[HN Gopher] I deleted my second brain
___________________________________________________________________
I deleted my second brain
Author : MrVandemar
Score : 477 points
Date : 2025-06-28 05:27 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.joanwestenberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.joanwestenberg.com)
| spencerflem wrote:
| Don't mean at all to discredit what the author's done - it's
| their life and seems to have been helpful to them and for that
| I'm very glad.
|
| But this would make me so sad -
|
| Its not that the notes are useful but every few months I love
| nostalgia tripping on old notes. Like looking at old photos but
| instead of places and people its thoughts. Like, "oh yeah, I did
| care about that back then!"
| system2 wrote:
| That's what I feel after finding "Desktop" backup folders from
| years ago after refreshing my Windows installations. Each
| computer had their unique desktop and documents folder with
| bunch of software, games, half written plugins / codes.
| kstrauser wrote:
| That's very nicely put and I'd feel the same way. I like seeing
| what mattered to me a while back.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| I know what you mean. It's not just notes. I had shelves full
| of trinkets and books that I never looked at. I threw them all
| way to "unclutter my life". I realize now, even though I never
| picked them up or read the books they triggered memories. When
| I bought them, what I was into at the time, things like that. I
| don't know how much I wish I still had them all.
|
| I'm going though something kind of similar now in that there
| are several boxes of stuff of mine in my parent's storage. I
| haven't looked in them in 20+ years. I basically told them to
| just chuck them in the trash. I haven't seen them, I don't want
| to see them. If I see them I'll just end up keeping them for
| another 20+ years without looking at them.
|
| Yes, they will trigger memories. Things I made in high school,
| elementary school, college, etc.... There's at least 3
| journals. But, do I really care? If they had just thrown them
| away with out telling me or if the storage and burnt down I'd
| have no idea what was in them and I certainly don't miss the
| contents or even think about them except when my parents
| mention, "you know, we still have your boxes in our storage"
|
| I don't know how to choose between keeping them and getting rid
| of a pile of trash haha. I'm choosing to throw them away. I'd
| prefer not to know what's in them so I don't know what I don't
| know. I guess partly I just want to detach from the past.
| Others certainly make different choices.
| imhoguy wrote:
| This. IANAD but I think there maybe something deeper the author
| might be fighting, some hoarding and OCD.
|
| Balanced amount of personal and family archive is nice when
| revisited.
| latexr wrote:
| > Like looking at old photos
|
| Many years ago I realised I never do that. I find no enjoyment
| in going through old photos, so I stopped taking and storing
| them.
|
| But like you, I don't discredit the people who do it. More
| power to you if it makes you happy.
| k310 wrote:
| I always used and use paper notes. Computer files are mostly
| downloads, and saved articles for better search (ahem) than DDG
| or Google because their results are almost entirely name matches
| with movies or shit to buy.
|
| And stuff disappears. Hopefully saved at IA, but not always.
|
| That said, I have all my old note books with great ideas :-)
| whose time may come yet, etc.
|
| The only notes I tossed were from years just prior to a divorce.
| Nothing useful, just griping. The other ideas are still
| interesting to review.
|
| For example, lists of questions for games, and unusual names,
| such as Ebenezer and Florence, aka Ebb and Flo.
|
| Photos are always saved, including ones I scanned from parents'
| prints and daughter's growing up prints. (Film days) A few old
| slides have been scanned, but I keep the originals. One more
| adapter ring, and those will also be scanned. My brother and I
| have Dad's original paintings and good quality photos (from the
| digital camera age) for showing off.
| aryehof wrote:
| It's surely a question of perspective. View entries as (perhaps)
| things to do, or just as historical record.
|
| The former is likely a mental burden, the latter not?
| wiseowise wrote:
| Is that a hipster thing?
|
| Like the same person would write completely opposite in the same
| style ten years ago, but now that PKM are all the rage they need
| to reassert themselves as "not-like-the-other" by burning
| everything to the ground?
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| I'd think so but then the mention of sobriety makes me think
| there are other reasons behind the note taking.
| sandspar wrote:
| And instead of just logging off, the dramatic deletion. He
| frames this as the end of a phase but I suspect he's still in
| the middle of something. I wish him luck and strength.
| MrVandemar wrote:
| Wrong pronoun. Joan Westenberg so "she".
| grugagag wrote:
| It's both
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_(given_name)
| robertlutece wrote:
| people change, people grow
|
| I myself threw out about 3000 notes last year
| wiseowise wrote:
| Throwing notes away is not growing. Growing is understanding
| that inanimate things don't have control over your life.
|
| This whole "philosophical" article that basically says "I've
| removed my notes because they were giving me anxiety" is a
| confirmation that this is just yet another phase in author's
| life.
| latexr wrote:
| > Throwing notes away is not growing.
|
| You don't get to define that. The author does, it's their
| life.
|
| The action taken here was not just the deletion, it was the
| reflecting, the identification of a problem, the thinking
| of a solution, the courage to follow through with something
| irreversible, the willingness to try something.
| navane wrote:
| I think it's a phase he had to go through. The point is not to
| not have notes, but maybe it's time to reassess having them.
| latexr wrote:
| That is a judgemental and bad faith argument.
|
| Do you know that this person was writing the opposite ten years
| ago? And even if they did, people can't try something and then
| change their mind? Is that worthy of ridicule now?
|
| Frankly, making fun of someone for being "hipster" says more
| about the person doing the comment than the target of it. It's
| a basic, meaningless insult.
| exitnode wrote:
| I don't take long-term notes at all, only quick notes on paper of
| thing I need to do. I tried to collect all thoughts, notes etc.
| but I would never read them again. Most of it would be outdated
| anyways. So I understand that these kind of notes might feel like
| ballast and might be a reason to not be able to close with
| things.
|
| Everything that is worth keeping is on my website as properliy
| written posts which I enjoy to re-read from time to time. You
| could also look at it this way: anything that doesn't make it
| onto the website - i.e. is published - isn't worth saving either.
| ErrorNoBrain wrote:
| the thing with such a system is keeping it up to date
|
| you have to spend SO MUCH time writing notes... and since you
| might put in everything you've thought to do, in there, you also
| have to go back and read it again, to find it?
|
| seems like a very time consuming process
|
| i personally write down details for a few topics, in my notes,
| and then i tend to forget the small details, and use my brain to
| remember the big scope(s). then i can return to my notes for tiny
| details later, if needed.
|
| most of the time though, i tend to never return.
|
| and so i ended up just not writing notes anymore. it ends up
| being too much to look through, or too much to be worth the time.
|
| gotta find that sweet spot i guess, but thats not easy either.
| runjake wrote:
| I can't count the number of times my notes have saved me or my
| team some serious grief. I don't have to keep everything in my
| head. I can offload my brain into notes.
|
| Godspeed, but there's no way I'd give any of that up.
| thom wrote:
| Why do you keep what is clearly critical project documentation
| in your personal notes though?
| mrweasel wrote:
| Possibly because a large number of organisations don't really
| have a good system for capturing somethings as "messy" as
| notes.
|
| I'm not big on note taking myself, but when I do, the things
| I capture is very different from the version I put into the
| official documentation.
|
| There is a good article: A rational design process, how and
| why to fake it.[1] Basically how we reach our goal and how we
| present them are two different things. The personal notes
| have the details on failures, wrong turns and alternative
| ideas, the official documentation won't have that.
|
| 1) https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/david-
| parnas/fake...
| motorest wrote:
| > Possibly because a large number of organisations don't
| really have a good system for capturing somethings as
| "messy" as notes.
|
| To build upon this point, there's a problem that writing
| docs is a thankless job: those who benefit from it do so
| silently, whereas those who selflessly shared notes later
| can find themselves involved in issues they have no
| involvement.
|
| It's a lose-lose situation.
| XorNot wrote:
| I'd posit a simpler explanation: most large orgs buy
| Confluence, and you cannot find _anything_ in Confluence.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Confluence search is very good.... At finding stuff in
| PDFs. Search in Confluence is bonkers. Super easy to
| locate term, know to only exist in one document, and
| Confluence will return that one PDF that someone
| uploaded, which for some reason also have that term. It's
| odd that the search is so poor at searching Confluence
| pages, yet so good at searching PDFs.
| navane wrote:
| Because it's less friction to put it there? Because only he
| can find it in the sparse context it lives in? Because he can
| use it then for multiple projects, and might he change,
| multiple companies? Because that way it's his and not the
| companies? Imagine leaving a job and all you learned stays at
| that job instead of with you?
| motorest wrote:
| > Why do you keep what is clearly critical project
| documentation in your personal notes though?
|
| a) how can you tell some random note you took today is
| critical project documentation?
|
| b) why do you believe people read through project
| documentation?
| wiseowise wrote:
| Because then it spares you the maintenance of bullshit? The
| moment you put something public, there are 10 wise-asses that
| will start bikeshedding about MD flavor, where to put it, who
| maintains it, can we automate it, can you update this, can we
| expand it, etc.
| al_borland wrote:
| I started doing this, because my company goes through too
| many re-orgs and tool changes. If I capture it in my personal
| notes, I don't have to worry about re-doing everything when
| the org changes, or losing something I may need if I'm moves
| away from the area where those notes were kept.
|
| I'd love to have a universal shared notes system for the
| whole team, but it's proven unrealistic when seeing how
| things work over decades.
|
| With my former team I wrote 90% of the documentation. A while
| after I left they had to migrate their docs to a new system,
| and used it as an opportunity to clean up. I went back to try
| and reference a 20 page doc I wrote, going very in depth on a
| topic during a period where I was deep into it. Gone. I wish
| I had kept my own copies instead of relying on the shared
| platform. There was still a lot of good and relevant
| information in that document, but the people going through it
| lacked the knowledge and context to see it. There have been
| many examples like this.
|
| There are also things that don't seem like they deserve a
| note in a formal system. One day thing X broke and we found
| out we had to talk to person Y to fix it. No one else thought
| to write it down, but I did. It broke again yesterday, and I
| was able to quickly bring up the name of who to talk to,
| while everyone else just tried to remember and hunted through
| their chat history. Search of my local notes (in Obsidian)
| works much better than Confluence. The low friction also
| means it's easy to drop stuff in, even if it might not be
| that useful. The friction on Confluence is higher. I tried
| keeping all my notes in there once, so I could easily share
| them with others if/when needed, but it was too much effort,
| and only a matter of time before it goes away and we move to
| something else (that's happening to some degree right now).
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Where do people draw the line between a PKM (which is yours)
| and team documentation (which belongs, presumably to your team
| to which you have a transient relationship with)?
| dudinax wrote:
| personal notes become cryptic team notes when you leave. If
| something ought to be team knowledge before that, it needs to
| get translated into a form that more people can easily read.
| bentinata wrote:
| Product focused (plans, documentation, snippets) notes for
| team, people focused (1-on-1, performance review, birthday)
| notes for personal.
| tetris11 wrote:
| I use org-roam for looking up a topic, adding a note, and then
| forgetting about it.
|
| Yeah I might link one topic to another, but it's so seldom used
| because if I did it properly I'd have to link everything to
| everything else or create some maddening time-consuming thought
| hierarchy, like I believe the poster did.
|
| I also dont use my notes to think... they just exist to roughly
| categorize my updates on a project or topic, and once that
| project is over I seldom look at it again, or, I simply archive
| it.
|
| Having this virtual briefcase full of hastily tagged and indexed
| notes sounds chaotic, but it is immensely useful in unburdening
| my brain and uncluttering my desktop (firefox has maybe 5 tabs
| open).
|
| I dont understand the need for thorough organization and
| consistent structure. Nor do I understand cradling every thought
| or whim like it's untapped genius.
|
| Life is seldom like this, and an impossible ideal to enact.
| Linnaeus himself must have questioned his sanity when he saw a
| Platypus.
| VariousPrograms wrote:
| Linking notes enables note-taking to become a full-time hobby.
| It's effortless to waste hours in Notion, Obsidian, Vimwiki,
| etc. creating MOCs, unused links, nice little home pages, and
| creating and recreating structures and systems.
|
| I switched to a directory of unlinked, tagged notes and I've
| yet to have an issue just searching for a specific note. I
| spend a fraction of the time I used to thinking about notes at
| all.
|
| Everyone has different needs and things that work for them, but
| some of these productivity gurus have 100,000s atomic notes,
| each note being like a single quote from a book, and you
| realize that taking and organizing notes is the only thing they
| do.
| nchmy wrote:
| I was elated when obsidian came out, because it brought to
| reality exactly what I thought I had wanted for a few years
| prior - ability to link, especially graphically, all of my
| notes.
|
| But I quickly realised what you described - it's a futile
| effort to maintain such a thing, and that the only people who
| do it are absolute slaves to the systems they've created.
|
| Worse, they surely don't really generate truly unique
| insights from it all because the insights don't really come
| from addition and interconnection, but instead from
| subtraction and refinement. The cultivation of wisdom, in
| other words - which is the opposite of accumulation. I've
| seen various versions of this chart and I think it summarizes
| the situation well - though I'd go further and be culling the
| noise from it all. https://magniapartners.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2023/08/Magnia...
|
| I still use obisidan, as it's just great software. And
| mybnotes could absolutely benefit from better structure and
| discipline in filing them - I do almost none of what I
| mentioned above. Though, perhaps I'm just mentally doing the
| culling and just focusing on what actually matters. Full text
| search usually finds me what I need quickly enough.
| timeonecom wrote:
| I would have zipped it and put it into long term storage. Now
| that I can run llms locally and train them with my notes, I'd
| never have to organize or revisit old notes and could still get
| value out of them.
| Pursuit1782 wrote:
| Great post, it captures a lot of feelings that I myself share
| about "PKM"!
| tonijn wrote:
| Reminds me of stories people tell after they lost all their
| belongings in a fire. Pain but also relieve
| tolerance wrote:
| If it wasn't for the compulsive authoring, storing, organizing,
| accessing, discarding, archiving, indexing and retrieving of
| notes and related data I wouldn't know what a computer was good
| for.
|
| But the whole "second brain" trend always made my stomach turn
| and the surrounding culture of productivity/personal knowledge
| management is a tarpit.
| vasco wrote:
| For porn.
| imhoguy wrote:
| I keep mine but archived as git history. I don't return to it but
| in critical moment I can come back to some obscure information I
| recorded years ago - useful for legal or insurance.
|
| And my "second brain" is just handful list of current stuff, some
| home technical or financial details my family would need in case
| I am in coma, etc. I would call it Snapshot of Presence notes.
| ricksunny wrote:
| > Markdown files in nested folders.
|
| I'm debating whether nested folders should be used at all in my
| PKMs. I'm starting to think everything should be in the root
| folder. Less likely to render searchability incomplete due to
| some function or widget breaking.
| raincole wrote:
| > I started reading to extract. Listening to summarize
|
| I resonate with this a lot. But in the opposite way of what the
| author implies here.
|
| Since I've start 'reading to extract', my attention span improved
| a lot. I feel my reading pattern is like that of the pre-social-
| media self again. Simply knowing that I'm going to write some
| notes down makes reading a much more engaging experience for me.
|
| By the way, this is what I wrote into Obsidian after reading this
| article:
|
| > [url]: The author deleted their Obsidian database of 10,000
| notes. I do not agree on this approach, but they raised some
| interesting issues. Quote:
|
| > > The more my system grew, the more I deferred the work of
| thought to some future self who would sort, tag, distill, and
| extract the gold.
|
| > > That self never arrived.
|
| > I am probably making the same mistake, and should be reviewing
| my notes more often. Perhaps I can delete some outdated ones
| every once in a while, instead of deleting the whole database
| like the author did?
| fjfaase wrote:
| My personal website acts as my second brain in the sense that it
| helps me remember important events in my life and tracks my
| personal projects. I started it around 1995.
| yard2010 wrote:
| https://www.iwriteiam.nl
| MrGilbert wrote:
| That is pretty impressive. I skimmed through the site, and was
| wondering what your thought process was when putting your life
| in the open vs. keeping it on a local disk?
| fjfaase wrote:
| Good question. Through the years, I have become more
| restrictive about what I write especially with respect to
| others. I am aware of the fact that I am more open to share
| about my personal life than many people around me. Maybe it
| is related to fact that I want to have some, hopefully
| positive, effect on the world. (Maybe one day in the future
| it might become material for some historic research.)
|
| There is also a lot, I do not share. I keep a personal diary
| and since 2010, I am recording my daily activities in
| Moleskin daily planners (the only planners I have found that
| have the same space for Saturdays and Sundays as for working
| days).
| mtts wrote:
| Of course if you store "7000 notes" in a PKM you should expect
| most of them to be useless, unless you're doing science and most
| of them are literature notes or something (remember the guy who
| "invented" zettelkasten worked as a researcher). Ordinary mortals
| can get by with a lot less.
|
| I have maybe a few hundred notes on the handful of topics that
| matter to me and that's it.
| winkelwagen wrote:
| This resonates with me, I've never considered knowledge as
| something you can live.
