[HN Gopher] Excerpts from a conversation about personal informat...
___________________________________________________________________
Excerpts from a conversation about personal information management
Author : JNRowe
Score : 130 points
Date : 2024-11-07 12:50 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sachachua.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sachachua.com)
| pushcx wrote:
| It seems this is excerpts from a video or screenshare. Does
| anyone have a link for that? I'm curious to see some of the
| things the speaker refers to.
| pinko wrote:
| This is an excellent, if meandering, discussion -- lots of great
| nuggets in there I want to follow up on. Thanks for sharing!
| deskr wrote:
| I think this is interesting but I'm totally out of the loop.
|
| He links to https://github.com/brabalan/org-review - what is
| that? What is org mode and org mode review? What is a sketchnote
| and how do you create one?
| pushcx wrote:
| [Org mode](https://orgmode.org/) is a popular emacs plugin for
| organizing notes and todos. I don't use it so I can't be sure,
| but the reference to review is [probably
| this](https://orgmode.org/manual/Stuck-projects.html) about
| doing a weekly review of one's tasks and projects, probably in
| line with [the practice](https://gettingthingsdone.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2014/10/Wee...) from the Getting Things Done
| productivity system.
| [Sketchnotes](https://rohdesign.com/sketchnotes) are an
| artistic visual summary.
| clircle wrote:
| HN does not render markdown
| slightwinder wrote:
| org-mode is an extension for emacs. It's centered around a
| plaintext markup-format which is specialized for organization
| and note-taking, hence the name. It has several other
| extensions build up on the core-extension, and it's format,
| many coming from the original project itself. And it has later
| branched out into other areas, like literate programming,
| personal databases, etc.
|
| Seems org-review is one such extension.
|
| And a sketchnote is a visual note, something where you
| draw/sketch your information. Basically a more freestyle
| diagram or something to tell a short story.
| tolerance wrote:
| Wiegley's "Today's agenda has 133 items on it," now joins David
| Foster Wallace's "I received 500,000 discrete bits of information
| today," in quotes I wish I could recite to others to express how
| I think and feel.
|
| Tangentially,
|
| > I have over 30,000 tasks in my Org Mode overall. 23,000 of them
| are TODOs. Several thousand of them are still currently open. I'm
| never gonna see them all. Even if I wanted to, I'm never gonna
| see them all.
| ActionHank wrote:
| As a systemiser using GTD I have an ever growing list of items
| to get to should I complete items for the day, but I don't
| understand how you could expect to address 133 items in a day.
|
| If the approach is to let low priority items roll over, that
| just seems like a recipe for dropping the ball.
|
| Are people getting through 133 items in a day? That's 216
| seconds per item.
| bosie wrote:
| Yes but I use OmniFocus for habit learning or reminding
| myself to take eg meds. Taking 7 meds or supplements in 20
| seconds is doable :)
| j45 wrote:
| This approach can also be useful for researching routines
| or habits after a trip.
| nik_0_0 wrote:
| I don't follow - what do you mean by this?
| tolerance wrote:
| I haven't given the article the dedicated read that I intend
| to yet but my impression is that he does not expect to
| address all 133 items and it does not matter.
|
| As someone who has compulsively accumulated lengthy to-do
| lists and buckled beneath the phantom of hopes and intentions
| of varying importance and ambition I find it enlightening
| that the possibility of completing a task other than those
| that are important enough to not have to write down to begin
| with can be measured by their meaningfulness and address
| according to this measure.
|
| I gather that the .0050% of information that I consume daily
| is what is of the greatest priority and the remaining 99.995%
| is synthesized and iterated over the next day until it
| reemerges as something important. I suspect that Wiegley
| completes on average about 5 important things each day. This
| sounds like a solid baseline.
