Comment by andybak

As someone quite deeply into the "tools for thought" thing... I hardly ever worry about the meta-task. I just make notes tied in to one or other index page, all of which (there are only a few more than a dozen or so) tie into a higher-level index page. Given the search capabilities of a decent personal-wiki-like there's not really much call to arrange, file, tag, classify notes.

I use Zim Desktop for my notes because it's simple and (precisely) because it stays the hell out of my way and lets me focus on my own writing. Over several years of doing this I've tried quite a few other tools, but none manages to hit the sweet-spot of simplicity and affordance I find in Zim. Roam, Notion and other web-based tools are just a fucking annoyance to me, being clunky to use and offering little since I have no need to access my notes across multiple devices, nor any use for publishing/"sharing" my personal notebook or pages with others. If I do want to do that I can (and do) just copy the relevant material over to my (static) blog, `git push` and the job's done.

(Edit to add: the "Backlinks" plugin is vital for using Zim for this purpose.)

Music/video is much more challenging in that regard: our computers' capabilities for searching those is pitiful, but then... keeping bookmarks to such stuff is hardly the use-case for a personal-note tool. It's for keeping your own thoughts and observations, not for bookmarking random blatherings.

Agreed. My “note-taking app” is an ASCII text file with a bunch of URLs and command names in it, each with a description. Totally free-form, even the super simple markdown syntax would be too much to bother with.

I don't know what being in "tools for thought space" means but if it just mean "Roam or similar user", I can give my personal answer: I set up 2 or 3 templates when I started. The most used one I updated once since then. That's it. The time I spent doing this is essentially 0% of my Roam use time.

I can see how someone who checks out blogs/youtube about Roam-like tools might get the wrong impression but those are usually a business so they have to output content.

It also comes down to personality, I suspect some people have a tendency to optimize tooling as a form of procrastination.

> At a certain point I realised I was spending more time figuring out how to tag my mp3 colletion

I then came to conclusion MP3 tags are harmful and removed them altogether. Because you can never tell a song genres reliably and many things can be written many different ways.

true. I don't need better tools for thought, I honestly need better thoughts. I always wonder what kind of Da Vinci levels of output some people have to have to make use of all these tools. The most sophisticated thing I get any use out of is a pile of markdown files

It's the same with hyper-optimized keybinding editor setups. I'd need to be able to think and type about four times faster before some of the things I've seen would make any meaningful difference.

They don’t.

Which is why there’s a massive industry catered towards productivity tools.

Who tags their mp3 collection without something playing in the background? :)

I've fond memories of hanging out in my friend's room, listening to punk while expanding our extensive Clarion MS DOS database, and then reprinting it to admire it.