Unbundling Tools for Thought

The author has good points & the idea that specialized (info-)spaces with specialized tools help. The tool imposes a big context boundary to rapidly filter through & mask out most of the big pile of everything one has. That alone is a huge gain.

Trying to maintain some overall view, some sense of importance... having shape to your spaces, having them well defined, some kind of memory palace with notable form & place to it resonates a lot with me The author nicely highlights the challenge:

> Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt. Every link doubly so. The more you have, the more in the red you are. Every node that has utility—an interesting excerpt from a book, a pithy quote, a poem, a fiction fragment, a few sentences that are the seed of a future essay, a list of links that are the launching-off point of a project—is drowned in an ocean of banality. Most of our thoughts appear and pass away instantly, for good reason.

Strong use of poetic license but stood out & I like it!

Yet... I disagree with the premise. There's definitely some expedience to having separate specialized apps for separate things. It's a great short term aid, right now, today. The suck it up & use Unity option.

But I feel like we have much more exploring to do with general purpose systems. Right now we are fairly first order, where everything kind of coexists & most interfaces lack distinct submodes, lack distinction of subspaces.

Having a common backend & common base-layer, which is extensible, growable, can begin to be shaped into the more specific regions eith distinct & differentiated capabilities will greatly help. But that common platform seems key.

Links alone may be sufficient, but alas few apps really expose that. Also fixable, apps really ought have PingBack protocol (or some similar protocol) support, to hear when someone links them & tell links they have been linked, such that we can have bidirectional links, which can greatly add navigation.

Beyond that, I think no tools really do a great job of helping us review & raise up data over time. Algorithmic tools like Google Photos can do a fairly good job of finding & reminding us of some stuff. But overall I havent seen many attempts at tackling the underlying problem here, of keeping folks in the loop and pruning, refining, revieing, whether we have specialized apps or whether we embrace the all-is-one general systems digital garden. Attention is a resource we have not honed personally, although it has been well tuned at larger mechanistic scales. I hope to see & am excited to hopefully become a part of progressing on these points!

I disagree with some of the ideas in this piece.

> And yet I don’t use them. Why? Building them was fun, sure, but there must be utility to a personal database.

There is utility in doing things that are fun. Even if that fun thing does not increase your productivity. There are deeper issues if enjoying how you spend your time is a problem.

> 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

If you know where to look and how to find your stuff, you're sufficiently organized.

> migrating everything from my filesystem, from Calibre, from Zotero, from my browser bookmarks, etc. is a huge process

This is a common claim, but the truth is that there's no need to move, say, files into a new system. The simplest thing to do is keep a note listing where you can find stuff outside the new system. Been doing that for years, and it's never failed.

Finally, I don't like the conflation of tools for thought with spending large amounts of time on useless things. People use cars to get away after robbing banks. The question is whether the problem is car ownership or how criminals use their time.

My personal note taking system is based on Markdown, Vim, grep and Git.

I have a private repo for personal notes, including a `todo.md` file that I use as an GTD style inbox - I have an alias `todo='$EDITOR $HOME/personal/todo.md'` which takes me there quickly.

For some topics I use other repos - for example for programming notes, I use https://github.com/ADGEfficiency/programming-resources.

Works great, fast, cheap and I don't have to put up with any of the nonsense I used to put up with when I use Evernote.

For a lot of things I agree organization is over-rated, but for some things it's essential. And, in any case -- collecting things whether organized or not is super important.

I think the act of capturing notes, todos, bookmarks, and other things, all involve the same _impulse_ and _function_. Whether a great idea strikes, remembering a quote from a good article you just read, or capturing an important piece of data.

It turns out, there are all kinds of things that need collecting that don't fit neatly into a practice like: note-taking or todo lists or bookmarks. Transactions, events, and formulas are three other types I use extensively. But the act of collecting is the same: at random times you need to record some information.

In an ideal world you need a button available everywhere and when pressed an input instantly materializes ready to record the desired information. It gets saved somewhere safe, accessible from any place, where it is easy to find, where it can be put to use without much effort, etc.

I think it's extremely beneficial to consolidate information in the same system if that information is processed in the same way. This is where I see a ton of redundancy between tools and it drove me crazy enough to build a solution myself, Tap [1].

A couple notes specific to Tap and the solution I've come up with:

To make this capture-anything from anywhere system work, I believe the format needs to be text. But, I don't think a structured data format with a schema definition is the answer, nor do I think markdown is a good fit.

Tap uses a format designed specifically for Tap called sowhat [2]. It's a tiny syntax for parsing tokens that carry special meaning. Above all, it is intended to be easy for humans to write. This allows collecting information via SMS and email trivial.

1. https://tatatap.com 2. https://github.com/tatatap-com/sowhat