|
| But comparing it with photography, it influences how you
| experience the world. Sometimes it makes you feel like an
| outsider documenting instead of being in the moment.
|
| I always cringe a bit when people take endless videos of
| fireworks or concerts. There is a fine line between wanting te
| remember a feeling or moment and just brainlessly recording.
|
| I'm wouldn't be surprised if this second brain movement is
| similarly lacking its connection with "reality" and when lacking
| clear intention.
| ZYZ64738 wrote:
| I used Obsidian 2 yrs. ago for almost 2 weeks and I quit. I did
| not know why - until this post. I felt missing s.th. or left
| myself behind by not using s PKMs. Now I feel calm after reading
| this post. It seems that my subconsciousness alredy knew, that
| (to me) a PKM would never reach a break even point...
| barrkel wrote:
| I understand what the author deleted and why.
|
| I would never delete my own archive of notes, because it contains
| a different kind of information: howtos for things I do
| infrequently, current state for personal projects I rotate in and
| out of over years, maintenance logs for my vehicles,
| identification details for every important account (account
| numbers, insurance expiry details etc).
|
| When I'm doing something complex, I narrate what I'm doing in my
| notes. Most of these logs are write only. They can help as a kind
| of written rubber duck. And about 1 in 100 turn out to be
| extremely useful when I want to remember how I did something 10
| years ago.
|
| I use the same app (of my own design) with a different storage at
| work, and there I use it to remind myself what I did for
| performance reviews. Every edit is logged with a timestamp and I
| have a different tool which puts all the edits into chronological
| order.
|
| For the author, their system served as a way of dealing with
| anxiety over self-improvement, it seems. But it turned into an
| anxiety of its own when the weight of unexplored ambition became
| manifest. It wasn't really a second brain IMO.
| tommica wrote:
| I'd hate to lose the ability of just going back 20 years later
| and read my own thoughts and ideas, to meet the person I was at
| that point.
|
| I have a project/idea journal that I've had for over 10 years,
| and going through it sometimes is really fun. I remember being
| so proud about my code-generation tool that allowed me to
| quickly start a new html+css project that I was doing that work
| as a freelancer. Seeing that page in my journal brings up a
| smile.
| diggan wrote:
| > I'd hate to lose the ability of just going back 20 years
| later and read my own thoughts and ideas, to meet the person
| I was at that point.
|
| Yeah, my "second-brain" doubles as a journal too, and I have
| written notebooks from when I first arrived in my "real home
| country" with basically nothing, and it's always a pleasure
| to go back to read through and realize (again) how different
| my life is now.
|
| It's really easy to lose track of our own progress day-to-
| day, and being able to analyze your past perspectives and
| situations is like a hack to instant happiness.
| chuckadams wrote:
| > I'd hate to lose the ability of just going back 20 years
| later and read my own thoughts and ideas, to meet the person
| I was at that point.
|
| The author mentions being sober for 6 years. Chances are
| she's not terribly interested in meeting her past self.
| wonger_ wrote:
| Sometimes it's nice to remind yourself how far you've come.
| jhbadger wrote:
| I have an archive of all my email going back to 1992.
| (Granted, this is more accessible prior to 2000 or so when
| things went unnecessarily to HTML). It is a wonderful
| resource, not only for practical reasons but also it's like
| my own personal Pepys diary -- I can tell you what I was
| doing in 1992 and later on any date. I love reading it, even
| if I encounter sad messages from mentors who have since
| passed or significant others decades since the breakup.
| motorest wrote:
| > I would never delete my own archive of notes, because it
| contains a different kind of information: howtos for things I
| do infrequently, current state for personal projects I rotate
| in and out of over years, maintenance logs for my vehicles,
| identification details for every important account (account
| numbers, insurance expiry details etc).
|
| It struck me as odd how the blog post waxed lyrical about
| "second brains" but the description of the notes seemed to
| point at mostly to-do lists. That's not what I would call a
| second brain. The definition of "second brain" is in line with
| the old tradition of engineering logs, where engineers write
| down things they did, measurements they took, and observations
| they did. On the other hand, to-do lists is just work you
| assign to yourself.
|
| No wonder those notes caused anxiety. I would also be anxious
| if I was faced with a log with 7-years worth of chores that are
| both late and stale.
|
| Logs are logs. You write down what you feel is important, and
| forget about them. After some time, you can delete them without
| a second thought. You write down stuff today because you feel
| it will help you in the future. If what you wrote down today is
| not a present from your past to your present, and instead is
| causing you grief, then just remove it from your notes.
|
| As all things in life, you need to preserve the things that
| cause joy and push away those that cause grief. Your second
| brain is no different.
| keysdev wrote:
| I recently recovered about 3TB of data from over 15 years ago.
| It was just on a hard drive with a friend that we thought was
| lost. I dont really miss the data, but oh it was nice to see
| some old photos and notes!!
|
| So what I recoomend is put on a hd and hide it some where. Go
| check it in 15 years
| thfuran wrote:
| An HDD (or tape if you _really_ want want it to stick
| around), not an SSD.
| zahlman wrote:
| TIL that tape storage exists with density competitive with
| HDDs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open
|
| but I still don't understand what supposedly makes it more
| reliable long-term as storage.
| datameta wrote:
| I believe it is cost per unit density that allows
| magnetic tape to be more suitable for archival storage
| than HDD, which surpasses it in I/O speeds. Magnetic tape
| storage is still usually in RAID-like configurations and
| while tape only survives for 15-30 years, data survival
| by migration is typically done well before medium
| degradation.
| kstrauser wrote:
| LTO-9 drives are expensive, but the media is around $90
| for an 18TB (pre-compression) tape. That's a pretty good
| price if you make lots of backups for work. They also
| offer append-only mode, which is awesome for archives
| where you want it to be essentially impossible to delete
| a backup without physical access.
|
| But the tape itself has a great reputation for being
| physically robust. There are fewer parts to break than in
| an HDD, too. If your tape drive dies, you can replace it
| and keep using the same media. That'd be like having hard
| drive platters you could swap into another HDD later on.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Tape media doesn't last forever. I suppose that tapes
| specifically meant for archiving are better, but I have
| old audio tapes from the 1970s and 80s that are just
| falling apart.
| projektfu wrote:
| Mylar audio tape of that vintage had longevity problems.
| I remember reading about an audio archive that thought
| they had done the right thing by preserving onto high
| quality tape of the time and then they found their
| archives disintegrating. I think they got lucky and moved
| things to new media before losing everything.
|
| This is always the risk. Longevity testing is often done
| at high temperatures or other artificial means but cannot
| exactly simulate 30-50 years of storage. If something is
| important, it's best to use two different media, and
| check them over the years.
| ta988 wrote:
| It is a question of failure mode. If your hard drive
| motor dies, if the heads fail, if the electronics fail,
| if the sealing fail (in some cases it can be repaired by
| specialists but that's not easy and much more expensive
| than a tape reader)... lots of things can go wrong that
| are not related with the media itself. The advantage of
| tape is that the device that reads it is separate from
| the mechanically simple tape. It comes at a cost but
| that's for hedging against a different risk.
| zahlman wrote:
| > current state for personal projects I rotate in and out of
| over years
|
| How do you get yourself to rotate back in?
| kaashif wrote:
| Personally, I don't "get myself" to do anything, I just do it
| for fun.
|
| The usual cycle is that I start hacking on some fun thing
| like an implementation of rules for a board game or trying to
| work out how some library I use works. Eventually I write
| down where I am then stop, maybe because I got bored or it
| was too hard.
|
| Then I forget that the project was hard, become convinced
| that it was easy, then spend an evening hacking away again.
|
| It's just leisure. Like putting a bookmark in a novel.
| michaelbarton wrote:
| Somewhat related I have a little script that shows me three
| notes at random everyday. If they're stale or no longer
| needed I delete the note. This helps keep it relatively fresh
| over time.
|
| I have a tag "#noreview" for notes that are evergreen that
| don't need to be reviewed. Example of that might which bus to
| take from Heathrow when visiting friends in London
| ZunarJ5 wrote:
| I also follow this philosophy. I also have an anxious brain,
| though. To manage the clutter, I zip up old notes & projects by
| date and put them in an archive folder. They're always there if
| I need to reference them, but I have a clean workspace too. I
| include file trees in those archives for easy reference. Very
| easy to script with a cron job.
| Willingham wrote:
| I took some blurbs from your comment and added it to
| my...life/career notes. (:
| BrtByte wrote:
| What you've built sounds more like an external memory
| prosthetic than a second brain - grounded, functional, and
| geared toward real-world utility, not aspirational insight-
| hoarding. I think that's the key difference: your system serves
| your life, not the other way around
| dawnofdusk wrote:
| This comment you wrote sounds a lot like an LLM, FYI. Not
| saying you are
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| I've used AI a lot and completely disagree.
| bckr wrote:
| It's the last sentence that makes it sound like Claude, to
| me
| barrkel wrote:
| That voice - antithesis - is straight out of ChatGPT, like
| the sibling comment says.
| dhdaadhd wrote:
| It's funny how ChatGPT writes like a first-year in an MFA
| writing program. Its style is often too elegant for its
| substance.
|
| OpenAI is not good at matching form to function in text or
| voice.
| isolatedsystem wrote:
| This article is visibly, annoyingly, _distractingly_ in threes.
|
| > It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage.
|
| > but to keep it alive, replayed, and reworked.
|
| > A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old
| compulsions...
|
| > A quote would spark an insight, I'd clip it, tag it, link it...
|
| > There is a guilt that accompanies unread books, articles and
| blog posts
|
| > The belief that by naming a goal, you are closer to achieving
| it. That by storing a thought, you have understood it. That by
| filing a fact, you have earned the right to deploy it.
|
| > ...the fear of losing track, of forgetting, of not being caught
| up.
|
| > Nietzsche burned early drafts. Michelangelo destroyed sketches.
| Leonardo left thousands of pages unfinished.
| tolerance wrote:
| I'm starting to notice this style a lot. Apparently there's a
| formal term for it, but I didn't begin to notice it until I
| started using ChatGPT regularly.
|
| Granted, there are people who didn't notice the utility of the
| em dash until it became apparent in ChatGPT's responses, but
| aside from either device there is a certain vibe I'm starting
| to pick up from a lot of writing online that mirrors AI writing
| although you can't just call it that, especially if people
| enjoy it.
|
| A kind of abstract solipsism that only resonates unless you
| consent to a platonic relationship with the author through
| their writing. About as close as you can get to reading
| something written with the aid of AI, I'd imagine.
| alwa wrote:
| I choose to think optimistically, in the same way as I did
| when smartphones put a camera in everyone's pocket: suddenly,
| "bokeh" is a term with purchase in the mainstream! "Portrait
| mode" for every adorable baby pic! A ring light in every
| makeshift bedroom-dresser studio!
|
| Everybody's _participating_ now, and taking pride in using
| more of the visual language of photography for themselves.
| That makes us all richer!
|
| Now, then, that the language-bots have sensitized our
| collective ear to the hypnotic rhythm of a parallel-
| constructed triplet, the drama of a "--", and the muscular
| power of a strong active voice (...that's three,
| right?)--aren't we all richer for it?
| tolerance wrote:
| > Now, then, that the language-bots have sensitized our
| collective ear to the hypnotic rhythm of a parallel-
| constructed triplet, the drama of a "--", and the muscular
| power of a strong active voice (...that's three,
| right?)--aren't we all richer for it?
|
| That is yet be proven, comrade.
| eertami wrote:
| I think you raise a valid point, but I would argue that in
| your photography example, the content is very much still
| human - portrait mode and ring lights are tools that
| improve the output but a human framed the picture, and
| pressed the button.
|
| LLM generated writing doesn't quite feel the same for me,
| the words are the content but they lack human touch,
| context, intention. The equivalent would be the
| photographer uploading their photo to ChatGPT and asking it
| to regenerate the image. The output wouldn't feel right, it
| is more like losing something than gaining.
| yapyap wrote:
| I feel that your optimism is great but that the example you
| provided is not the same.
|
| Everyone had the ability to write before chatgpt, they had
| the ability to get their thoughts across if they so wished,
| whereas with photography it lessened the burden of having
| to buy an entirely seperate device.
|
| if I move myself into the shoes of a photographer or
| someone with an affinity towards photographing I kind of
| get that when taking pictures is a big part of your life
| the camera starts to get ingrained with that but for others
| it wasnt just a step from camera to more frictionless
| camera it was a step from nothing to camera.
|
| Whereas everyone has a brain to think things and to try to
| communicate what they are thinking and feeling, large
| language models did not enable that, they did however
| enable lazy people to swap out the work with a robots
| response or malicious people to spam the internet
| XiphiasX wrote:
| That's because it's LLM.
| Veen wrote:
| The rule of threes is a widely known rhetorical guideline.
| Some people do take it a bit far, though.
| crtified wrote:
| Verbose, literate writers wrote like LLMs long before LLMs
| existed.
|
| _We_ taught _them_.
|
| One irony now being that that form of skilled writing is
| inevitably and sometimes falsely accused of being machine-
| written.
| paulluuk wrote:
| > "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not
| have the time." - Blaise Pascal
|
| It takes much more skill to write concise than verbose.
| latexr wrote:
| That quote doesn't apply at all. Verbose writing doesn't
| immediately indicate a lack of skill, otherwise every
| fiction book would've been reduced to a pamphlet of a
| summary.
|
| If you are writing to explain, being concise is a useful
| asset. If you are writing to entertain, or for pleasure,
| verbosity and flair can be better.
|
| I don't get the feeling the author is trying to convince
| anyone of doing anything. They are sharing their
| experience, probably writing for themselves above
| everyone else. They should do it however they prefer.
| gjm11 wrote:
| On the other hand:
|
| > Every note in Obsidian. Every half-baked atomic thought,
| every Zettelkasten slip, every carefully linked concept map.
| (4, though I suppose you could argue it's 1 + 3)
|
| > But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty
| collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled
| on top of each other like geological strata. (2, albeit with a
| 3 inside)
|
| > Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it.
| Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static
| categories. (2)
|
| > The inhabitants of the library, cursed to wander it forever,
| descend into despair, madness, and nihilism. (2 with a 3 inside
| again)
|
| > It is associative, embodied, contextual, emotional. We do not
| think in folders. We do not retrieve meaning through backlinks.
| Our minds are improvisational. They forget on purpose. (4, 2,
| 2)
|
| I think the author (either in person, or via some LLM that did
| much of the actual writing) is just fond of this sort of
| rhetorical repetition, and it happens that if you're doing that
| then 3 is often the best number. (Because 2 may not be enough
| to establish the rhythm, and 4 may be enough to feel overdone.)
|
| I _do_ think there 's too much of it here, and specifically too
| many threes, but I think the underlying fault is "too much
| parallelism" and the too-many-threes are a symptom.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| I don't understand why people are saying it's LLM.
|
| To me it's more of a stream of consciousness style of writing.
| gwern wrote:
| I'm fascinated by all these comments I see on HN and
| elsewhere where people will deny that a blatantly LLM-written
| article was not LLM-written, including cases where people
| praise it for _not_ being LLM-written (eg.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44384138 ). Like, leave
| aside the issue of whether it's a good or bad thing (I've
| been doing generative text NNs since 2015, so I'm mostly for
| it, when done well), I'm just interested in the inability to
| notice.
|
| Skimming your comments, you, for example, do not seem to be
| illiterate or a bad writer at all despite being ESL (although
| you overuse the double-sentence structure in your comments),
| but you describe this as being 'stream of consciousness' (it
| is not even close to that, look at an actual example like
| Joyce) and seem to think it is fine.
|
| So I'm puzzled how. Why isn't it obvious to you that the
| style is so mode-collapsed (
| https://gwern.net/doc/reinforcement-learning/preference-
| lear... )? Do you also not notice how all the ChatGPT images
| are cat-urine yellow? (I've been asking people in person
| whether they have noticed this in the Bay Area and I'd say
| <20% of enthusiastic generative AI users have noticed.) What
| are you thinking when you read OP? Does it all just round off
| to 'content', and you don't notice the repetition because you
| treat it all as a single author? Are you just skimming and
| not reading it?
| warpspin wrote:
| If she tended to have that rhythm in her notes, too, no wonder
| it was two-thirds hoarded junk.
|
| SCNR
| jtwoodhouse wrote:
| It's called the Rule of Three. It's a good writing practice,
| but it can be overdone.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(writing)
| cornfieldlabs wrote:
| I deleted all my bookmarks since I was hoarding unhealthy amount
| of them. A lot of them were in "to read" folder. It was so
| freeing to "let go"
| sunaookami wrote:
| Ha did the same a few years ago with over 2000 bookmarks! A lot
| of links were already dead anyway.
| cornfieldlabs wrote:
| Sometimes I remember a particular line from a particular
| article and wish I had kept the links. But I have learnt that
| things should go away permanently and it's normal to never
| get to read it again. "Life is like that"
|
| I had around 3.8k collected over the span of 4 years
| doesnt_know wrote:
| > But what got me sober, what got me through the first one, two,
| three hard years - none of it was in those notes.