| slightwinder wrote:
| It entirely depends on which tasks you have and where they
| are coming from. Not every task has to some unique hour-long
| work. People who are using routines, pre-defined lists or
| elaborated project-planning, usually have very detailed and
| long daily lists full of small tasks, each in the range of
| some second to minutes of work.
|
| Maybe the 133 items are 120 items of one minute work each,
| and the rest are conditional or optional task you will not do
| that day.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| If it's the Org Mode agenda view in anything close to its
| default configuration, those 133 items will contain not just
| tasks scheduled for today, but also any incomplete tasks that
| were either scheduled for time before today, are past
| deadline, or have a deadline coming in the next 7 days (IIRC,
| maybe it's 14).
|
| This is to say, if you don't keep on top of current work, the
| agenda view quickly turns into an ever growing wall of shame.
|
| I have a pretty weird love-hate relationship with it because
| of that.
| charles_f wrote:
| I don't understand that, at some point don't you just forfeit
| what you haven't done in a month or two and get back onto a
| manageable list? I mean keeping track of everything is a
| philosophy, but to the point where the vast majority of your
| system is just noise, what's the point?
| tolerance wrote:
| > Noise is either a sound of too short a duration to be
| determined, like the report of a cannon; or else it is a
| confused mixture of many discordant sounds, like the rolling
| of thunder or the noise of the waves. Nevertheless, the
| difference between sound and noise is by no means precise. --
| _Ganot_
|
| http://www.websters1913.com/words/Noise
| bckr wrote:
| > Ganon
|
| I was wondering what an action-adventure villain was doing
| in the dictionary
|
| > Ganot
|
| Oh, that sounds more like a real person.
| tolerance wrote:
| Thank you.
|
| Perhaps my locating of the quote is redeeming
|
| https://archive.org/details/elementreatisephys00ganorich/
| pag....
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Ganon_
|
| For a second I misread it as Gowron, and my mind started
| replaying the quote above in an angry Klingon voice.
| TOGoS wrote:
| This is why I don't let my to-do lists automatically roll
| over. If it wasn't important enough to copy to today's to-do
| list, then maybe it's okay if it's never done. But I do keep
| them around in some form, because maybe the old to-do items
| had some interesting ideas associated with them that I might
| want to re-visit later. Or keep the 'cool ideas' and 'tasks
| to take action on said cool ideas' separate.
|
| https://www.nuke24.net/docs/2024/202410-to-do-lists.html
| iLemming wrote:
| Noise is good. There's nothing wrong with noise. Internet is
| noise. You only need a good search engine or discovering
| technique. For Org users there are plenty of different
| choices - Org-Roam and org-roam-ui; built-in org-agenda, tags
| and todo stickers; Denote; Khoj, plain grepping, etc.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Noise is bad. Horrifyingly and anxiety inducing. The
| Internet may be noise, but you never actually see it
| directly. If one could, it would likely drive them insane.
| Search engines and other discovery methods is how we view
| it, and why it works at all.
| iLemming wrote:
| That's what I'm saying. I don't see all my notes at the
| same time; I never try to see the entire picture nor do I
| ever worry about composing a new note, thinking it would
| just get lost in my mess. My knowledge graph looks like a
| complex web of interconnected nodes. I have over two
| thousand indexed notes and a few thousand plain-text,
| unindexed ones. The tools I've listed above do help you
| to find what you need easily. I treat my notes as my
| "personalized Wikipedia" - I don't need to know how it is
| organized or structured, where specific things physically
| exist, or in which file a specific text of a note sits.
| It is noise, but it is useful noise, because I have
| instruments to "extract music" out of it.
| renewiltord wrote:
| At record time, don't know what is signal and what is noise.
| Separation of signal from noise is not persistence problem,
| it is presentation problem. Model is sophisticated: number of
| delays against action intended time, etc. flow into whether
| task is noise. Being in list is protection against amnesia
| but not protection against prioritization.
