Are you just in a scenario where you have absolute control over what you do and on what timeline?
If not:
Do you ever lose track of older items (i.e. forget about them for a long time because your eyeballs don't land on them)?
How do you decide when to remove something that isn't done?
Alternatively, if things never enter the list faster than they leave, how do you predict whether something will or will not violate that rule at entrance time?
Re: Just use fucking paper, man
#34If my organizational systems aren't backed up to the internet they're useless to me.
I use Apple Notes for scratch notes and GitHub Issues for everything else and I couldn't be happier.
Re: Just use fucking paper, man
#35Paper is good if you are solo. I tried Notion, waiting inside the grocery store 30 seconds for it to boot up or load or update or whatever on mobile, gave up on it for day to day tasks. Google Keep is still king. Am I going to be able to consistently pull down a text file from a server on mobile? How will I share a paper shopping list with others?
What cheap hosted service should I be using that lets me CRUD my text files on mobile + desktop and share with others?
Re: Just use fucking paper, man
#36Paper is great for transient stuff that is relevant for at most a week or two, but it really goes downhill when you try to capture information you'll want to revisit in the future. Paper is great for todo lists and in the moment notes, but not so great for knowledge base building.
I used to struggle with a lot of tools before too and now use org-roam for longer term notes. The linking model helps a lot with just _writing_ the stuff down and not worrying about how to organize it too much in the moment.
Re: Just use fucking paper, man
#37As @kabdib says, "You can't grep paper."
And now its,
"I can't turn my paper into a Vector DB to build a RAG pipeline and connect it to a voice chat so I can "talk" to my notes" :'D.
Re: Just use fucking paper, man
#38My problem with paper is that I can't keep up with paper. I will lose it several times a day, and inevitably, I will lose it permanently after a year or two. I need the sync and findability that an app on a device affords.
If your project TODO lists are stretching into years, it's time to get a better project management system. I recommend paper.
Re: Just use fucking paper, man
#39What about the reMARKABLE 2?
Re: Just use fucking paper, man
#40Paper is great, but good lord I tire of these "Just do X", "Stop doing Y", "Z considered harmful", kind of posts. So overconfident and devoid of context, this shit gets really old after a while. Reminds me of JWZ or (gack) Zed Shaw.
I LOVE paper. I also like whiteboards. I also like being able to search through my megabytes of notes for something silly I was wrestling with 2.5 years ago. It might be in a TODO list even. I'm messy, I don't care to try to organize such things, but (rip) grepping still provides value. I don't want to "just use fucking $ANYTHING", thanks very much, man.