|
| > It hit me: what got me here won't get me where I need to be
| next.
|
| Where was it, or, what was it that did?
|
| I believe the author when they went through their system of notes
| and effectively found nothing that contributed to the most
| important parts of themselves, but I was also sort of waiting for
| the alternative answer that I thought was supposed to be
| coming...
| kkfx wrote:
| The main problem of notes is that most tools are bad, Emacs/org-
| mode outshine the others, still having it's own hiccups (for
| instance a very limited transclusion support so far with org-
| transclusion and delve at the best).
|
| Nevertheless for me it's my main digital life, I have all in
| notes (org-mode) and the result is another level of computer help
| in my physical life!
| urbandw311er wrote:
| I can't help but wonder if it was the journaling, the act itself
| of creating and keeping a second brain, that ultimately was
| useful for the author.
| winter_blue wrote:
| _> The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would
| spark an insight, I'd clip it, tag it, link it - and move on. But
| the insight was never lived. It was stored. Like food vacuum-
| sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away._
|
| The better answer here would have been to make some time to go
| back and reflect and write more.
|
| Not necessarily to throw it all away.
|
| The goal should have been to reflect deeply, and write more on
| the most interesting topics therein.
|
| _> Worse, the architecture began to shape my attention. I
| started reading to extract. Listening to summarize. Thinking in
| formats I could file. Every experience became fodder. I stopped
| wondering and started processing._
|
| Summarization could now be done by LLMs.
| latexr wrote:
| I don't understand why so many people on this thread feel the
| need to prescribe to the author what would've been better for
| them.
|
| You don't know the author, don't know their mind, and clearly
| do not understand their thought process.
|
| This post is a personal reflection. The author's actions affect
| exactly one person: themselves. The "better answer" is
| unambiguously the one which works out best for the author.
| Period. They are better equipped than any of us to know what
| that is.
| atoav wrote:
| Having went through similar deletions before the important
| takeaway is that the reason the author felt relief is that
| _deleted things that were weighing them down_.
|
| A common mistake is to keep stuff you won't need (or worse stuff
| actively keeping up mental space). If you're really worried about
| losing something you can still keep those old notes somewhere
| where it doesn't bother you, but the real useful notes.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I'd like to believe there is a happy medium.
|
| The problem likely is an obsession with any of the following:
|
| Trying to keep your notes accurate.
|
| Trying to have a "good" organizational scheme (categories?
| folders? tags?)
|
| Trying not to have your notes on a topic fragmented. (Didn't I
| write about this before? Let me find my earlier note and add to
| it. Oh, and let me find the appropriate places _within_ a note to
| add the new info).
|
| I've suffered from all of the above. Late last year I decided to
| start afresh. I use org mode + capture. All notes go in one org
| file. I don't try to find a prior note on the same topic. I just
| tag the new note (hopefully with the same tag as before), and
| start writing. I don't check if I've written some thought before.
|
| I then have a function that takes a tag as an input, and creates
| a new (temporary) org file with only the entries from that note.
| It's in the same format as my blog's publishing SW, so if I want,
| I can output to HTML and view it in the browser - with each note
| being a blog post.
|
| 6 months in, though, I've never needed that function.
|
| What I like about this:
|
| I enter freely without worrying about how it should be organized
| - I tag it with whatever comes to mind at the moment.
|
| I rely on basic search when looking for something. It's not
| great, but I'll live with it.
|
| If I ever do work on a long term project where I can work only
| very sporadically, that export function will be handy.
|
| I never randomly browse. The fact that the file has X notes not
| acted on - doesn't bother me. That it's all in one file - is
| surprisingly nice. Since it's in Org mode, I can always do
| queries on it (but haven't so far).
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| I like howm for this because it's designed around "writing
| notes fragmentarily". Or as their tagline says:
|
| > Write fragmentarily and read collectively.
|
| I felt a lot lighter just writing things without thinking about
| organization too heavily and howm gave nice tools to find/see
| what I needed.
|
| https://github.com/kaorahi/howm/
| gabrieledarrigo wrote:
| Well done.
|
| I also think that mental clarity comes from a lean, blank sheet
| of paper, instead of a useless pile of accumulated knowledge. I'm
| still familiar with the act of deleting, which is liberatory:
| destroying drawings, writings, trashing things from the past,
| pictures, and deleting graffiti.
|
| I don't want to be productive, I don't care about being able to
| access a thought from 7 years ago to do...what? I don't want to
| summarize, I don't want a stupid LLM to dictate my knowledge. I'm
| a human being, I change, I forget, I can fail, I'll die, and
| that's it.
| notsydonia wrote:
| I enjoyed reading this but it also made me think I must be a bit
| weird. Depending on what I'm working on and where I'm at, I keep
| notes in Apple notes or obsidian, extended descriptions on
| bookmarks, physical sticky notes, an actual journal and pages
| files on desktop - barely any of it is tagged and I'd call it
| 'notes' rather than a 2nd brain but i go through it all every
| eight-12 weeks, cull what now seems irrelevant and try to act on
| the rest of it. I should probably learn how to actually use
| obsidian properly but I still don't get the 'second brain'
| terminology.
| yard2010 wrote:
| I think this is not the time to delete an old archive of personal
| data, it feels like someone who deleted his bitcoin in 2010..
| Data is eating the world.
| 1dom wrote:
| I don't really like this. I think the author let their own
| personal issues lead to the destruction of knowledge. I relate to
| the issues, but the nuclear option seems extreme.
|
| They could have just left their library for a bit, there was no
| need to burn it to the ground.
|
| "I've just lobotomised myself and I look forward to having to
| relearn everything and doing it all again".
|
| If nothing else, in 7 years time, they'll regret not being able
| to compare how their new manifestation of internal knowledge
| anxiety compares to their previous.
|
| There was no need to do this. Please anyone, if you're
| considering this, just zip them up and put them on a usb or cloud
| storage somewhere out of the way - that's a lot harder to regret.
| manmal wrote:
| The problem with hoarding is that, on the whole, the hoarded
| items are worthless. There's too much noise and too little
| signal. Finding the gems takes an active effort, which author
| found daunting. Hoarders usually need help from the outside,
| and if they don't get that help, it's IMO fair to throw it all
| out.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| > Finding the gems takes an active effort, which author found
| daunting.
|
| Who knows what are gems are what are not? I scan tons of
| stuff related to my children's school/activities etc. One day
| when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them and
| find some things they will call gems and lots of other junk.
| Or maybe they will consider it all junk and just get rid of
| it. But I can't be the judge of that now, I can only be the
| custodian.
| manmal wrote:
| You are perfectly describing the issue when sorting out a
| hoarder's stuff. There's no way of knowing what's precious
| and what not for most of the things. There might be some
| obvious things (wooden furniture / ISO documents that are
| still relevant), but the rest goes in the trash usually.
|
| > One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going
| through them
|
| My mother used to say the same thing. But I'm not looking
| at that old stuff, ever. Maybe your kids will. It's your
| decision whether it's worse to be false negative or false
| positive here. If the stuff is not taking up too much
| space, it's probably a good idea to keep it. Hoarding is
| something else though.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| I'll take my chances on the off chance that my child will
| see their primary 2 report card scan after many years and
| say "oh my god I can't believe it..."
| sanswork wrote:
| My mom kept everything like that. The structured stuff
| like baby books and photo albums with labels and stories
| are great. The boxes of report cards from when I was 7
| were a momentary amusement before they were recycled. The
| school work and random other things were just annoying to
| have to sort through.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| I would have been stoked to see the evidence of her
| sentimentality if that was my mother (my dad kept my
| stuff and I liked that very much). I guess we are all
| different people will different emotional reactions. Also
| I know nothing about you or your life so maybe your
| reaction is totally warranted.
| astura wrote:
| Of course you would have been m stoked, hoarders enjoy
| hoards. It's a tautology.
|
| What you fail to understand is the vast majority of
| people are not hoarders and don't enjoy hoards.
| kaashif wrote:
| I would enjoy a digital hoard of stuff like that, but not
| a physical hoard. I have since digitized all of the stuff
| my parents hoarded and got rid of a lot of the physical
| items.
|
| It doesn't really cost me anything on an ongoing basis to
| have this huge digital dump of files sitting around. It
| was a one time effort to scan everything. If my parents
| had done that and just left a huge archive of digital
| files, that would be fine.
|
| If people feel neutrally about digital hoards, that makes
| sense.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| It is amazing how things can be interpreted that
| differently. How heartless you have to be to not even
| spare a kind thought about the moments she lovingly put
| away the things for her loved child. If the person is a
| hoarder, they will do that for each and everything, not
| just for things that remind one of the memories of the
| loved ones.
|
| Just wow.
| achierius wrote:
| What you fail to understand is that the vast majority of
| non-hoarders are still happy to get those "brief moments"
| of joy, memory, nostalgia -- connections to the past that
| could otherwise be totally gone. The cost is so low, the
| benefits -- perhaps not life-changing, but of a
| particular and hard-to-replicate quality that I think
| makes them worth it nevertheless.
| latexr wrote:
| If it were me, I would indeed think "oh my god I can't
| believe it", followed immediately by "why did my parents
| save this worthless junk? I have no interest in this. How
| much more garbage is in here? I'm definitely not going to
| look through it all to find two important things buried
| in hundreds of trivialities. And now I have to go through
| the trouble of throwing it away myself. I'd rather be
| doing anything else".
|
| Maybe your kids will enjoy it, though. But that feeling
| is far from universal.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| > If it were me, I would indeed think "oh my god I can't
| believe it", followed immediately by "why did my parents
| save this worthless junk? I have no interest in this. How
| much more garbage is in here? I'm definitely not going to
| look through it all to find two important things buried
| in hundreds of trivialities. And now I have to go through
| the trouble of throwing it away myself. I'd rather be
| doing anything else".
|
| Sure, we are all different people. I was super happy to
| find my childhood class photo and marksheets that my dad
| had saved - it just underlined what I already knew, that
| he cared. I shared it with my children and we bonded over
| the exams where I didn't fare well.
|
| > But that feeling is far from universal.
|
| I know that the level of sentimentality isn't a universal
| thing.
|
| I'm not going to hold them to cherishing this stuff and
| ask them to explain themselves if they just delete it. I
| just want them to have a chance at looking at small parts
| of their childhood. It is done without expecting
| gratitude or reciprocal emotions in return, which I
| guess, is part of being a parent.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It's a hundred times easier to search a digital hoard and
| you can fit a very big one inside a single hard drive.
|
| So the idea that most of it is worthless is far far less
| justification to toss the entire pile. The cost to
| benefit ratio is shifted by more than 1000x.
|
| And even then, while cleaning out a physical hoard you'll
| take time to look through things.
| manmal wrote:
| Discarding the hoard has mainly psychological upsides in
| this case.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Realistically they will use an AI to find the gems.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| I'll be happy if they atleast try, AI or no AI :) And if
| they don't, thats ok too!
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Who knows what are gems are what are not?_
|
| In this case, the author wrote the notes. If they say it
| has no value, they probably know what they're talking
| about.
| diggan wrote:
| > In this case, the author wrote the notes. If they say
| it has no value, they probably know what they're talking
| about.
|
| Well, yeah, if they say it has no value, then obviously
| it has no value _to them_ , no one could claim otherwise.
|
| I guess the context in this thread kind of shifted to it
| might still be valuable to _someone_ , even if it isn't
| valuable to them. There been a lot of cases in history
| where very smart people judged their own journals to not
| be very valuable (to them) so they think nothing of it,
| then 100 years later someone discovers the journal
| together with a ton of valuable (to the world) nuggets in
| it.
| al_borland wrote:
| You can ask your kids what those gems are. My dad ask me
| this a few months ago. I brought up some knick knacks he
| had in his office when I was growing up. I'm not sure if he
| still has them or not, but if he does, if he ever goes
| through his hoard, he'll know to send those my way instead
| of getting rid of them.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| > You can ask your kids what those gems are. My dad ask
| me this a few months ago. I brought up some knick knacks
| he had in his office when I was growing up. I'm not sure
| if he still has them or not, but if he does, if he ever
| goes through his hoard, he'll know to send those my way
| instead of getting rid of them.
|
| He can't give them to you if he threw it away. Also, he
| can ask that question to you because your choices and
| preferences are, to a large extent, set.
|
| The same stuff, that my child would throw away without
| hesitation few years ago, is now "precious memories" and
| not to be disturbed. The emotional value of things
| doesn't follow much logic and has massive volatility
| until adulthood.
|
| I mean I totally understand that me keeping bunch of
| stuff isn't a guarantee that they will find what they
| value at that point of time. Maybe the lego-shaped eraser
| would be the most interesting piece of stationary they
| will remember; doesn't mean I can hoard every piece of
| stationary. Digital stuff is different though - my SSD
| doesn't bulge just because I'm putting more files holding
| snippets of life on it.
| al_borland wrote:
| My dad has kept a lot of stuff. If he kept what I
| mentioned, I don't know. But I do hope he goes through
| his stuff and pairs down before he passes, and if he
| does, I'm glad he asked. But you're right, they the kids
| need to be grown before that question becomes valuable.
|
| I've known several people who had to go through their
| parent's entire lifetime of accumulated stuff and it was
| quite the job. Dumpsters were rented. It was a big burden
| to leave the kids.
|
| Digital stuff will also be a lot to go through. My dad
| has hundreds of thousands of photos, backed up in
| triplicate. I was helping him clean the basement once and
| found 5 1/4 inch floppy disks labeled "backup" from the
| 80s. He's kept all digital files. Many of them are locked
| into various proprietary apps as well. So I'll likely
| need to spend months going through it all, while
| everything is still working, to see what is worth saving,
| and migrating it into a format I can manage. It will be a
| massive project, on top of the physical stuff. I'm hoping
| I can talk the rest of the family into an estate sale for
| the physical stuff, but the digital stuff is arguably the
| bigger job, with no way to outsource it.
|
| There is also the question of corruption, or simply being
| able to read older files. I grabbed some documents I had
| saved on his computer back in high school about 15 years
| later. I had saved them as rtf files at the time so they
| would be more portable. I tried off and on for a week or
| two to read them in more modern times and it was a no-go.
| I could get sections, but not the whole thing. I don't
| know if the rtf standard changed or the files were simply
| corrupt, but they were basically trash. I'm sure I'll run
| into a lot of that as well.
| astura wrote:
| OMG, this is so dumb, your children don't want your hoard;
| at least admit your hoarding for yourself, not them.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Speak for yourself and stop projecting your opinions on
| others. You don't speak for me or my children.
| achierius wrote:
| I want my parent's hoard :)
|
| Does that make me a... vicarious hoarder? What point are
| you trying to make? If you keep knick-knacks for the sake
| of others, you're a hoarder and should admit it's
| actually just for yourself -- if you enjoy someone else's
| knick-knacks which they saved for you, you're also a
| hoarder?
| sotix wrote:
| > I scan tons of stuff related to my children's
| school/activities etc. One day when I'm gone, maybe they
| will enjoy going through them and find some things they
| will call gems and lots of other junk.
|
| My sister and I have an agreement to trash my mom's hoard
| of our school stuff she refuses to get rid of that we don't
| want. All it does is bring us stress. If they made physical
| art like clay pots in a kiln, keep it for yourself if they
| don't want it. If it's something you can scan, I doubt it's
| worth keeping and makes it much harder to find signal in
| the noise when too much is scanned.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| When my mother passed and we had to clean out my parent's
| house, she had boxes of the same kinds of things. Old
| report cards, drawings and school work from 40+ years
| ago. It was nice to see that she cared to save it but it
| was of no interest beyond that. And it was pretty clear
| that she herself never looked at it, as the boxes were
| packed away in closets and obviously hadn't been touched
| since they were put there.
|
| Stuff causes stress. It's really true. Even if it's
| mostly out of the way, every time you see it it will
| cause some stress about whether it should be moved,
| reorganized, saved, or thrown away. The house I grew up
| in was always cluttered and I'm bad about it myself.
| Every once in a while I will order a roll-off dumpster to
| the house and get rid of things that have accumulated
| over the past 10 years or so. It's a relief but then it
| starts over again.
|
| If there's one habit I wish I had it would be to
| regularly and ruthlessly get rid of stuff that I don't
| use anymore.
| KHRZ wrote:
| We just entered the era where LLMs could mine his gems for
| him though.
| alternatex wrote:
| I find it wild to suggest an LLM would be better at
| scouring data for gems than the person who wrote them. LLMs
| are better than us at going through large amounts of data,
| and that's it. They have no idea what is valuable there.
| diggan wrote:
| > I find it wild to suggest an LLM would be better at
| scouring data for gems than the person who wrote them
|
| I mean, "an out there" idea sure, but wild? There are
| plenty of cases where people underestimated their own
| worth and value, and the potential impact of their ideas.
|
| Sometimes it's valuable to have outsiders perspective on
| things. Old war veterans might not think twice about
| their love-letters between them and their partner, but
| taken together with a large collection of letters,
| historians can build new perspectives that we weren't
| able to see before.