| tra3 wrote:
| Indeed. But the action of creating is a list is separate and
| indeed different from actionioning said list. Creating lists
| reduces my anxiety significantly...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It used to reduce anxiety for me too, until my brain learned
| that, unless acted upon immediately, those lists get out of
| date within couple days, at which point they never shrink.
| More than once I ended up with lists that rot faster than I'm
| able to fix them, so I eventually stopped planning too much
| in advance.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Why not reduce the scope of your future plans then?
| tra3 wrote:
| I dont think it's as simple as that, after all there are
| book written about task management.
|
| When "something" comes up, it's not always clear to me
| whether it's urgent or not, important or not. Getting it
| out into a list frees my mental capacity.
|
| For example, I got a reminder to renew my passport
| yesterday. Not urgent, but important. Goes onto a list.
| I'll eventually prioritize and schedule it in my weekly
| review.
|
| The key (for me) it aggressively devote attention to
| pruning these lists.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Breadth is not the issue, _depth is_. Nor there is much
| that I can reduce horizontally. At work, two or three
| open tickets + some blocked work in the "back burner"
| can already trigger the problem; on personal side,
| there's even more stuff that I need to keep track of, and
| take care of in parallel.
|
| Those few "active" items and some more "standby" items
| are easy to list and read by themselves, but unexpanded,
| they're also non-actionable. And what I learned is,
| trying to expand even a few of them more than one level
| down quickly becomes overwhelming, and creates big
| overhead - as I work on one thing, the task breakdowns
| for the rest go stale, requiring additional effort to fix
| them. It surprised me just how fast this happens (and how
| quickly it leads me to stop looking at my own plans).
|
| Related and perhaps extreme example that taught me much
| is when I took a medium-sized ticket that seemed
| perfectly doable in two to three work-weeks, and
| attempted to break it down all the way to actionable
| TODOs no larger than 2 to 4 hours worth of work. I wanted
| to see if this would streamline my work and allow me to
| make a more precise time estimate for the whole ticket.
|
| I probably spent a day or two on the breakdown itself,
| complete with estimates and dependency links for every
| item - starting Z requires X and Y to be done, Y is done
| when A and B are done, etc. Standard project management
| stuff - lets you compute critical path and prioritize
| accordingly, and even draw a Gantt chart. My 3-week
| project ended up having some 150 tasks in it. Initially
| it looked great, but just a day or two into actual work,
| I found myself redoing large parts of the breakdown.
| Every two or three ticked-off tasks, the newly-gained
| knowledge made it apparent some task dependencies were to
| too strict, or entirely unnecessary. Large subtrees had
| to be split, shifted around or deleted, or had to have
| their estimates adjusted, all while new actionable tasks
| had to be added (and broken down). And that doesn't even
| includes the time spent readjusting the list after being
| pre-empted by some unrelated, critical-priority tasks.
|
| All that planning quickly became a huge maintenance
| overhead. I only ever started making progress on the
| project itself when I stopped paying attention to my
| lists. That experience has taught me to stop breakdowns
| much earlier, and to stop eagerly breaking everything
| down to the same level - however good estimates I got
| this way, they weren't even needed for anything, and at
| the same time, they were constantly invalidated by added
| re-planning overhead.
|
| These days, I don't break down work ahead of time beyond
| what's apparent and useful at the moment. I went from
| ahead-of-time to just-in-time.
|
| Another factor is, it seems I'm really bad at the whole
| separation of planning and execution stages. My mind
| doesn't work that way, and can't stay in "execute this
| list one item at a time" mode for very long.
| julianeon wrote:
| Plain text files are cheap and occupy basically 0 space.
| Whenever I have an overfull todo list - let's call it todo.txt
| - I copy it to a file named x.txt, and trim it down. Then when
| I finish that, I go back to whatever is left in todo.txt.
