Unbundling Tools for Thought • Hacker News Board

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#121

Post by nicbou » Mon, Dec 26, 2022, 10:49 PM UTC

atomashevic wrote: post #37

I've spent a good (unproductive) part of 2022 tinkering with notes/TfTs and I'm stuck with "optimizing" note-taking for more than few years (started with zettelkasten and Roam Research I guess). 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,…

In the end, any notes app plus Notability end up working great. Pen and paper are another excellent option.

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

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#122

Post by DavidPiper » Mon, Dec 26, 2022, 10:57 PM UTC

funksta wrote: post #70

idearoots wrote: post #56

My non-obvious observation after five years in this field: 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 mo…

I've found the same, the catharsis of writing the "Daily Notes Pages" [0] is probably the main benefit of these systems. 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 se…

Great to see a Maggie Appleton reference!

She also did a talk on Tools for Thought in April 2022:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6uhvFGPUE0 (she's the first half of the video)

And she has an unfinished blog post on the topic as well:

https://maggieappleton.com/tools-for-thought

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#123

Post by college_physics » Mon, Dec 26, 2022, 11:09 PM UTC

The file system and a good desktop search engine can go a long way. Allows using any app or format, provided its indexable. Its not a proper knowledge graph but it allows you to trigger associations in your brain as you examine query results

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#124

Post by throwaway675309 » Mon, Dec 26, 2022, 11:54 PM UTC

agileAlligator wrote: post #5

> 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, because I have a spatial sense of where each book is in Calibre’s big grid view. If I went through everything in Calibre and Zotero, and fixed the titles, added missing authors, publishers, publication years, fixed the cove…

Because there's a certain element of dopamine release associated with this act of digital tidiness. And for a lot of people it's a good way to provide the illusion of feeling productive while stalling on the act of creation... which is hard.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#125

Post by amadeuspagel » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 12:00 AM UTC

> The only friction is in clicking the bookmark to localhost:5000. It is literally two clicks to get to the daily note.

That's significant. I register a domain for every project I make early, so that I can easily reach it from the addressbar. I only have to type "th" in the addressbar and it autocompletes to "https://thinktype.app". I never even try to use it from the bookmarks bar.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#126

Post by roywiggins » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 12:01 AM UTC

blondin wrote: post #84

Tomte wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Photos are the worst. I'm through at least three complete reorganizations where I even dusted off old backups and collected all photos (because I felt I was deleting photos too liberally last time), de-duplicated (and de-quadruplicated) them all, and built the new "forever" structure. It sucks that I just know I'll do it again at most five years from now.

this calls for an AI that recognizes pictures and categorizes them for us. what have we been solving all these captchas for? photos and pictures organization should be a solved problem.

Google Photos search function leverages some automatic categorization, it's pretty good. I wish I had some way to run something at that level over my Lightroom 5 catalog.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#127

Post by Kinrany » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 12:11 AM UTC

dangom wrote: post #28

Kinrany wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking with paper is very obviously better than keeping all the thoughts in your head.

Sure, just like working out continously is better than rest. There is no better or worse, you need both. Ideas take time to materialize.

Using or not using paper is not at all similar to working out or resting. When you're thinking with paper in front of you, you're free to not use paper or switch back and forth in a matter of seconds. It's a strict improvement, the downsides are all logistical.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#128

Post by funksta » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 12:16 AM UTC

DavidPiper wrote: post #122

funksta wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found the same, the catharsis of writing the "Daily Notes Pages" [0] is probably the main benefit of these systems. 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 se…

Great to see a Maggie Appleton reference! She also did a talk on Tools for Thought in April 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6uhvFGPUE0 (she's the first half of the video) And she has an unfinished blog post on the topic as well: https://maggieappleton.com/tools-for-thought

I just found her site a month or two ago (via HN, I think), it's really fantastic! Thanks for the pointers

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#129

Post by raguilera » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 12:20 AM UTC

While I agree with a lot of the points the author has made, TfT has really been a game changer for me in terms of how I process information. Regardless of the app (currently I'm using Tana), what's been great is I no longer dump random bullet points of information under one topic, but really strive to take an idea and make it stand on it's own (atomic note concept). It's really helped me cut away the fat that inevitably makes up the majority of what we read and get down to the "meat".

I don't know how much I'll use the bi-directional linking in the long term, maybe not at all, but at least for the moment it's really helping me retain what I'm reading and that alone is worth the price of admission (at least for right now).

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#130

Post by sureglymop » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 12:33 AM UTC

I basically just want a "daily" journal. I find that is enough because information i mostly want to retrieve was journaled on previous days near the top of the stack.

What I want though is for a note taking app to have CalDav and CardDav sync support. It can just be read only. But I want to refer to and link to Contacts, Calendar events and E-Mails. That's pretty much all i use to "organize life". I recently set up all my calendars in Thunderbird and it's awesome to have all calendars in one view!