|
| > They have no idea what is valuable there.
|
| Of course an LLM wouldn't know what is "valuable". It
| would require a person to have an idea of what could be
| valuable, and program the LLM to surface based on that,
| together with more things.
|
| For example, I could imagine if I setup an LLM with the
| prompt "Highlight perspectives that you think are
| conflicting with other stated perspectives" to go through
| my own second-brain, it could reveal something I haven't
| considered before, granted it'll be able to freely query
| the db and so on.
| sotix wrote:
| Agreed. LLMs have no taste.
| tareqak wrote:
| With respect to knowledge and notes, I would say that the
| knowledge (gems) may not be worthless in an absolute sense
| but its relevance may no longer be worth the cost of keeping
| said knowledge organized under a given person's organization
| scheme.
|
| For what it is worth, I still find it frustrating when I
| cannot find a certain piece of information that I am looking
| for but I know exists because I came across it before but
| didn't record it at the time. However, I also appreciate
| being able to forget distressing events that would find ways
| to remind me about their existence.
|
| I guess all of this may depend on the exact definitions of
| knowledge, data, and memory, and how an individual reckons
| with acquiring, organizing, and forgetting information.
| qwertox wrote:
| That's an effort that can be handled by an AI.
| motorest wrote:
| > The problem with hoarding is that, on the whole, the
| hoarded items are worthless. There's too much noise and too
| little signal.
|
| I don't think that's a problem. What turns logs into a
| problem is misplaced expectations on what is their purpose
| and how you should use them.
|
| Logs are collected with the express purpose of being ignored,
| and as a safeguard in case in the future you need to check an
| audit trail of what you were doing. After a while, once the
| odds of those logs providing any value drops enough, you can
| safely delete them.
|
| Your tool is only as good as you make it out to be.
| 1dom wrote:
| I don't disagree with anything you're saying apart from the
| last few words.
|
| The solution to this problem is the same it has been for
| literally centuries: archiving.
|
| The whole point of an archive is that it's out of the way and
| takes no effort, even more so a digital one. But if you
| have/need/want the time/space, you or someone else can check
| it, and find a gem.
| layer8 wrote:
| As someone who by now has decades of nested digital
| archives of archives, those still have a psychological
| weight that sometimes surfaces when I am reminded of their
| existence. It's not clear to me they really constitute a
| net benefit.
| deadbabe wrote:
| If they're worthless then give them away
| zahlman wrote:
| Counterpoint: data hoarding is not like physical hoarding (or
| at least, it hasn't been up to this point), because we've
| lived through an era of exponentially increasing storage
| capacity (with file sizes to match, in many cases).
|
| I still have a folder full of notes from several of my
| university courses, grouped by course. Some of it is source
| code (either the lecturer's or my own); some is assignment
| text (in a mixture of plain text, PDF, legacy .doc, etc.).
| There aren't any repositories because this was many years
| before Git existed and professors back then apparently didn't
| think we needed to be taught about the systems that did
| exist.
|
| But why not keep it? The whole collection is smaller than,
| say, the OpenBLAS shared library that comes with a NumPy
| installation. It's maybe 1% of the size of the ISO for a
| modern desktop Linux distribution.
|
| It's part of a folder with even older stuff - all the way
| back to toy Turing programs I wrote as a child. There are
| countless random files that are probably poorly organized
| internally, that I'll likely never revisit with any good
| reason. But the whole thing is less data than I'd likely end
| up downloading if I spent an hour on YouTube or Twitch. The
| ability to store it permanently costs me literally pennies,
| amortized over the cost of the drive.
|
| ... And yet, the size of modern applications still bothers
| me. It feels almost disrespectful, somehow. Old habits die
| hard, I guess.
| achierius wrote:
| > And yet, the size of modern applications still bothers
| me. It feels almost disrespectful, somehow. Old habits die
| hard, I guess.
|
| Data size != memory size, and even memory size != binary
| size. It's totally fair to rail against the program text,
| and associated application data, that have to be loaded
| onto your machine in order for you to do something as
| simple as send a message on Slack -- RAM, unlike cold
| storage space, has not grown quite so exponentially, and
| wasting that space is expensive. And of course, the larger
| the binary, the slower the program, and the worse your
| programs will interface with other ones on the system.
| johanneskanybal wrote:
| I mean most of us don't keep any organized notes and are fine.
| I can giggle sometimes when I find old notepads from the past
| but nothing I'd miss.
|
| Sounds like the author for sure made an obvious choice even if
| that doesen't mean you have to do the same.
| Veen wrote:
| It's not knowledge unless they actually know it. It's just a
| collection of information.
| qwertox wrote:
| Let alone the fact that he could have fed an assistant with
| that information in 3 or 5 years, and would never have had to
| bother with that information again, but would be able to talk
| about it and ask in huge detail about things that were once
| relevant. The AI would have enough information on how he wants
| the data to be structured, it could have kept doing it for him.
| jen729w wrote:
| Her. Her name is in the goddamn URL. Joan.
| N7lo4nl34akaoSN wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_(given_name)
| alganet wrote:
| It's a commitment. Note that the author also struggled with
| sobriety.
|
| Likely, this whole "library" was causing unhealthy behavior.
|
| Commitments are important.
| latexr wrote:
| > I think the author let their own personal issues lead to the
| destruction of knowledge.
|
| Conversely, I think you're letting your own personal views
| stand in the way of empathy and recognising what is best for
| another.
|
| There was no "destruction of knowledge". It was a collection of
| notes which was never going to be looked at again and was
| causing stress to the author. Written knowledge which isn't
| read is as useless at that which isn't written in the first
| place. Would you also decry someone for not having written the
| note in the first place?
|
| > They could have just left their library for a bit, there was
| no need to burn it to the ground.
|
| It was not a library. I bet that for the author it felt closer
| a hoarder's house with stacks of scattered newspapers.
|
| > "I've just lobotomised myself and I look forward to having to
| relearn everything and doing it all again".
|
| Absurd. Deleting written notes does not make you immediately
| forget everything that was written on them. The lessons they
| needed, they internalised. The ones they didn't weren't
| important anyway. Sure, there may have been _some_ good notes
| in there, but not in enough quantity and quality to warrant
| wading though them all and justify the extra anxiety the
| existence of these lists caused.
|
| > If nothing else, in 7 years time, they'll regret
|
| No, they will not. Signed, someone who learned to delete
| relentlessly and is much happier for it.
|
| Maybe _you_ would regret it. That says nothing about other
| people. If anything, I'd regret the years when I didn't delete
| stuff.
|
| > There was no need to do this.
|
| Yes, there was. The author needed it for their mental well-
| being and development. Let them be. Everyone copes with life in
| different ways. We're all going to die, all your notes will be
| meaningless in the end.
|
| > Please anyone, if you're considering this, just zip them up
| and put them on a usb or cloud storage somewhere out of the way
| - that's a lot harder to regret.
|
| No, everyone should do what makes sense for them personally.
|
| Having the thing "out of the way" is not the same as having it
| gone. It's a very different feeling, like saving a memento from
| an unhealthy relationship VS throwing it away. There is freedom
| in _deciding to let go_ without recourse.
|
| I for one applaud the author and wish them the best. I'm sure
| they struggled with the decision and it took some courage to go
| through with it. They did the right thing for themselves and
| that's what matters.
| 1dom wrote:
| We're not going to agree here, we're going to descend into
| stupid walls of texts. I'll give you one more, but I probably
| wont respond. It's not personal, it's just not valuable for
| either of us.
|
| > There was no "destruction of knowledge". It was a
| collection of notes which was never going to be looked at
| again and was causing stress to the author. Written knowledge
| which isn't read is as useless at that which isn't written in
| the first place. Would you also decry someone for not having
| written the note in the first place?
|
| I disagree that there was no destruction of knowledge. Even
| if the author is just copy/pasting from random sources, the
| link and choice of putting those 2 copies in the same folder
| is a bit of knowledge, a link solidified with an action. We
| have different ideas of what constitutes knowledge, I think
| you know you're being ridiculous if you're sincerely trying
| to argue that 7 years worth of notes doesn't have a single
| new contribution of any value to anything or anyone at all.
|
| I do decry people who don't take personal notes.
|
| > It was not a library. I bet that for the author it felt
| closer a hoarder's house with stacks of scattered newspapers.
|
| I totally agree that's how the author felt - they let their
| own negative feelings towards what they've created destroy
| something which could be valuable to others.
|
| > Absurd. Deleting written notes does not make you
| immediately forget everything that was written on them. The
| lessons they needed, they internalised. The ones they didn't
| weren't important anyway. Sure, there may have been some good
| notes in there, but not in enough quantity and quality to
| warrant wading though them all and justify the extra anxiety
| the existence of these lists caused.
|
| What's even your point here? You start saying how notes
| aren't even needed and are pointless to be written down, then
| you argue that maybe there is some value in them written
| down, and then come back to support my argument that the
| author's own personal feelings have lead to the destruction
| of something valuable.
|
| > No, they will not. Signed, someone who learned to delete
| relentlessly and is much happier for it.
|
| > Maybe you would regret it. That says nothing about other
| people. If anything, I'd regret the years when I didn't
| delete stuff.
|
| Ignorance is bliss: you can't get upset about the things you
| don't know any more. Knowledge is hard.
|
| Your position about not regretting throwing away potential
| personal knowledge and memories isn't a position I've heard
| from anyone over (*edited typo) the age of 50. You don't
| regret it just like the author doesn't, I think you have a
| future of denial or upset.
|
| > Yes, there was. The author needed it for their mental well-
| being and development. Let them be. Everyone copes with life
| in different ways. We're all going to die, all your notes
| will be meaningless in the end.
|
| There's other ways to deal with information overload, like
| proper archiving. We're all going to die, and the only reason
| why have a culture or knowledge as a species is because
| everyone else hasn't done what this person is doing.
|
| > No, everyone should do what makes sense for them
| personally.
|
| > Having the thing "out of the way" is not the same as having
| it gone. It's a very different feeling, like saving a memento
| from an unhealthy relationship VS throwing it away. There is
| freedom in deciding to let go without recourse.
|
| Congratulations with the individualism, you made yourself
| feel free by burning books. If that makes you happy - you do
| you, I don't care - but don't act like it's benefit anyone
| else other than the person struggling with the feeling of
| information overload.
| latexr wrote:
| > I'll give you one more, but I probably wont respond. It's
| not personal, it's just not valuable for either of us.
|
| Then why did you bother responding in the first place, and
| why should anyone bother reading beyond that point? If
| you're not interested in discussing, don't. Throwing a
| bunch of words at someone and then going closing your ears
| singing "la la la" is worse than not being valuable, it has
| _negative_ value for the discussion.
|
| Frankly, that made me only skim the rest of your post
| instead of engaging properly. It was still pretty obvious
| you lack real empathy for the author, their needs, and are
| unable to understand people who have a different view of
| the issue than you do.
|
| Here's the thing: The author isn't making a general
| commentary or recommendation, they are recounting their own
| _personal_ experience. Pretending you know what makes sense
| _for them_ is arrogant and misguided. That you are unable
| to understand other people have different needs and ways of
| approaching life is a you problem.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I guess sometimes people just need to get a thought out.
| At least that note saved us the time of reading the
| comment in full.
| 1dom wrote:
| > Then why did you bother responding in the first place,
| and why should anyone bother reading beyond that point?
| If you're not interested in discussing, don't. Throwing a
| bunch of words at someone and then going closing your
| ears singing "la la la" is worse than not being valuable,
| it has negative value for the discussion.
|
| I didn't mean to imply I wasn't going to read, it's just
| that disagreeing so vehemently on a sentence by sentence
| basis - like we're both clearly prone to do - isn't
| always fun or productive. Neither of us is going to
| change our mind with the depth and detail at which we're
| disagreeing. You're completely fair to see it as me
| sticking my fingers in my ears, sorry, because that's
| disrespectful of me.
|
| My intent was to give you the respect of responding in a
| similar level of detail to address your points, since you
| gave the time for me, but prevent the need for either of
| us to have to keep doing it...
|
| > Here's the thing: The author isn't making a general
| commentary or recommendation, they are recounting their
| own personal experience. Pretending you know what makes
| sense for them is arrogant and misguided. That you are
| unable to understand other people have different needs
| and ways of approaching life is a you problem.
|
| I never claimed to know what's best for them, I would
| even go as far as saying I don't care what's best for
| them, I was speaking from a position of what I think's
| best for human knowledge. Fundamentally, if you agree
| burning books - metaphorically - is a bad thing, then you
| agree deleting second brains instead of just archiving is
| a bad thing.
|
| Here's the thing: I'm not making a general commentary or
| recommendation, I'm recounting my own _personal_ view of
| what's best for human knowledge and what I think of the
| authors article. Pretending that me having a different
| view is "absurd", is arrogant and misguided. That you are
| unable to understand that I have different needs and ways
| of approaching life is - apparently - a problem...:P
| latexr wrote:
| > I didn't mean to imply (...) but prevent the need for
| either of us to have to keep doing it...
|
| Alright, fair! Thank you for clarifying.
|
| > I never claimed to know what's best for them (...) I
| was speaking from a position of what I think's best for
| human knowledge
|
| Even rereading your original post, it still feels like
| some parts are a direct prescription for the author. But
| I believe you if you say that wasn't your intention. I
| guess my argument would then be that I still support the
| author in their deletion, for several reasons, including
| but not limited to:
|
| * We don't actually know what was "lost". Let's be real:
| most of what any of us writes is irrelevant and
| inconsequential and wouldn't truly contribute to human
| knowledge as a whole.
|
| * I don't think it's fair for the author to suffer in any
| way, even if it's "just" anxiety, for the dubious benefit
| of human knowledge. Even if they did have valuable
| insights in their texts, they are still their texts and
| they should have the final say regarding what happens to
| them. If they want to burn them and doing so will help
| them get their life back on track, they should. I would
| argue that without that purge, they could actually be
| doing more harm to human knowledge in the long run, by
| not letting them "get back on their feet" and be free for
| all the new and more valuable insights they'll have but
| wouldn't otherwise.
|
| > Fundamentally, if you agree burning books -
| metaphorically - is a bad thing, then you agree deleting
| second brains instead of just archiving is a bad thing.
|
| I agree burning books is bad on principle, but disagree
| that what the author did was comparable. They didn't take
| away from human knowledge, like book burning does. They
| deleted _personal notes no one else was ever probably
| going to read anyway_. The difference is massive.
|
| > Pretending that me having a different view is "absurd"
|
| To be perfectly clear, the only thing I found absurd what
| that specific quote in relation to what the author did.
| I.e. I found it to be hyperbolic beyond the realm of
| reasonable argument. Everything else I found reasonable
| as a personal opinion _as long as it's not prescribed as
| the solution for everyone_.
|
| > That you are unable to understand that I have different
| needs and ways of approaching life is - apparently - a
| problem
|
| Again, that is perfectly fine and valid. But in your
| original posts you explicitly asked for everyone to act a
| certain way and my primary goal as to point out that no,
| I don't think that should apply to everyone. _Many_
| people, sure, but there is definitely a large section of
| the population for whom I don't think it would be the
| right approach. For their own sake, which in this
| situation trumps "human knowledge".
| 1dom wrote:
| > I agree burning books is bad on principle, but disagree
| that what the author did was comparable. They didn't take
| away from human knowledge, like book burning does. They
| deleted personal notes no one else was ever probably
| going to read anyway. The difference is massive.
|
| There's so much we know about the world from personal
| notes the author never knew or intended to be read.
| There's no way of knowing if your personal notes will be
| valuable to inconceivable futures. We all have to endure
| a little struggle to maintain society's knowledge. I
| respect and understand that you disagree with me in
| various nuanced ways. We're not going to agree, not for
| any reasons other than we just have fundamentally
| different views on the world, or one of us is disagreeing
| for the sake of disagreeing, possibly without realising.
|
| I'm sorry, to anyone who's read this far. Instead of my
| "... I'll give you one more, but I probably wont
| respond...." I should have just said "let's just agree to
| disagree" and stopped there. I don't think either of us
| have added much valuable at all since.
|
| Sincerely, apologies for any offence caused or time
| wasted in frustration.
| subjectsigma wrote:
| That's a lot of words to say "I know what's best for you
| and you don't."
| crsv wrote:
| It's the thought organization equivalent of the Britany Spears
| head shaving. It's a mental breakdown and the person suffering
| from the mental health issue at its root is processing their
| behavior by writing about it. It's mental illness.
| jen729w wrote:
| Deleting notes to mental illness is quite the leap.
| crsv wrote:
| So you didn't actually take the time to read the article.
| bovermyer wrote:
| This sounds like it came from a place of fear. This is not an
| indictment, incidentally; just an observation. You choose
| language like "nuclear" and "destruction" and "lobotomise" and
| end with a plea to not make similar choices.