|
| Now pretend that I cut and cut but can't bring myself to reduce
| x.txt to less than, say, 50 items, every one essential to
| complete by today. What do I do then? I copy x.txt to y.txt,
| and reduce x.txt to just what I plan to do for the next 4
| hours. If that's still too long, I copy y.txt to z.txt, x.txt
| to y.txt, and reduce x.txt again. You could always start lower
| in the alphabet (a.txt) if you want more "space".
|
| You get the idea. The point is, with text files, if it's got
| too much in it, create a backup version of that file and cut it
| down to size. Repeat as necessary until your todo list is
| manageably long.
| xpe wrote:
| While the authors both use org mode, this includes a broader
| discussion that includes various ideas and tips, including the
| books "Atomic Habits", "Getting Things Done", and "Building a
| Second Brain". (Updated, since my previous comment thought it was
| only about org mode).
| 7402 wrote:
| This is a satire ... right?
| xpe wrote:
| Haha, no.
|
| But I know the feeling. I've seen videos about people who have
| special physical filing cabinets for notecards that take up an
| entire tabletop. They have to figure out how to number these
| things, which can open up a can of worms and lots of differing
| opinions.
|
| This can seem farcical at times. Sometimes the knowledge-
| management world can seem like a manifestation of OCD or
| perfectionism.
|
| But to be clear, I don't want to discount in any way that such
| approaches could work for many people on many projects. My
| general take is that if a person is being mindful about the
| _effort in_ versus _benefit out_, they'll probably end up in a
| pretty good place.
|
| For YouTubers in a niche of a niche, sometimes there is a
| positive feedback loop to just go deeper down the rabbit hole.
| For example, once a content creator has "committed" to a paper-
| only Zettelkasten system, what are the chances they are going
| to "mellow out" and move to a hybrid paper+digital system?
| tra3 wrote:
| For a YouTuber it's more advantageous to keep switching
| between various systems to keep generating more YouTube
| content.
|
| > special physical filing cabinets for notecards
|
| It sounds like you're a bit dismissive of it. The creator of
| this system Luhmann was a very prolific writer [0] which he
| credited to this system.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann#Note-
| taking_sys...
| xpe wrote:
| > For a YouTuber it's more advantageous to keep switching
| between various systems to keep generating more YouTube
| content.
|
| That's a factor, yes, but before I will grant that it is
| more (or less) advantageous, we would need to have a much
| longer conversation. (Right now, however, I'm not
| particularly interested in running experiments and drawing
| conclusions about how to best optimize YouTube content
| creation.)
| xpe wrote:
| It would be too coarse-grained to say I'm categorically
| dismissive of paper-based systems. My views are more
| nuanced.
|
| Right, I'm aware of Luhmann and Zettelkasten and ZK-
| inspired systems. I'm glad it works for him and many
| others.
|
| Still, if one goes down the rabbit holes of ZK and
| knowledge management systems, you will sooner or later find
| some videos that leave the realms of productivity and
| venture into the farcical.
|
| This is important to recognize: "There is a common mistake
| people [make] when [using] PARA, Zettelkasten, GTD, Bullet
| Journals [...]. / They assume each system is universal. /
| These systems were [NOT] built for mass consumption." -
| 2022 blog post by Zain Rizvi titled "PARA vs. Zettelkasten:
| The false binary" https://www.zainrizvi.io/blog/para-vs-
| zettelkasten-the-false...
| tra3 wrote:
| Right, I may have read your comment as generally
| dismissive of personal knowledge management systems in
| general, but I see you have a much more nuanced approach.
| Thanks for clarifying!
| xpe wrote:
| So. Many. Tradeoffs. :)
| BeetleB wrote:
| Both John Wiegley and Adam Porter are insanely productive, so
| _something_ must be working for them.
| sexyman48 wrote:
| Underemployment drives active github profiles.
| xpe wrote:
| How do you know this? What do you mean? They are in the top
| X% of software engineers and computer scientists in terms
| of ... (some kind of productivity)?
