Unbundling Tools for Thought

By coincidence I am moving off of Evernote right now. I broke down everything I used Evernote for right now to plan the roll off.

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.

Much of the backlash to these tools seems to assume that they require significant devotion and time.

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.

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> 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.

About once every year or two, I remember something I read maybe 15 years ago and realize it would be absolutely perfect for some reason, but I can't find it. And being an engineer and an HN poster, my brain immediately leaps to "Oh, if only I ran a system that archived everything I browsed so I could build my own personal search engine that could search on just what I've ever looked at."

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.

The point of the article is that we don't like being idle. We'd rather spend our idle time "pretending" we are being productive, and tools for thought are what we use for that.

Being actually productive (quality > quantity), I argue, is a process that takes physical time. Absorbing information, internalizing it, and summarizing it with our own understanding requires a lot of energy. This process cannot be massively accelerated. Same as with physical fitness, one can operate close to optimum and see and maintain great results, but one cannot operate better than optimum given one's own physical constraints.

For intelectual work, defining what "operating close to optimum" means is much harder because the quantity of output is usually the metric, and that varies so much from discipline to discipline and person to person. I believe many of us are already operating close to optimum (reading and writing, attending meetings, presenting our work), so there is no point in investing even more towards productivity. But the falacy is that because we don't have a proper metric for productivity, we believe investing even more is worthwhile since it increases output, and so we perceive ourselves as better.

I don't see AI changing the picture for us because the problem is not what we are doing, but how we perceive to be doing it. That's what's up with tools for thought and personal wikis.

As limited as OneNote is, I find it the place I keep returning to. Obsidian was extremely off-putting to me when I last tried it out, as the node parents themselves could not be documents. Or I couldn't figure out how to use them that way! Maybe it's just me!

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.