|
| I'm in my forties. I have gone through multiple cycles of
| collecting and purging. How that feels has changed over the
| years. Sometimes I have regretted getting rid of some things,
| but that frequency is far, far lower than the number of times I
| haven't cared or even noticed. And those times I have regretted
| it have not resulted in obsessive thinking about what I've lost
| or what might have been.
|
| Further, having a "reset" has proven valuable on more than one
| occasion, as it opens up new pathways that I might otherwise
| have not even considered. You speak of relearning everything as
| if it's forcing yourself to repeat the same path all over
| again, with no new learning and just a pointless sacrifice of
| what little time we have. In my experience, "relearning"
| usually entails discovering entirely new experiences and paths
| to knowledge along a general set of guidelines through half-
| memories.
|
| To put it another way, starting over is not guaranteed
| suffering, it's an opportunity to discover new things.
| keizo wrote:
| i like this. complexity bad, delete it! Most pkm, tools for
| thought, second brain apps confuse me. I drank the coolade with
| roam research but it drove me kinda nuts I've spent almost 3
| years making my own tool. I mostly use it as a paste-bin, todos,
| lists -- and for the only thing i would never delete, voice notes
| on funny sayings or interactions with my 3 y/o daughter. my
| project is over at https://grugnotes.com if anyone else fits the
| anti note app vibe i'm kinda leaning into.
| 2pie wrote:
| >It hit me: what got me here won't get me where I need to be
| next.
|
| This resonates a lot. I always have this feeling when I am
| browsing old notes.
| lawgimenez wrote:
| I've been sober for over 19 years, the first few years are the
| most difficult transition if I remember. I think the author is
| overreacting.
|
| You can't really deny the past, it's part of you.
| Ezhik wrote:
| I don't know about everyone, but I found the whole PKM/second
| brain "industry" a bit much, I was never able to stick to complex
| rules and things like atomic notes.
|
| Instead I mostly just write notes with hyperlinks:
| https://ezhik.jp/hypertext-maximalism/
|
| I like hoarding my notes. I don't actually have to come back to
| the notes I write unless I need them. Because I keep my system
| very simple, having lots of notes doesn't weigh on my mind.
|
| My notes _are_ glimpses of my old selves and old interests, but I
| like being able to trace a line between my old self and my
| present self. At the same time, I 'm not really at odds with my
| past self - but we all have different relationships with time.
| motorest wrote:
| > I don't know about everyone, but I found the whole PKM/second
| brain "industry" a bit much, I was never able to stick to
| complex rules and things like atomic notes.
|
| I agree. I think that ultimately their product is not a note-
| taking tool but a vague promise of structure that solves
| whatever issues the user has in keeping something organized.
| melvinroest wrote:
| So...
|
| I just use Apple Notes and almost never reread my notes. The
| search functionality is almost always enough to find what I'm
| looking for. If I really need to dive deep/search deep, then I
| just open up the SQLite db that's somewhere on my Mac to find a
| very particular note. That's only needed if I have 100s of notes
| to sift through.
|
| I guess I don't need to know all the link between what I know?
|
| The reason I write my experience is: I never got it. Why make
| things so complicated? How do you write stuff up if you're
| severely sleep deprived but still have a fun thought? I just
| become a mess of old habits and even can't be bothered to open my
| Apple Notes so I just WhatsApp my thoughts to myself, to sort it
| out later what to do with them when I'm not sleep deprived.
|
| Can anyone relate and did they make the switch to something like
| Obsidian? If so, I'm curious what I'm missing out on or what it
| is that I'm not understanding.
|
| I'm currently around 2500 notes, I started 2 years ago. I wanted
| a note taking habit for years, none ever stuck. The Apple Notes
| habit is the only one that really stuck. It's a very KISS-style
| approach, on purpose. When it becomes more complicated I can only
| follow through 50% of the time. Now I can follow through 98% of
| the time.
| SirHumphrey wrote:
| One senior researcher I know, though an extremely early user of
| computers and Emacs, still uses basic paper notebooks for
| writing things down. The system is not searchable, not
| hyperlinked - but he still finds things almost effortlessly
| even though he hasn't been young for a long time.
|
| So if the only habit that sticks is Apple notes - keep doing
| that. At least in my experience hyperlinking was never that
| useful, because the act of remembering what to hyperlink where
| was about as difficult as just remembering the what other notes
| exist - in which case, what do I need hyperlinking for? I also
| find hyperlinked text hard to read because you end up in
| Wikipedia style 3 pages deep hyperlink hell - a fun way to
| spend an afternoon, a terrible way to work and understand.
| xeonmc wrote:
| The act of physically writing things down commits the event
| to incidental memory. The more effort it took to concert all
| your neurons into outputting an action, the less easily it
| fades from your impression.
| al_borland wrote:
| I find with physical objects I can better remember where it
| was spatially. I know that note was about 3/4 of the way
| through the green notebook, on the right-side of the spread,
| near the bottom of the page. Or something to that effect. I
| find the same thing with physical books over ebooks.
| al_borland wrote:
| My solution is to make various capture methods. I use Apple
| Notes for personal notes and Obsidian at work.
|
| With Apple Notes, I used the Shortcuts app to append some text
| with a timestamp to a note where I log those random thoughts. I
| use this shortcut on my phone to type stuff, I use it with Siri
| via CarPlay to capture stuff while driving, and it works
| decently well. I have a list in Reminders I can easily throw
| stuff into as well, via Siri or whatever else. It looks like
| iOS 26 will make some of this better as well.
|
| With Obsidian, I do something similar. I currently also do it
| with Shortcuts, but have made similar solutions in bash,
| Hammerspoon (lua), and AppleScript. I have a daily note in
| Obsidian, and while I always have that open, I also have a
| keyboard shortcut (and desktop widget) where I can quickly
| bring up a text prompt, write something, and have it go into my
| daily note (or a shared log like I do with Apple Notes). I
| mostly use this to keep track of what I actually did each day
| so I have a record of it. I need that to be low friction or I
| won't do it.
|
| It actually works a little better with Obsidian, because it's
| simply appending to a text file, so I can use markdown really
| easily to format things. I'm hoping the better markdown support
| in Tahoe will allow for me to add some better formatting to
| Apple Notes. Shortcuts has a markdown to rich text converter in
| it already, but it didn't work for what I was trying to do (or
| I did something wrong). Shortcuts has a way to add to a list in
| Apple Notes, so that way can look a little cleaner than raw
| text, given there is no formatting. I swear I got formatting to
| work once before, but I deleted the Shortcut, so I don't
| know... maybe it was in Obsidian and I migrated the note back
| to Apple... I spent way too long messing with it.
|
| Apple Notes also has various other capture methods, live OCR
| from the cameras, speech to text, etc. I don't use this that
| often, but I try to remember they exist for when they would be
| useful.
|
| I've gone back and forth between Apple Notes and Obsidian for
| personal notes, and I've told myself I'm going to stop this.
| The draw of Obsidian is having plain text notes that are
| effectively future proof. However, dealing with media is very
| annoying. I don't have a lot of images in my notes, but with
| Apple Notes it's easy to just drop something in (and I can
| search/copy text in the images). With Obsidian I usually end up
| trying to distill whatever information was in the image into
| text, so I can search it, and I also don't have to deal with
| coming up with a system to manage how and where images are
| stored, so they can be referenced, that won't be a nightmare in
| the future. These are things I don't need to think about in
| Apple Notes.
|
| If Apple Notes works for you and has been the only thing that
| has stuck, stick with it. Getting into the game of trying to
| find the "perfect" note app will send you on a path to madness.
| The perfect app doesn't exist; they are all a collection of
| trade offs. I once watched an Ali Abdaal video on his note
| taking system and it was insane. He convinced himself that it
| was a good idea to have 4 different apps for 4 different kinds
| of notes, or something to that effect. This is not a place
| anyone really wants to end up.
| jjice wrote:
| I use Obsidian for two reasons - I'm across OSs and I like it
| as plain files. That said, the Apple Notes UX (especially
| search) is absolutely incredible. If I was all Apple, I'd use
| it in a heart beat
| coldblues wrote:
| Digital notes take an insignificant amount of space, you can just
| keep them and ignore them, use them when you need to. Deleting
| them seems to me like neuroticism. Some kind of symbolic gesture
| for emotional relief. There are a lot of productivity gurus
| online that will try to sell you a course on the best way to take
| notes, and perhaps the author has fallen into one of those traps,
| taking notes of things they don't have interest in. in a way that
| does not feel natural and satisfying. I only take notes when I am
| compelled to. It's a gut feeling that I rely on. It's effortless
| for me to take notes because of it. It provides me comfort and
| relief knowing that my memories are accessible, and I gladly
| write them. The author makes some grandiose assumptions that we
| have to forget. You don't have to, and neither do you have a
| choice in it. It's some kind of idealist way of thinking to
| justify the author's actions. Seems misguided. Memorization plays
| an extremely important role in learning, but for those of us with
| executive function problems, using our notes augments our life
| for the better. Just as the author talks about how memories work,
| my notes are just like my thoughts, webs of interlinked notes
| strung together. A lot of times, I just remember what tags and
| backlinks I can use to find the information I am looking for in
| my notes.
| junon wrote:
| > Some kind of symbolic gesture for emotional relief.
|
| Calling someone neurotic and insinuating they are doing this
| for symbolism instead of having a real, tangible effect on
| their life is rather narcissistic, don't you think?
|
| These sort of comments always baffled me; they read as if
| you've never taken the time to talk to someone who lives or
| operates differently than you, and don't consider any way but
| yours a valid worldview and lifestyle.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| I feel like someone who never struggled with mental health
| will never get someone who did.
|
| I dealt with anxiety, it certainly sounds like something I'd
| do. It's not that it's digital notes, that I can leave - no,
| my mind would be occupied with them. When I was younger, I
| would throw my stuff away, hoping that it will help me get
| more disciplined.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Calling someone neurotic and insinuating they are doing
| this for symbolism instead of having a real, tangible effect
| on their life is rather narcissistic, don't you think?
|
| No? Even if you think it's wrong I don't see what's self-
| important about that claim. _Maybe_ there 's lack of empathy
| but that's only a small part of narcissism. And saying
| something is done for emotional relief doesn't sound like
| lack of empathy to me.
| eviks wrote:
| What if you change your mind again a year later? Couldn't you
| achieve exactly the same by simply archiving everything and
| starting from scratch without big data loss?
| latexr wrote:
| > Couldn't you achieve exactly the same by simply archiving
| everything and starting from scratch without big data loss?
|
| No. The act of irreversible deletion is meaningful and has a
| real effect, archiving is not at all the same thing. It's like
| moving houses and carrying all the junk you had in your attic
| to a new garage: all the crap is still there, you still think
| about it, getting rid of it is liberating. Even if you discover
| you needed something you threw away, having to redo it from
| scratch will require doing it differently, with fresh insights.
| eviks wrote:
| The analogy doesn't make sense since you can't avoid physical
| things you moved, they still take space and you see it every
| time you visit the garage.
|
| > has a real effect
|
| Sure, and I've mentioned one such effect - inability to
| access knowledge when you change your mind later.
|
| And redoing doesn't require doing anything differently, you
| could end up doing exactly the same thing finding that useful
| info, just wasting more time in the process.
| latexr wrote:
| > they still take space and you see it every time you visit
| the garage.
|
| And the digital things take space in your disk and, more
| importantly, the mind.
|
| > inability to access knowledge when you change your mind
| later.
|
| _If_ you change your mind later. I'm an avid deleter, have
| been for years, and have never regretted it. It won't
| happen, the upside of deletion is just too good.
|
| That regret is a you thing (shared by many others), not a
| universal human characteristic. You're not the author of
| the post, so your feelings don't apply to them and their
| decision.
|
| > you could end up doing exactly the same thing finding
| that useful info
|
| Yes, you could. That is extremely unlikely, but you could.
|
| > just wasting more time in the process.
|
| And it still wouldn't have been a waste of time. Not only
| would you have confirmed everything, which is extremely
| useful, it is very unlikely you wouldn't have thought of
| new ideas or gained new insights in the process.
| eviks wrote:
| > take space in your disk and, more importantly, the
| mind.
|
| They don't, your mind isn't big enough to worry about
| everything you store digitally. You need to at least try
| to state the actual issues with just knowing that your
| archive exists. The article at least established personal
| issues with maintaining the notes, but you failed to even
| try!
|
| > I'm an avid deleter, have been for years, and have
| never regretted it.
|
| How is it relevant when "your feelings don't apply to
| them and their decision."?
|
| > It won't happen, the upside of deletion is just too
| good.
|
| What crystal ball with the perfect visibility into the
| rest of your life have you glanced this certainty from?
|
| > That regret is a you thing (shared by many others)
|
| No, that's just an ~ad hominem you've made up. I didn't
| talk about regret. The issue could just be a waste of
| time later without any feeling of regret involved.
|
| > Not only would you have confirmed everything
|
| You don't have the old version, so you wouldn't know
| whether you've confirmed or rejected anything.
|
| > which is extremely useful
|
| Don't stop here, what's the usefulness?
|
| > it is very unlikely you wouldn't have thought of new
| ideas or gained new insights in the process.
|
| You could say exactly the same thing about reading your
| old notes since new insight isn't banned there. The only
| more certain difference is the extra effort required to
| recreate.
| latexr wrote:
| > They don't, your mind isn't big enough to worry about
| everything you store digitally.
|
| Patently incorrect. I did worry. Not about _the contents_
| of every little thing, but the fact that they existed.
| Some unmanaged, some improperly categorised, some
| perfectly triaged but no longer useful...
|
| > The article at least established personal issues with
| maintaining the notes, but you failed to even try!
|
| What does that even mean, "failed to even try"? Did you
| fail to even try to give me a recipe for chocolate cake?
| I didn't think that would be relevant, so I didn't
| mention it. But alright, I gave you some details in the
| rest of the post. All you had to do was ask, no need to
| criticise others for not doing something they didn't even
| knew you wanted.
|
| > How is it relevant when "your feelings don't apply to
| them and their decision."?
|
| That's not the jab you seem to think it is. It is
| relevant _precisely as way of example_ of something
| _similar_ to the author. It is precisely so I don't speak
| for them that I gave you a personal example that is close
| enough. It presents "the other side" (people who delete)
| in a way we can engage without assuming anything about
| the author.
|
| First you complain that I "failed to even try" to talk
| about my experience, then you complain when I talked
| about my experience in that very same post. Please make
| up your mind.
|
| > What crystal ball with the perfect visibility into the
| rest of your life have you glanced this certainty from?
|
| Do you not see how this counter argument is counter
| productive? By the same token, I could ask you by what
| crystal ball do you know neither I nor the author are
| better off by the deletion of material. The answer is:
| you don't. And maybe I can't know for certainty either,
| but I sure as hell know myself better than you know me.
| And I do know what I threw away in the past, and the
| things I lost accidentally (tangential issue), and I know
| what my attitude and life repercussions have been. And
| for that, I can say with certainty I prefer things as
| they are, with the deletion.
|
| > I didn't talk about regret.
|
| Changing your mind about something you did isn't regret?
| Alright then, let's forget the word, replace it instead
| of "that feeling of wasted time". Doesn't really change
| the argument (because, crucially, that's not what an ad
| hominem is).
|
| > You don't have the old version, so you wouldn't know
| whether you've confirmed or rejected anything.
|
| Deleting a digital file doesn't erase your memory. But
| either way, I meant confirmation in the sense of
| reasserting the research. Doesn't matter what the old
| version said, only that the new one is correct. Also,
| crucially, if in your scenario you can't be sure of what
| the old version said, then you also don't know if the
| time was wasted or not.
|
| > Don't stop here, what's the usefulness?
|
| It's in that exact same sentence you quoted. It's
| literally all the rest of it that you cut from the quote.
|
| > You could say exactly the same thing about reading your
| old notes
|
| With the monumental difference that in this case the old
| notes were a cause of stress. In hundreds of notes, maybe
| you'll have to recreate one or two. Or maybe none. Yet
| not having all the other cruft is absolutely worth the
| trade off. Maybe not for you, but certainly for me, and
| probably the author of the post.
| sixpackpg wrote:
| A poor workman blames their tools.
|
| My notes are basically like Smeegol's precious ring, and to burn
| them is unfathomable. But initially these notes they were
| garbage, I initially got into all these PKM systems and used a
| stripped down Zettelkasten, but then realised that I was focused
| on creating the system not the outcome. My wonderfully linked
| notes were never being seen, the notes I was taking was not
| connected to my current focuses. They were virtually all "maybe
| I'll use this in the next 10 years" type notes.
|
| I changed my goal away from following a system to focusing on
| getting meaningful changes in understanding from notes. This
| means having the ability to recall information, not rely on a
| second brain. I spent a fair chunk of time reducing my inputs to
| notes which are focused on my current goals: metacognition,
| mental health and business. If the note does not fall in these
| category it is not noted, I still read things for pleasure just
| noteless. The value of applying what I read in the short-term
| outweighs notes for possible futures. As possible futures are
| everchanging and so the likely value of these notes are heavily
| weighted down. I do have troves of notes which will be
| transformed when I need them, but these notes have a very high
| chance of being seen and are related to my goals, but not
| applicable currently. I delayed transforming these troves until I
| am applying them, as I will get the most value out of my notes
| when they are being applied Not someday dreams, but in reality
| never to seen again notes of yesteryear.