| AlanYx wrote:
| I'm not familiar with Porter, but Wiegley is a heavy
| contributor to a number of open source projects, is the
| author of the Ledger plain text accounting system, has
| been emacs maintainer since 2015, operates his own
| software consultancy, and is very active in several open
| source discussion lists. The guy is a dynamo.
| Jerrrrrrry wrote:
| >This can seem farcical at times. Sometimes the knowledge-
| management world can seem like a manifestation of OCD or
| perfectionism. >But to be clear, I don't want to
| discount in any way that such approaches could work for many
| people on many projects. My general take is that if a person
| is being mindful about the _effort in_ versus _benefit out_,
| they'll probably end up in a pretty good place.
| >My general take is that if a person is being mindful about
| the _effort in_ versus _benefit out_, they'll probably end up
| in a pretty good place.
|
| :(
| iLemming wrote:
| What point(s) of that discussion feel to you like satire? I'm
| not trying to be snarky; I'm genuinely curious. I remember
| myself when I was younger; I never viewed note-taking as a
| serious endeavor. Oh boy, how wrong I was. I wish I had found
| better ways of taking notes sooner.
| sexyman48 wrote:
| No, emacs and note-taking are forms of pointlessly recursive
| refinement. Think of sharpening a sword you've no intention to
| swing. Hold up a hand mirror to your vanity mirror. The
| resulting wormhole is what you get with emacs and note-taking.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Think of sharpening a sword you 've no intention to
| swing._
|
| More like having every intention to achieve glorious victory
| in battle with your sword, but never getting to it as you
| keep finding ways to make the sword _even sharper_. That 's
| legitimate trap, yes.
|
| Most are so afraid of this trap, that they just live on the
| battlefield and keep fighting with their dull, wooden swords;
| when asked if they heard about sharpening - or steel - they
| mumble some quotes from Arthur C. Clarke's story,
| "Superiority". And it's true, many people fall into this
| trap. Some are never heard from again. But then others
| occasionally share their sword designs and sharpening tricks,
| which end up improving weapons for the whole army. Then there
| are those who pop in and out, tinkering in the field,
| upgrading their blades until they become rocket propelled
| chainsaws or other weird shit.
|
| The truth is, if you're not satisfied with your Army Standard
| Issue Sword and want something better, you'll need to fall
| into this trap once or twice. That's how you learn how to
| upgrade your own gear.
|
| Or, in short: exploration vs. exploitation tradeoff. If you
| want to get shit done, you need to find a good balance.
| Maximizing either of the two is a failure.
| xpe wrote:
| I was hoping there is an audio/podcast version of this, but I
| haven't found it yet.
| iLemming wrote:
| The note on semantic and operational distinction of notes is
| interesting. I personally ditched hierarchies when I switched to
| Org-Roam. I used to think all the time where a specific note
| would belong - should I organize my notes by dates? Should I use
| the datetree feature of Org-Mode? Should I put everything in one
| file or split between multiple files grouping notes by some
| categories or tags.
|
| These days, the only question I have to ask myself is "in what
| context do I want to rediscover this note?". For example, I don't
| usually sit around thinking: "Didn't we discuss this SSH-related
| problem with Jeffrey and Anna back in May? Let me go to the
| may-2024 folder of my notes and grep through them...". Instead, I
| would just go to either of these notes titled: 'ssh' or 'Jeffrey'
| or 'Anna' and search for backlinks, where I will surely find my
| notes related to that discussion, even if they're spread out
| across multiple days and many notes in multiple places. And it
| doesn't really matter where specific notes are - which file, what
| nested hierarchy of headings, etc.