|
| Relying on a second brain is not the same as understanding
| concepts and applicable learning. An example: When you read an
| article and come across a word you don't know it stops your train
| of thought, going to you PKM to find the definition doesn't help.
| When you know the word it allows you to chunk info and think
| deeper thoughts about said article. That requires understanding,
| which you won't get from these PKM systems which focus on input
| with little concern for output. By having deeper understanding it
| reveals further planes of thought previously impossible.
|
| Adding a note feels good, it feels like work but it really isn't.
| PKM has sprung up about making feel good systems but have rarely
| leads to any meaningful changes or outcomes, such as this blog.
| To get to deeper thought requires way more than creating a note
| which is literally one of the first parts in my understanding
| chain. PKM systems focus on this, but spend very little on the
| other end- meaningful output.
|
| My "learning stack" - fleeting ideas go into Todoist, ideas are
| encoded/transformed and go to into Obsidian, at the same time
| these ideas go into Anki, which I go through multiple times a
| week. These ideas are further elaborated on and changed in Anki.
| My pkm is a single step in developing understanding not the
| destination.
|
| for further anki learning:
| https://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html
| DavidPiper wrote:
| I'm in a similar spot to the author. I have a stack of notes
| curated over years. Got hooked on the whole Second Brain thing.
| But I think it's time to trash the lot.
|
| I'll probably keep some of the how-tos and syntax reminders for
| various tools -- looking at you, ffmpeg and defaults -- but most
| of it, even many of the curated notes from books, is just junk
| that I carry now carry around, with the added bonus of that
| little voice saying "hey, you haven't reviewed me in a while,
| maybe you should because _this time_ there'll be some
| productivity hack or life-changing insight you'll glean from it".
|
| When I look at the physical hoarding tendencies of some people
| close to me, it looks scarily similar.
|
| A long time ago someone told me that you should always be wary of
| the difference between what you know and what you can look up.
| Trying to merge those things seems to have been a mistake for me.
| rwnspace wrote:
| Intentionally wiping almost all of my obsidian vaults and
| accidentally wiping my 2TB HDD was the most freeing thing.
|
| I'd amassed so many books and papers and notes and half-
| finished projects over a frenzied couple of years where the
| main drivers were stimulant abuse and low self-worth.
|
| It turns out that the excitement of finding some resource
| that's perfectly fit for your requirements is it's own rare
| pleasure, and it can be harmful to make them a demand on
| yourself in their own right, and especially harmful to try and
| catch'em all
|
| I think I'd decided to grind my way out of my situation and
| channelled that energy into the most elaborate resource-
| hoarding and procrastination. I did genuinely learn a lot but
| very, very inefficiently, and in such a way I was sick of
| computers and self-motivated learning for a couple years.
|
| Second-brain culture definitely provides an open door to
| hoarding (and stimulant users). I still like using obsidian but
| I don't care for the various "methods", I just do what makes
| sense. It turns out when I enjoy the process of doing/learning
| things, I remember stuff about them pretty well.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| > I'll probably keep some of the how-tos and syntax reminders
| for various tools -- looking at you, ffmpeg and defaults
|
| or maybe just ask an LLM for the exact command each time you
| need it.
| skydhash wrote:
| > _or maybe just ask an LLM for the exact command each time
| you need it._
|
| And deal with slow response, a copious anount of verbiage,
| and possibly wrong answers?
|
| I backup my etc folder, my bash history and write small
| scripts for the snippets to not hunt for answers again.
| BrtByte wrote:
| That "little voice" you mention is so real
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| i will just give a fresh counterargument I encountered yesterday.
| when trying to reset my Passat service warning, you got to press
| a combination of button, hold a few seconds, etc.
|
| I spent about an hour yesterday looking for the right
| combination, for the right model of Passat produced in the right
| year. A freaking hour of wasted time.
|
| Been doing that every 2 year or something for the past decade.
|
| You have no idea how many times I angered if only I had taken 30
| seconds the last time to put the right YouTube link in an
| obsidian note.
|
| Even if the second brain is messy, it's still your mess. Internet
| is even a bigger mess than that.
|
| And to that, I'd add that a second brain should behave like a
| real brain in the way that our brain get rid of (what it thinks)
| is useless.
|
| Your note should reflect on that and be cleaned up once a while
| for things that are not relevant anymore and should be
| disregarded, it doesn't negate the advantage of the second brain
| tho which is that it's able to retain much more information and
| even file. Good luck embedding a pdf or a tax report in your
| brain.
| KronisLV wrote:
| I don't really use any PKM tools outside of an instance of
| Kanboard and OpenProject for tracking the stuff I want to do in
| the future, but because of my mTLS setup and limited hardware in
| my homelab, using them ends up feeling slow and sluggish
| (Kanboard is okay except for mTLS, whereas OpenProject is just
| unbearably slow all the time).
|
| I did consider having a personal Wiki a while back where I'd jot
| down the solutions to various problems that I encounter over the
| years, but instead opted for just writing the occasional blog
| post on my blog, which also ends up feeling even higher friction,
| because I still need what I write to have some sort of a
| structure and the expectation is that it will mostly make sense
| to a reader that stumbles upon it, not just me.
|
| Maybe that was a mistake. It would actually be immensely cool to
| be able to reference solutions to a particular problem that I had
| 2 years ago, once I encounter it again but what I did back then
| has slipped my mind. Only as long as there is really good search
| (maybe even semantic search and automatic tagging) and it's easy
| to use. If nothing else, I can easily imagine that being another
| side project to work on, for the fun of it, a software package
| that I customize to my own needs and control.
| ecocentrik wrote:
| Why not just start a new notebook/vault? Notetaking systems are
| all imperfect and it's best not to throw a fit every time you run
| into those imperfections.
| tasuki wrote:
| > I still love Obsidian. And I'm planning on using it again. From
| scratch. And with a deeper level of curation and care - not as a
| second brain, but as a workspace for the one I already have.
|
| Different, but reminds me of something I have regrettably
| witnessed at several of my workplaces: "Our knowledge base is in
| disarray. It's disorganised, full of out of date information, and
| it's hard to find the things you need. Let's discard it and
| create a better one!" Then the new one quickly falls into
| disarray just the same. Now you have to search two badly-
| organized, partially out of date knowledge bases.
|
| I wonder why people are so resistant to organising whatever they
| have already. I'm surely never deleting my personal knowledge
| base. I might rework parts of it in the future...
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| Organizing your stuff means starting a big unpleasant task
| today. Starting a new knowledge base lets you have fun today,
| and you cross your fingers that future you will eat their
| vegetables and diligently keep it up to date forever.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Let's discard it and create a better one!" Then the new one
| quickly falls into disarray just the same. Now you have to
| search two badly-organized, partially out of date knowledge
| bases.
|
| I could blame the idea of moving to a new knowledge base here,
| or say it was a waste of time, but instead I'm going to blame a
| stark refusal to make a schedule for a simple job and then
| follow it. "Discard it and create a better one" is very easy to
| understand. If you still have two after a few weeks you failed
| at a fundamental level. The problem wasn't the idea.
| tasuki wrote:
| > The problem wasn't the idea.
|
| I'll double down: yes, the initial idea is the problem. In a
| large organization, you can never discard the old knowledge
| base because you do not understand it well enough. No one
| does. No one knows which pieces of the old knowledge base are
| useful to whom. So it sticks around indefinitely.
|
| The best you can do as an individual is to gradually improve
| your corner of the knowledge base. The idea that "we'll
| create a new one and it'll be up-to-date forever" is
| unrealistic, it's wishful thinking. If we weren't able to do
| it with the old one, why think we'll be able to do it with
| the new one?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > yes, the initial idea is the problem. In a large
| organization, you can never discard the old knowledge base
| because you do not understand it well enough. No one does.
| No one knows which pieces of the old knowledge base are
| useful to whom. So it sticks around indefinitely.
|
| If you don't understand an entry you can always copy it.
| It's not a very difficult task to make sure the new system
| starts with the same information as the old one.
|
| > The idea that "we'll create a new one and it'll be up-to-
| date forever" is unrealistic, it's wishful thinking. If we
| weren't able to do it with the old one, why think we'll be
| able to do it with the new one?
|
| This is a flaw with the actual idea, and a pretty big one,
| but it's a totally different flaw from failing to delete
| the old knowledge base.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| I spent half of last week updating an old guide and
| dokumentation page for an internal product. 20 people have used
| this guide and noticed the factual errors. Nobody wanted to
| make the edits.
| admiralrohan wrote:
| I only keep my own thoughts in my 2nd brain, mostly daily
| journals. To see how my thinking evolves over time. Helped me to
| develop my unique theory on human behavior.
| kashunstva wrote:
| Part of the problem with these collections of notes, whether you
| call them Zettelkasten, Second Brain, PKM or whatever, is the
| expectation that something unique, amazing, or earth-shattering
| emerge from the process of using it. The expectation is strongest
| in the Zettelkasten community where they trot out the story of
| some academic sociologist of old who invented the system and
| cranked out tons of publications. Never mind that those
| publications have practically zero impact on the field currently.
| There is also the apparent expectation that you follow a specific
| and arcane method, with specific types of notes that evolve in a
| certain prescribed way. I'm a reasonably smart person and the ZK
| ontology perpetually escapes me. Maybe because it's needlessly
| reductive. Yes maybe Luhmann used the system to generate a lot of
| publications. But the academics I know have never even heard of
| this. My spouse has a few hundred published papers and her
| process is nothing like this.
|
| Anyway, I don't see the point in destroying one's notes. It seems
| performatively symbolic; and if that helps you get past a block
| of some sort, more power to you. My own notes are half-organized,
| half-chaotic. Vestiges of a dozen different systems live on in
| it. It shows that I suffer from collector's fallacy. I don't
| care.
| Tomte wrote:
| > some academic sociologist of old
|
| > Never mind that those publications have practically zero
| impact on the field currently
|
| You're so cool and edgy.
|
| Luhmann is still one of the most cited, grappled-with and
| thought-about sociologist across a number of disciplines.
| warpspin wrote:
| > Luhmann is still one of the most cited, grappled-with and
| thought-about sociologist across a number of disciplines.
|
| Unfortunately (though I think this is a regional thing also -
| Luhmann's still pretty strong in Europe, especially in
| Germany where "systems theory" has become synonymous with
| Luhmann's systems theory, but not so much in the USA, I
| think).
|
| One of the problems with Luhmann stems directly from his
| Zettelkasten: His tendency to tear citations out of their
| original contexts and name drop witnesses for his own point
| of views where the original text did not support his view at
| all.
|
| You can see the system at work actually: He truly made a lot
| of stuff his own in ways never intended by the original
| authors - boon and bane at same time.
| latexr wrote:
| > It seems performatively symbolic
|
| Performances and symbols are meaningful; the way you act
| influences the way you think. It is pretty well known that an
| effective way to enact change in your life is to act as if your
| goal was already true and it will change your mindset to
| actually make it so. As a small example, forcing (i.e.
| performing) a smile can improve your mood.
|
| > I don't see the point in destroying one's notes. (...) if
| that helps you get past a block of some sort, more power to
| you.
|
| Looks to me like you _do_ see the point. Maybe it's not
| something you'd need personally, but everyone is different.
| BrtByte wrote:
| Most people I know doing meaningful work have cobbled-together
| systems that reflect how they actually think, not some
| idealized process
| achierius wrote:
| You may not like Zettelkasten (same here), and you may not like
| Luhmann, but saying "those publications have practically zero
| impact on the field currently" is just uninformed. He was one
| of the most influential continental sociologists of the last
| century. Sure, he's no Durkheim, but he still managed to
| surpass a level of international relevance that 99.9% of
| humanity will never even reach.
| Tomte wrote:
| Jurgen Habermas had this to say about Luhmann's theory: "All
| of it is wrong, but it's got quality."
| tucnak wrote:
| > Sorry, you have been blocked You are unable to access
| beehiiv.com
|
| Well
| kmarc wrote:
| I find it interesting, that some (many? most?) people develop
| anxiety about the stash of never-read but captured content in
| their note-taking apps.
|
| I would think I am normally this guy. The one, who gets anxious
| over exactly this kind of matter. However, the (almost-)never-
| read captured content induces two substantially different
| emotions in me:
|
| * safety
|
| * joy
|
| Safety, because I know the content is there, in case i ever want
| to search for it (I do daily worklog, I capture web pages for
| later reads, I also draft my own blog posts / etc before posting
| it on intranet, and so on).
|
| And joy! Sometimes, accidentally I find a snippet, a piece of
| knowledge, something I quickly jotted down during a guided tour 4
| years ago somewhere in the Andes. I know that at that time I
| thought it's so, so super important to research the topic later.
| Even with zero connectivity, probably freezing and bothered by
| the wind, I went through the trouble of grabbing my phone and
| taking the misspelled note. Looking at this kind of notes brings
| back memories. A joyful experience.
| rsanek wrote:
| >Worse, the architecture began to shape my attention. I started
| reading to extract. Listening to summarize. Thinking in formats I
| could file. Every experience became fodder. I stopped wondering
| and started processing.
|
| This sort of experience is what I've seen pop up consistently in
| folks that feel relief in letting go of some sort of knowledge
| management system. The trick might lie in one's ability to avoid
| (or get past) this sort of feeling. I think I agree that it's
| better to trash the whole thing than to be stuck in this kind of
| mindset.
|
| For me, the mindset took 1~2 years to take hold after I started
| using Anki. Probably 3~4 years after that until I was able to
| dispose of it. Now, it's fun again.
| kristjank wrote:
| When people discard something and Chesterton's fence doesn't come
| around to bite them in the back, I assume that the something was
| a bunch of rubbish in the first place.
| dirkc wrote:
| I'd like a digital reset - like starting a new play-through in a
| game.
|
| I don't know how exactly? Buy a new PC, maybe I should jump
| platforms, a new email address, no past bookmarks, some
| deliberate avoidance of things I know by memory.
|
| The old stuff will always be there, but I feel like a fresh
| opportunity to explore the digital world could be nice. Or maybe
| not?
| M0r13n wrote:
| I can absolutely relate to this. I had similar feelings for the
| last year or so - although I couldn't express these thoughts as
| well as the author did.
|
| I've developed this weird addiction to making notes in Obsidian.
| It wasn't really about learning or understanding anything. I
| bought into the illusion that having notes in my PKM meant I had
| actual knowledge. Bigger graph = smarter me, or so I thought. I
| even started reading books just to feed the system: Look at me
| with my 3,587 notes this year - aren't I clever!"
|
| Currently, I am just taking notes where it really matters:
| Readme, documentation and some loosely organised markdown files
| barrnell3 wrote:
| Word of advice: don't do what the author has done. He has gone
| from one extreme (categorizing all notes obsessively) to the
| other extreme (wiping all notes, to start fresh).
|
| The answer, as usual, is in the middle: keep all notes, archived.
| Feel free to restart old projects/ideas by archiving old projects
| to old/2024/legacy, and starting with a fresh page/folder,
| occasionally looking back at archived notes, if needed.
| gtsop wrote:
| > He has gone from one extreme (categorizing all notes
| obsessively) to the other extreme (wiping all notes, to start
| fresh).
|
| No, he went from extreme to "in the middle", if you find
| yourself in their place you should do EXACTLY what he did.
|
| > I'm planning on using it again. From scratch. And with a
| deeper level of curation and care - not as a second brain, but
| as a workspace for the one I already have.
|
| You can't categorize a gazillion notes you obsessively picked
| up over years. Do anything required to become functional again,
| in this case, delete it all if it is psychologically weighing
| on you
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| I don't delete them but I put them in a archive folder and kn the
| main folder I only maintain the current version of the files
| bilvar wrote:
| I'm not sure I can relate to the author. My Zettelkasten is not a
| todo list or project binder or whatever personal life management
| function they use it for.
|
| Mine is for consolidation of knowledge. For instance, when I
| study math and I write a pen and paper proof as an exercise I
| then write a clean note from scratch and link to other theorems
| or corollary notes I have etc. Similar stuff for computer science
| or programming. I find out that this process solidifies the work
| I'd already done and make it less likely to forget.
|
| I also think people get a bit too dogmatic about the ways to use
| technology to help improve your life. Like, what the heck complex
| rules about Zettelkasten? I don't know what kind of expectations
| they have going into this. Do these "influencers" telling you how
| to use it sell the promise of the ultra-intelligent god from the
| popular meme? Just open the damn editor and write, you will find
| what works for you through tinkering and iteration.
| kaashif wrote:
| Yeah, it seems like they were writing massive volumes of
| useless ephemeral to-do lists and throwing them away was easy.
|
| Maybe they were doing it wrong and should've been writing down
| durable knowledge that has lasting value.
|
| I write down guides to do things, explanations of how things
| work that make sense to me, information that I know will be
| useful at some time but will be accessed infrequently (e.g.
| information about people or projects).
|
| A 7,000 book reading list seems useless if your goal is to read
| all of them. But if it's just a bank of interesting books to
| pull from when you want something to read on the beach or on a
| sunny weekend, that doesn't cause me stress at least. I'm
| adding to the bank, not adding items to do. Like my list of
| board games to try.
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| I maintain a very simple system a folder my ideas, another for my
| projects and one for thoughts I think that with the current
| search tools at our disposal there is no need to set up a complex
| system
| metalman wrote:
| ,.............the ancient greeks, correctly identified nostalgia
| as a disease.That said ,deap personal memories do serve a central
| place is familial and tribal/cultural knowledge, but the
| ......."insignificant bits (and bobs)" are poison this is
| something that I have experienced on a number of occasions when
| knowledge keepers have......inserted, very short statements that
| serve to turn a great deal of other myth and trivia into a
| cohearant whole containing actionable instructions. a list can
| never,ever, serve this function
| gtsop wrote:
| > I don't want to manage knowledge. I want to live it.
|
| This is the essence!
|
| Very good post. I think the nuclear action was perfect, it was
| neede to get out of the loop.
|
| You should write your thoughts, not copy paste others'. This way
| you help reorganise your brain to adapt to the subject. Some
| thoughts should be written as a tool and then thrown away, others
| (more important) should be kept
| Havoc wrote:
| These types of impulsive grand swings ("Remember everything ->
| Delete everything") are in my experience always mistakes in the
| long run.
|
| Would have been better to figure out how to prune 50% in a way
| that hits the right spots.
| igiveup wrote:
| I don't get this. I have a megabyte or two of plain-text notes,
| and going through them and maintaining them and extending them is
| fun (apologize to the person who doesn't like threes). There are
| notes for a novel, ideas for future personal projects (way too
| many to do in my remaining lifetime), attempts at capturing my
| understanding of great scientific and philosophical problems,
| weird things I invented in my dreams, various ideas which didn't
| fit anywhere else. Guess what, the novel will probably never get
| written, projects will never get done, I will not make a
| philosophical breakthrough. So what?
|
| Some ideas on how am I supposed to start hating my notes:
|
| * They grow to 100MB, then it starts to be a burden
|
| * I switch from notepad.exe to a dedicated application which
| somehow exploits my hobby of writing notes
|
| * I develop OCD or something else
|
| None of this seems very relatable. At this point, I might be
| writing a new note with these ideas, updating it when I get more
| ideas or when the one, most plausible explanation jumps out at
| me. Then I would read it years later and have something to think
| about before bed and have a good feeling that I didn't lose
| something and I am not left with thougths about the last episode
| of a TV show. Or is that supposed to be a bad feeling?
| latexr wrote:
| > I don't get this.
|
| I'll try to help.
|
| > going through them and maintaining them and extending them is
| fun
|
| It's fun _for you_ , not for everyone else. There, it's as
| simple as that. All you need to understand is different people
| enjoy different things.
|
| > Or is that supposed to be a bad feeling?
|
| It's not "supposed" to be anything. It will be good for some,
| bad for others, neutral for others still. There's no objective
| right answer. If you enjoy something and it doesn't harm
| anyone, do it. If you don't enjoy it and it isn't necessary,
| don't do it. Other people will have different preferences.
| igiveup wrote:
| Oh, the OP pretty much told me that they didn't like taking
| notes. I am trying to understand why, what is the mechanism?
| Is it like burning out? Can it happen to me and my notes when
| I start doing something wrong? Why is "just do less of it"
| not a solution? Why is "just expect less from it" not a
| solution? Am I an exception? If so, why?
|
| "All you need to understand" is for insects.
| edem wrote:
| I started building the second brain a while ago but I quickly
| started to feel like I was trying to dance while wearing a
| straitjacket so I stopped doing it.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Notes should be for things you can't remember. How long did I
| bake that loaf of bread that turned out great? I'm not carrying
| that detail around in my mind with me unless I'm a baker and
| baking thirty loaves a day. Only then does become a permanent
| resident in my brain through pure repetition.
|
| Thinking and processing and making connections is a dynamic and
| amorphous experience that can't be put into static notes. It's
| always changing, based on your mood, recent experiences, and new
| knowledge acquired.
|
| Write down things you can't remember, but keep the thinking in
| your head.
| alabhyajindal wrote:
| This matches my experience as well. I have been journalling on
| and off for 4-5 years. It's a way for me to process my thoughts.
| But I never look back it, I don't feel the need to. The writing
| is the important bit, not the resulting output.
| jbs789 wrote:
| This whole Second Brain idea is new to me. Sounds like a lot of
| work relative to what you get in return.
| al_borland wrote:
| It's effectively a really intense form of procrastination.
| UltraSane wrote:
| What an incredibly stupid thing to do.
| emadda wrote:
| I think the speed at which you can open previous notes matters.
|
| If it takes you 1 minute of scrambling in a GUI to find a
| previous note, you are less likely to read previous notes.
|
| And also less likely to write new ones as you know you'll never
| visit it again.
|
| I have an app built on the fzy CLI and Ghostty terminal for Apple
| Notes. It is working well for me:
|
| https://github.com/emadda/hot-notes
| johnplatte wrote:
| I remember reading the compendium of human-interface writings
| Apple put together in the 1990s. There was an exploration of ways
| to show age in software. They were changing the color and adding
| other aging effects to old files in the Finder.
|
| I think part of that thought has stuck with me. I like storing
| things in directories by year. It is a structural reminder that a
| lot of the value of what I'm doing is tied to this moment in
| time. I can search back through "over the years" to find things,
| and it addresses this question of guilt.
| birriel wrote:
| It's baffling to me that anyone would do this in the age of LLMs.
| All of the author's concerns could've been solved or greatly
| mitigated by loading her PKM into a model as context. The article
| doesn't mention that she even considered this as an option. I
| hope the files can be recovered when she realizes this
| possibility.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >All of the author's concerns could've been solved or greatly
| mitigated by loading her PKM into a model as context
|
| No, because the correctly identified concern by the author is
| much deeper. Knowledge isn't some repository of data, or some
| solipsistic LLM simulacrum of it, it's practiced, social,
| contextual. A real brain, unlike the "second brain",
| _intentionally forgets_.
|
| To have agency is to purposefully erase, cut through BS, and
| start from a clean slate. Any person who has done anything
| meaningful starts with an empty sheet of paper. There's a
| reason all these note taking gurus have exactly zero actual
| work to their name, it's just productivity LARPing. Every
| single time you see one of these "productivity" advocates you
| try to look up if they've build something that has helped even
| one person with all their productivity, nothing. They just keep
| yapping about their notes.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Sounds like Hoarder's Syndrome, but digitally.
|
| I'm a cable hoarder. It's pretty bad. I have cables for tech
| that's been dead for a couple of decades. "Just in case." Need a
| FireWire 400 hub? Got you covered. Even better, how about SCSI?
|
| Every now and then, I go through them, and toss out a few, but
| many remain.
|
| I've also been in Recovery for a while. Suspect the Venn diagram
| overlaps a bit.
| roxolotl wrote:
| > I delete what I don't need. I don't capture everything. I don't
| try to. I read what I feel like. I think in conversation, in
| movement, in context. I don't build a second brain. I inhabit the
| first.
|
| This is a really important insight especially today. There is a
| ton of pressure to move faster, produce, consume, be the absolute
| best. Use AI to do things you'd never be able to before. Build a
| zettlekasten that insights will fall out of. Give up your
| attention to the next big thing.
|
| For some I'm sure that's fulfilling and I do not mean to say to
| stop. But for those whom it brings anxiety, a feeling they can
| never have or be enough, that meaning is just around the corner
| this is an important insight.
|
| It reminds me of a favorite quote of mine from Emerson's Self
| Reliance: Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in
| the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition
| from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the
| darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates, that the soul
| becomes; for that for ever degrades the past, turns all riches to
| poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the
| rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside.
| jbmny wrote:
| What a well-written piece.
|
| It reminded me of my own habit of logging my pour-over coffee
| brews. For months I saved every variable about every cup,
| imagining that one day I'd analyze that data and arrive at the
| perfect recipe.
|
| I never once looked at the data. Eventually I realized that I'd
| rather learn by just paying close attention to this cup, and
| using it to change my approach for the next cup.
|
| It feels like a more human, living knowledge.
| Fade_Dance wrote:
| Overanalyzing everything loses some of the "magic". I drink
| tea, but I assume there's a similar sort of zen-like ritual to
| the whole process. That's somewhat it odds with turning the
| whole thing into a science experiment.
|
| Granted, some of that is a projection of positivity onto what
| is just another simply addictive substance, but I digress.
|
| A lot of tasks in life have elements of this though, including
| creative thinking and flow-state work which continually logging
| and categorizing can somewhat interrupt.
|
| In your case I'd consider doing a 1-off analysis of "the
| perfect cup", with full data collection for a couple of weeks.
| Then analyze it, distill it down, and extract the lesson and
| conclusions. Then go back to the more organic method, and
| hopefully the cup is a little better. Win win.
|
| As some other comments have mentioned, there's a streak of
| obsessiveness and anxiety in the original piece. _Everything_
| doesn 't need to be extensively logged, and it doesn't
| necessarily need to be something you do everyday. A lot of the
| "burden" aspect seems to be from some internal issues that the
| author needs to work on.
|
| All of these approaches are just tools. They can be used with a
| light touch approach (maybe only very complex projects need a
| vigorously searchable and indexed "second brain", and most of
| the time a .txt file in a simple daily log that takes no more
| than 2 minutes per day is more than enough, etc). And I know,
| those two approaches don't perfectly interface with one
| another, but creating an all-encompassing perfect system is an
| exercise and futility, and if that's the goal, then no wonder
| it's a massive cause of anxiety.
| melodyogonna wrote:
| I have a simple philosophy in how I approach everything: Too much
| of anything is bad.
|
| When I started taking notes with obsidian I almost fell into this
| trap of over-analysing everything in terms of what should go into
| a note, making folders and sub-folders. It became quickly obvious
| to me that the mental burden of this can accumulate quickly.
|
| These days I store most of my notes in one folder. The only times
| I now make a note are: 1. When I'm reading. 2. Very rare these
| days, but sometimes I still have nagging thoughts that wants to
| be written down. 3. When I have important information that needs
| to be stored, like IP address, things like this.
|
| I've found that not thinking about notes obsessively like this
| helps me better, most thoughts are useless and fleeting, they're
| not worth writing down imo. Best to be in your mind in those.
|
| The outcome of this is that my vault has remained simple and
| small even after a year, and when I search it for information it
| is almost always for some important detail I knew I wrote down, I
| don't get overloaded with junk.
|
| To keep my notes space clean I also regularly move things to
| archive, which I rarely check.
| chrbr wrote:
| I've also struggled with over-analyzing where stuff should go.
| I've restarted a new Obsidian vault based on PARA [1], and am
| experimenting with using LLMs (both Cursor and Claude Code) to
| help me decide where stuff should go. Been a big help so far.
|
| [1] https://fortelabs.com/blog/para/
| sothatsit wrote:
| I've started seeing a number of people talk about using
| Claude Code for searching, writing, and organising text
| documents. It is an interesting trend to me. I tried it out
| with my non-technical girlfriend and she really liked using
| it for helping with analysing interview transcripts. It seems
| like that agentic workflow is really effective outside of
| coding as well.
|
| I just hope non-technical people that pick this up also pick
| up version control. Or, is there a better alternative to
| Claude Code that can accomplish a similar thing while being
| more friendly to non-technical people?
| rkwz wrote:
| > am experimenting with using LLMs (both Cursor and Claude
| Code) to help me decide where stuff should go.
|
| Can you elaborate on this?
| wavemode wrote:
| My notetaking has devolved in much the same way. Nowadays I
| pretty much just have one big "Work" note, and then occasional
| smaller temporary notes for specific things (planning a trip,
| shopping list, etc).
|
| PKM can often turn into a form of procrastination (it's more
| fun to make lists and folders and grand archives, than to work
| on your actual projects). I decided to cut all that off and do
| the bare minimum instead.
| lqet wrote:
| > I have a simple philosophy in how I approach everything: Too
| much of anything is bad.
|
| This. Everything in moderation, including moderation.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| My mother found a pike of letters from 30 years ago. Mondane
| conversations that we today would carry out over message apps.
|
| It made her very emotional and nostaligic. Ended up much more
| precious than she thought when she wrote them.
| colelyman wrote:
| Interesting to think about if finding a database dump of
| messages 30 years from now would bring back the same
| nostalgia. I would think that the tangible aspect would have
| a more profound impact.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| I also think the format of letters lends itself a bit
| better to being re-read. A single message talking about the
| "last little while" rather than atomic thoughts and
| reactions. More context about the snapshot of life it
| describes. Like a page from a diary that was shared with
| someone.
| achierius wrote:
| > most thoughts are useless and fleeting
|
| While I can't disagree with your own analysis of your own
| thoughts, I would push back on generalizing this to what other
| people think. One's own thoughts have an intrinsic value, and
| to seize on them and let them flourish is one of my personal
| greatest joys. As a thinking being, how could I call my
| thoughts "useless"? Sure, I don't record every thought of every
| day, but I sure hope I continue at least having one or two
| interesting and, indeed, noteworthy thoughts a week or so
| through till my old age.
| melodyogonna wrote:
| Hi, I may not have written that well.
|
| I meant that most thoughts are not important enough to write
| down, not that they're not important. For those I prefer to
| just let myself think. Most times the thought just goes away,
| some other times I just subconsciously refine it until it
| becomes pretty obvious this is something I want to write
| down. Said another way, I don't write them every thought I
| have
| _kidlike wrote:
| "pan metron ariston"
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_mean_(philosophy)
| pugdev7 wrote:
| Who needs two brains anyway?
| somewhatrandom9 wrote:
| I enjoyed the piece, but wonder if the author could have found
| some benefit if they used the corpus to train an (ideally
| locally-run (for privacy)) ai - so that questions could be asked
| of it and some value extracted..
| bee_rider wrote:
| This seems like a particular curse of having an indexable, easily
| searchable journal.
|
| I use a paper notebook, which comes with the built in assumption
| that most of your notes are going to be permanently put on the
| shelf and forgotten. A couple pages can be marked somehow or
| another if anything really useful somehow ends up on them.
|
| Writing things out is an important part of the process... I'd be
| a bit worried about obtaining a default assumption where those
| notes become anything other than ephemera.
| blindriver wrote:
| I deleted all my gchats over 10 Years ago and it was the most
| freeing thing I did in my digital life.
|
| I realized they were absolutely useless but carried a weird
| weight for me.
|
| "What if I need something important from them?" Nope. If there's
| something important then I can ask whomever again.
|
| "What if I want to go through them?" Nope. Never even thought
| about it since I deleted them. Not even the first times I chatted
| with my now-wife.
|
| Once I realized they were useless it helped me never save my
| WhatsApp messages and I turned on disappearing messages as soon
| as the feature appeared. I have another friend I've known for 20+
| years, we set messages to 8 hours disappearing. If we miss a
| message or forget what we talked about, so be it.
|
| It's all so freeing, I never realized what a burden it could be,
| worrying about what if I lost something. I delete everything now
| except my photos which have more value.
| kaashif wrote:
| This is interesting. I guess I have all of my Whatsapp and
| Facebook messenger chats saved and have never thought about it.
|
| I have never even thought about this being a burden in any way.
|
| It's interesting that people have such different perspectives
| on this.
| blindriver wrote:
| Why do you keep them? Why don't you just delete them?
| iamsanteri wrote:
| Very nice article as I've felt the same.
|
| Throughout my 20's I've accumulated a huge amount of mental
| models, diary entries, ambitions, goals, knowledge, thoughts,
| interests and everything in-between.
|
| It helped me a lot and truly let me excel in some things -
| surprisingly enough.
|
| Since I turned 30 last year I've almost sort of been afraid to
| look into that repository whatsoever. It's a mix of amusement and
| anxiety. What felt like unlimited potential and a nearing of the
| "apex", my motivation is still there somewhere in my head, but
| I've suppressed it and opened my eyes to almost half of my life
| being lived.
|
| Sometimes I'm even afraid to stop and think deeply like I tended
| to do before. I distract myself.
|
| Was that a some sort of a religion carrying me week by week month
| to month?
|
| I take it step-by-step, day by day now and try to worry less
| while bringing back the focus of what I'd want to achieve. I calm
| myself down and work on things more gradually, cutting myself
| some slack.
|
| Nonetheless, I wouldn't just delete it all.
|
| Instead I'm just using it less and less, only adding some truly
| profound things and thoughts when I come across them. My reading
| list keeps filling up... I fulfill some of my ambitions, but also
| leave many of them undone by the time I thought I should've been
| done with them trying not to not feel bad about it.
|
| This techno-masochistic models-oriented mega-productive way of
| living is already perhaps disillusioning a lot of people out
| there, and we are entering the next stage.