|
| Zettelkasten really does work. You just need a quick an easy way
| of cross-linking different notes. I highly recommend this little
| book called 'How to Take Smart Notes', it's fairly small, you can
| go through it within an hour or so. And remember the famous quote
| of Richard Feynman: "Notes aren't a record of my thinking
| process. They are my thinking process"... If you don't find a
| good way of taking notes, you won't be doing a good job of
| thinking.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| The point about linting still stands, though. I recently had to
| grep for a note I was really sure was there, but didn't show in
| the roam-find- autocomplete. Turns out, at some point I must've
| accidentally put a stray character that made properties section
| stop parsing, dropping the note from the system. Another case
| is when I occasionally add what I intend to be roam note as a
| new org file, and then forget to press the shortcut I have to
| give the file an ID.
|
| (EDIT: Similarly, over the years I had a few cases of some
| TODOs I forgot about because I accidentally made a whole
| subtree stop parsing with a stray character. Rare as it is, I'm
| beginning to wonder if I shouldn't switch to modal editing a la
| vim, as those mistakes tend to happen when moving through the
| outline with "speed keys".)
|
| In general, Org works well for me, but damn if the fragility of
| plaintext doesn't bite me every now and then.
| iLemming wrote:
| > fragility of plaintext
|
| For that, I have .dir-locals.el file in the root of my notes
| folder with a single line: ((org-mode . ((eval git-auto-
| commit-mode 1))))
|
| Even if I accidentally make a change, there's always
| trackable history
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I'm more of a "stick everything in Dropbox/OneNote" kind of
| person myself, as it gives seamless syncing of my Org files
| between multiple devices. For various reasons I've been
| relying on that much less recently, so I'll reconsider the
| git approach.
| iLemming wrote:
| Yes, I do the same, I use Resilio. I thought about
| switching to Syncthing, but my NAS supports Resilio out
| of the box, so I kept using it. I let my .git folder to
| be synced between devices and I never actually pushed
| anything to a "proper" git forge - I can't think of a
| practical use case for pushing my notes to GitHub/Gitlab.
|
| My git-autocommit technique only for tracking unforeseen
| changes - I was using Orgzly on Android, and one day I
| tried using its sync feature and it borked up a bunch of
| my notes, creating duplicate files, etc. I didn't like
| that.
| iLemming wrote:
| > The point about linting still stands, though.
|
| Do you run org-lint on the save hook? I wonder if that'd be
| too distracting, or if it can be done silently unless some
| errors detected.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| No, but this submission and thread just convinced me to
| try.
| shaftoe444 wrote:
| Just forget stuff like a cool person
| xpe wrote:
| I'm storing this quote into my second brain right now. I'm
| heisenseriousjoking. Filing something away makes forgetting
| very cool indeed; I know I can look it up later.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Do you then actually look it up at the right time? I often
| don't. My anxiety increases with the number of uncompleted
| items on the list, until it eventually stops me from looking
| at the list ever again. Filing something away becomes a
| license to forget.
| xpe wrote:
| Ah, well, isn't a "to do" item, so no anxiety needed.
|
| I've collected quotes for years: pretty fun to review from
| time to time.
| codemac wrote:
| Does anyone handle org-mode for attachments + mobile sync?
|
| I use Autosync on android and a script that runs on my laptop.
| This works great for the text files, but the attachments/data
| files (say like screenshots) are a pain to find and open on
| mobile. Second, they're even more painful to add from mobile.
|
| I'm fine with quite elaborate set ups if it solves this problem.
| tra3 wrote:
| Not that I am aware of. The mobile story with emacs is pretty
| painful. I use dropbox + beorg (iOS). If I have to deal with
| attachments off spelunking through the dropbox folders I go.
|
| Realistically, I dont see the mobile experience improving much.
| Given Emacs' utility though I dont mind it.
| codemac wrote:
| org-review is interesting, but I just added another TODO state:
| DEFER
|
| Then projects, todos, agenda items etc can go from TODO -> DEFER
| and I know that they're "not now" items. That has seemed
| sufficient for me. Tracking exactly when they're reviewed has
| been too much, and not everything needs a scheduled time in the
| future for review.
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(page generated 2024-11-07 23:00 UTC)