|
| Feels like end of an era, at least for me personally.
| QuiEgo wrote:
| I think it's important to acknowledge everyone's mind works
| differently, and something different works for everyone.
|
| For me, I've found once I start trying to follow a system, like
| PARA or zettelkasten or whatever else, it just becomes tedious
| and time consuming and I feel like a slave to the system.
|
| After going through 3-4 cycles of this, I came to feel like the
| main point of these systems is to sell books to people like me,
| who's brain craves structure yet struggles to create it :).
|
| I also came to realize most of my notes are write once, read
| never.
|
| I now just make quick and dirty notes and throw them in an
| "archive" folder once they are not active (one "inbox" folder for
| active ones), and rely on search.
|
| No system, no curation.
|
| Same strategy for email.
|
| I do find the notes useful to keep; e.x. "when was the last time
| I got bloodwork done at the doctor" or "what command did I run to
| get the debugger to hit the right symbol server for that old old
| project", but I spend basically 0 thought cycles on them now.
|
| I also find plaintext or markdown to be the ideal format for
| these notes.
|
| There's a whole other category of notes, where you want to share
| information with others or teach. This is documentation. It is
| best suited to a wiki format with rich text.
|
| I think a lot of people end up making wiki-style notes, but
| really they are never going to look at them again or share them
| and they could have just hacked up a quick text file and then
| archived it, instead of making something pretty no one will ever
| care about afterwords (including themselves). It's really hard to
| admit this though.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| started with PARA, and ended up in PR.
|
| I have one note per topic. I write down in summary when I'm
| activity studying something. Most of it i end up remembering
| but its nice knowing where to look when i forget. (Especially a
| link to what i used to study it last time). Some of them could
| probably be printed as a compendium at this point.
|
| I have one note per project, running as a log of quick paste
| dump or thoughts when i leave for the day. Usually never
| revisited.
|
| I have some journal notes. But they're rare and only written
| for larger events (trips, holidays).
|
| I was all-in on backlings and atomic notes for a while, but it
| ended up being unsearhable. The current method could survive
| without backlings at all.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| I agree. I have come to this conclusion PARA and zettelkasten
| are just forms of procrastination.
| zkmon wrote:
| I interpret this as humanity's struggle to get back to its
| habitat, real world and fall back to keep pace with much slower
| biological evolution. Tools - all the way from stone tools used
| for hunting, to the AI assistants - are compensation for the
| desired extra pace in evolution. We can't grow horns over night
| and grow large in size to rule the jungle, so we got our hunting
| tools.
|
| But then we let the tools and thought dictate the biological
| human. Mind has always been a slave of the body, serving just
| enough intelligence as commanded by the body. But then mind grew
| to be the master, commanding the body and demanding faster
| evolution. When body could not deliver to the demands, mind went
| ahead and created artificial extensions to the body using tools,
| technologies and science. Mind no longer responds to the body
| signals leading to suppressed senses, unmet bodily needs, lack of
| intimacy with the ongoings of the body and total lack of basic
| understanding of purpose and function of body.
| NalNezumi wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, it was an interesting read that made me
| introspect on my usage of Obsidian too.
|
| I think there's a couple of points during his journey the author
| could've came to a more balanced conclusion than deleting his
| "second brain" (obsidian folder).
|
| First is ofc the tool-creep that he mention. It was supposed to
| be a support tool, to make you reach a goal or solve a problem.
| Yet it become a goal in itself. A classic Goodhart's law. This
| should've led him to realize that he need to _limit_ what context
| the Second brain idea is applied to. Luhmann, the Zettlekasten
| guy kept in his physical office, segregating his "thinking &
| writing, work" with the rest of his life. The authors case is the
| classic "Todolist trap". If he could've identified that early, he
| could've maybe siloed it better to the useful part.
|
| Second, The "Unread list". One of the first things even in the
| Zettlekasten ideal (which spanned the entire second brain idea)
| is to _never put in anything unprocessed_. Everything, new idea
| to new reading, should be first processed, thought of, and then
| written down _in your own word_. When you break this principle,
| your second brain is not a brain, it 's a todo list.
|
| The third is to humanize it. This also affect point 2. If you
| properly review your second brain, you'll notice that great
| insight or ideas you wrote down doesn't seem so great anymore, or
| lacking. It's also hard to recount _why_ you considered this
| thing great, or worth writing down. That 's when you realize that
| sometimes, the detail of the idea doesn't matter as much as
| why/when and how you came up with it. You more often can come up
| with same idea, hopefully even more refined, if you just remember
| the context of it.
|
| This should transform your "second brain" from not merely being a
| list of connected ideas, but with contexts. Who did you share
| that idea with? Where you sad/mad/angry? what did you do the day
| you got that idea? Those are all ques your brain can use to
| reconstruct the entire picture, wayyy better than just words.
| People that wrote diaries have known this since forever. It's not
| the ideas you want to keep, but the _mental state_ that reached
| you to that idea. New, future you, can take that idea way way
| further, given the same mental state. This insight alone should
| delete _all_ unread lists. At best it should be delegated to a
| reference /archive "folder" disconnected from your second brain.
|
| Second brain is not an archive, it's a process. When you
| misunderstand that, often because you're attached (ego) to the
| ideas you generate, you fall for the trap the author did.
|
| Edit: I realized that the author is from the rationalist
| movement. That kinda figures.
| scuol wrote:
| I understand the sentiment, but disagree with the solution. PKMs
| can be overwhelming if someone nerdy enough to use one ends up
| using it ineffectively.
|
| The way I do it that I find works well is to have the following:
|
| 1. each day, have a journal page for a given day. Content only
| happens in the journal pages
|
| 2. have a series of topics that you tag. This system is up to
| you, but I usually find something with a hierarchy that is <=3
| levels deep is best, e.g. I have "Job Search/2025/Company"
|
| 3. for each of the relevant tag pages, have those have some sort
| of "query" that will pull in all relevant tasks from all the
| journal pages, sort them by priority / state / deadline so you
| can see this all in one place (e.g. "What's the next step I have
| to do for my Nvidia application?" -> easy to answer with this
| system). Depending on your PKM, the hierarchy enables you to
| easily answer that question at a higher level, e.g. "What's the
| next steps I have to do for ALL of my applications?".
|
| In each journal page, you can also write down a "task backlog" so
| minor tasks that you remember don't take up headspace while you
| intend to work on other major tasks (e.g. write down "get back to
| Joel about the Nvidia referral").
|
| Regarding a point other folks have made: treat the journal and
| these tags as more of a "stream" of things you're doing in your
| life, instead of a collection of every-expanding obligations or a
| mausoleum of unexplored ambition.
|
| I built this in Logseq, which seems to be the only one that has
| an advanced-enough query language to do this in that is possible
| to do local-only (no mandatory cloud data) in text files. If
| anyone knows how to build such a system in a different
| application, I'd be happy to learn! Logseq has been stale for a
| year or 2 as the authors are working on a much needed near-total
| rewrite which I'm not sure is ever going to arrive at this point.
| goosejuice wrote:
| This is like the personal version of shapeup's reasoning to get
| rid of backlogs and there's a little nod to it. But yes, a
| backlog is a list of tasks not a second brain.
|
| https://basecamp.com/shapeup/2.1-chapter-07
| StochasticLi wrote:
| For a similar reason I kill all my unpinned tabs automatically
| every 24 hours. If I didn't do/read it, it means there are more
| important issues.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| I delete my tabs at shutdown. If its an important resource ut
| should be in the documentation for the project.
| StochasticLi wrote:
| I'm running a company so it's more than a project.
| goosejuice wrote:
| I never understood the large browser tab list. Though I am
| the kind of person that typically keeps only one to two
| buffers open in my editor. I must have a mild allergy to
| visual noise or something.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Very much the same. I almost never have more than half a
| dozen browser tabs open. They are always ephemeral. I don't
| save browser history or cookies either. Dispite all
| technology advances, a person's short-term memory can still
| only actively handle to four to seven things at a time. I'm
| probably on the low side of that. Having 30 browser tabs
| open is utterly pointless as I won't have any idea what 25
| of them are for.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Damn. My notes over the years are the only that gives me insight
| into who I was and what I cared about back then.
|
| Every once in a while I boot up a 15 year old Evernote archive or
| scroll through my Notes.app to get a new glimpse into the things
| my younger me was up to. It's often endearing, and it also
| reminds me of how much I will forget about myself in another 10
| years, yet these were the things that I spent my free time doing,
| and this person used to exist. I feel like an archaeologist into
| my own life.
|
| Even my most technical notes are laced with the residue of my
| character that I can see myself in.
|
| I'm super sentimental though. I could scroll back to an ancient
| journal entry and probably make myself tear up if I consider it
| long enough.
| kaashif wrote:
| I feel like this too. I remember one time I came across a stack
| of notes (the throwaway kind I just write to help me learn)
| from school and I read through them, it made me very nostalgic.
| Especially reading homework set by teachers who have since
| died.
|
| It actually did make me tear up a bit.
|
| I even feel nostalgic and tearful looking at random doodles on
| a piece of paper that I did during my first job many years ago.
| BrtByte wrote:
| That feeling of being an archaeologist in your own life really
| resonates, like rediscovering forgotten versions of yourself,
| preserved in the syntax of old thoughts
| BrtByte wrote:
| Kinda ironic how tools meant to externalize thinking can end up
| stifling it. Might be time to clean house
| ChaoPrayaWave wrote:
| There's something freeing about admitting that you won't capture
| everything. I still write stuff down, but I stopped trying to
| build the "perfect" system. Life's messy. Notes can be, too.
| gtpedrosa wrote:
| That was an interesting read. Even more if you take a look into
| another of the author's text on the decline of personal thought
| [1]. I believe the author is engaging with very interesting
| questions: what is knowledge? How can I achieve it? How does it
| feel during the pursuit?
|
| Of course the answer is deeply personal. My take is that I agree
| with the author on that knowledge should be inhabited, as I
| quoted Arendt on a former blog entry of mine [2] "For memory and
| depth are the same, or rather depth can only be reached by man
| through remembrance.".
|
| If your journey using whatever tool du jour helps you, more power
| to you! But if it feels like a burden, drop it and adapt. In my
| process, I tried many different methods of note taking, but the
| one I haven't dropped is pen and paper. The act of writing is
| thinking to me. I do not have a plan to go through what I have
| written and treat them as a fortuitous encounter rather than
| having a procedure/method in place. But I still find the idea of
| having digital notes somewhat appealing, luring even.
|
| [1]https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/cognitive-offshoring-and-
| th... [2]https://gtpedrosa.github.io/blog/on-taking-notes-and-
| learnin...
| basisword wrote:
| I understand this and I have done similar a few times (e.g.
| deleting all old emails, deleting all notes, deleting a tonne of
| old files etc.). It's quite freeing. We do hoard a lot of digital
| stuff that we really don't need. Saying that, there are a few
| times over the years I've needed somethings, realised I deleted
| it and regretted it. That feeling passed quickly though and I
| soon realised it probably didn't matter.
| nprateem wrote:
| The futile craving for permanence.
| _aleph2c_ wrote:
| This post is a masterpiece
| scop wrote:
| I did the same thing recently, excluding quotes from books. Every
| other note, How To, and To Do gone. It provided tremendous
| relief. The vast majority of the stuff may as well have been
| written by a complete stranger. But, again, I kept my book quotes
| and notes as that is something I reference regularly. I guess the
| main thing was the realization that I literally don't access 90%
| of my notes and they were of no value other than making me _feel_
| something about myself.
| colelyman wrote:
| I have been enamored with developing a second brain and other
| productivity hacks, but have recently been turned off to them,
| because I believe the benefits are over-promised. Similar to OP,
| I haven't been able to achieve the clarity of mind and creative
| thoughts that are promised by a second brain.
|
| While I do think that deleting the whole thing is extreme, I can
| imagine that there is a level of catharsis experienced by that.
|
| Lately I have subscribed to Oliver Burkeman's (author of "4,000
| Weeks") line of thinking where life, and subsequently thoughts,
| are more meant to be experience rather than optimized. For me, I
| have seen a negative drop in "life enjoyment" when I have tried
| to capture everything, and have yet to realize the results and
| even stick with it consistently (which may be the reason for not
| seeing the positives).
| precompute wrote:
| Sounds like the author never really had any use for it, and was
| undergoing informational bankruptcy. Most people don't delete
| theirs, though, they just keep it apart and never re-arrange it.
| lowleveldesign wrote:
| I understand the burden that too much notes may take on you. I am
| a software troubleshooter and I used to keep my raw notes of all
| the interesting cases I encountered. However, with time, this set
| became hard to navigate. Additionally, when I was rereading my
| notes, they seemed chaotic and hard to follow. I now prefer to
| create a succinct summary of a closed case, explaining the taken
| steps, my thinking, and the solution, so that my future self
| could understand it :)
| godot wrote:
| I realize I must be in the minority of software engineers/tech
| circles, I do not keep a "personal knowledge management" base.
|
| I do have a personal Notion, but the things I keep in it are like
| list of restaurants we want to try and haven't yet, list of
| travel destinations we want to go at some point, the trash
| collection schedule, things like that. Basically
| references/bookmarks.
|
| I don't keep reading lists, knowledge I learned, or anything like
| that in an archive. I rely completely on my own memory in my
| brain for those. (I also don't open up tabs with intentions of
| "I'll read this later". Either I read it and close it, or don't.
| If it feels semi-interesting but long, I just skim it, then close
| it.)
|
| If anything interesting comes up, I talk about it, typically in a
| group chat (I have about half a dozen group chats with various
| friend groups or ex-coworkers groups that are active). If a
| discussion took place about something, I will likely remember it.
| If I remember some key points, if something comes up in the
| future about it, I will remember enough to look it up, whether by
| Google or by LLM. *
|
| I've lived this way for decades professionally and never found
| myself missing a piece of knowledge in any context that I wish I
| had. In other words I don't find a use to keep a personal
| knowledge base.
|
| For those reading this, maybe it helps you think about whether
| you need one like this as well. Perhaps like the article author
| here, you might feel more relieved not having one.
|
| * I also want to note that I operate this way at work / in
| meetings as well. I find that if I try to take notes during
| meetings, I can't pay attention fully, and can't digest the
| information being discussed. It works much better if I don't take
| any notes at all, pay attention in the meeting, and if there's
| anything important from the meeting, I try to write it down
| afterwards (typically in a Slack message) from memory. 99% of the
| time it works fine and once in a long while I might miss
| something (but someone else who reads my Slack message would fill
| out what I missed).
| gen220 wrote:
| You do have a personal knowledge management base, it's all your
| friends and coworkers :)
|
| I've heard this concept described as the "external brain". If I
| don't talk about something or write it down, it's more likely
| than not getting flushed out of my brain. My friends or
| calendar app or sparingly few notes will be there to remind me
| if it's actually important! I only write to make/check-in on
| longer term plans
| Vegenoid wrote:
| My "second brain" is almost entirely technical information and
| learnings. I can see why someone who uses it more like a fancy
| personal journal, for mental reflection and creative work, would
| delete it - but I would be devastated if I lost my notes, because
| they are key to my ability to quickly navigate technology and
| systems.
| Moosdijk wrote:
| Not even my bookmarks get trashed. It's like a treasure trove.
| sedatk wrote:
| One of the few decisions I absolutely regret in my life was to
| throw away my old notebook that I used to keep notes in when I
| was learning programming in the 80's. I had pretty much the same
| kind of thinking as the author: the nostaliga was dragging me
| back, cluttering my mind, and I simply had to move on.
|
| But, the thing is, those notes actually highlighted a part, or
| more aptly, an era of my existence that had no longer existed. I
| basically destroyed a part of me, similar to destroying
| photographs or any other memento that related to my "former
| self".
|
| Not only are those kinds of mementos endearing, but they are
| anchoring in a sense too. They let you draw an unbroken line over
| all versions of yourself to get the whole picture. They also have
| the potential to trigger certain parts of your mind, motivate you
| in ways that you can't imagine.
|
| So, the stuff the author had thrown away might be useless as a
| tool, but I think they would certainly be useful in an
| introspective archeological sense. I strongly urge anyone to
| consider that before performing a similar infocide.
|
| I'd at least suggest archiving them in a hard to reach place,
| instead of completely destroying them because you might regret it
| later.
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| The second brain is more generally refered as the guts tho, he
| should have said third brain
| il-b wrote:
| I still use nvAlt (formerly Notational Velocity) for note taking.
| It is synced to a Dropbox folder. I can use the native Dropbox
| app to search, view, and edit the files. What I really like is
| the speed of note taking and searching in the nvAlt app. All my
| notes have a title in a loose format such as "project_name
| keyword ... keyword". It takes a second to find the note I need.
| Therefore, nvAlt serves as a bookmark manager as well. Obsidian
| feels clunky and slow, and I couldn't get it to switch to the
| .txt file extension (which is possible to edit via Dropbox on an
| iPhone).
| molszanski wrote:
| If you don't do regular forest fires, one day you will need to
| nuke everything
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