Comment by pancakemouse
1 day ago
What this shows to me, as someone who has committed some of the unholy crimes above, is that people want their system, however esoteric, to come naturally to them.
I think reading docs, understanding a new system which someone else has designed, and fitting one's brain into _their_ organisational structure is the hard part. Harder than designing one's own system. It's the reason many don't stick with an off-the-shelf app. Including Org mode.
> What this shows to me, as someone who has committed some of the unholy crimes above, is that people want their system, however esoteric, to come naturally to them
I think this is a vocal minority. Outside of internet comment sections, most everyone I know doesn’t care that much about their todo list software.
The most productive people I ever worked with all had really minimal productivity software. For one person it was a Google doc with nested lists. I know several people who preferred physical sticky notes or 3x5 note cards.
A lot of the people I’ve worked with who built elaborate productivity systems and custom software weren’t all that productive. They seemingly spent as much time doing productivity rituals and rearranging their productivity software stack as they did doing actual work. I count the really heavy Notion users in this category because I’ve recently been pulling my hair out dealing with a couple PMs who think “reorganizing Notion” and adding more rules for Notion is a good use of their time each week.
The most extreme example I remember was the eccentric coworker who was building an AI-powered productivity tool that was supposed to optimize his todo lists and schedule them according to his daily rhythms. He spent so much time working on it that our manager had to remind him daily to stay on track with his real work. He was obsessed with “productivity tooling” but the productivity was secondary.
Not everyone is like this, but it happens a lot.
The real takeaway from your story is that it's easy to stay on task when you're interested in the task. Your coworker just didn't care about his work. But if his work was creating a productivity tool then he'd probably love his work and be productive.
I strongly agree. I think it's a form of procrastinating.
I read about all these complex systems for notes and second brains and whatnot.
All procrastinating imho.
I think it's actually a selection bias. Who is more likely to spend a lot of time on productivity systems -- a person who is on top of their obligations or a person who is drowning in them. A naturally organized person can do with simple txt, they are already doing okay. A chaotic person can build whatever complex process they wish, they will still fail.
That’s been my personal experience. Spend plenty of time looking at all kind of options to optimize my ir my teams workflow. Then just fallback on pen and paper or some very simple excel spreadsheet. Something thinking about being more productive makes you feel productive.
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Someone on here once called it craftsmanship cosplaying.
I've got to tell you that I don't think people like gwern.net and andymatuschak.org are procrastinating. A lot of these people are very productive in public. Walking through their zettel-sites is like walking through their minds. The best thing zettel-people have done has been to assume that everything that you're writing that was clearly inspired by something else should reference and direct link that thing. I really think we should caching and redistributing our references too, but the law...
The stuff they, and many smart people like them, are putting in their public notes are sometimes becoming the authoritative bibliographies of little specialized subjects. Their notes get referenced in journal articles.
edit: also, as far as I know, the goal of having a Zettel system is to be as lazy as possible. To have all your notes extremely networked so you can find them pretty quick, you can get surprised about what's in them because old stuff gets surfaced, and you can always find a place to add the thought you're having or the notes you're taking. You save all of that time digging though stuff and filing stuff and losing stuff, which you can use to take a walk in the park or something. To accidentally write a few books just because you had all your notes about some goofy subject you're obsessed with in one place and one day you're like "that must be about a quarter million words."
edit2: also, also, this conversation is very quaint. 10-20 years from now we will all have zettelkasten and we will never look at them at all because we will use AI to interface with them. I'm sure thousands are already in that world, I'm certainly working on getting there.
I spent several years trying to make a custom todo system and ended up back where I started using CalDAV and a basic todo app and calendar. Turns out I was always procrastinating because I didn't want to force myself to adapt to something simple.
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Same. I dabbled in the second brain fad for a while, until I realized I already have a first brain.
It was helpful to create new mental models, but I now much prefer using my actual brain to organize my thoughts.
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Eh, I don't know. I wouldn't paint with such a broad brush here.
Regarding productivity/to-do systems: on one hand I agree -- I know a few people for whom it's clearly a form of procrastination and really just need to get on with it. On the other hand, I myself was one of those people, but in hindsight I just hadn't found the right system yet and had real, legitimate issues with the systems I had been trying. Turns out, YouTrack is damn-near perfect for me. I use it both for work and for my personal life and I really, really love it, even for basic to-do lists. The things I was missing from standard to-do lists was the concept of relationships ("depends on," "blocked by," etc) and the ability to schedule multiple projects together on a Gantt Chart. Put those two features together and what needs to be done when and in what order is pretty much inarguable, which is precisely what helps me stay productive, as looking at a huge list and feeling overwhelmed about what to do next -- especially if I'm trying to be efficient or strategic -- freezes me in my tracks.
Regarding second brains: I completely disagree that they're not useful. My Obsidian vault is genuinely one of the single most useful things I have ever done for myself. There's nothing fancy about it, I don't use most of the features, but having a massive vault full of notes is truly indispensable in knowledge work.
There’s a now quite dated comment from Merlin Mann: "Joining a Facebook group about productivity is like buying a chair about jogging.”
It’s fuzzy - but my recollection was Mann was a fairly renown productivity influencer (although I guess we wouldn’t have called it that then), who had an apostasy about it all.
On managers side the equivalent is making fancy JIRA workflows with all the fancy fields so that everyone is informed. Makes people annoyed with extra work and that time could be spent just talking to people to understand what's actually happening.
Exactly. It takes enormous effort to get product and engineering teams to agree on how to use JIRA properly, because everyone has their own ideas around how and what to organize. It's exhausting.
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So much of it is empty productivity, all prepping for the work but never actually doing it.
Like the old joke about the programmers spouse who died a virgin because every night all the programmer did was sit at the edge of the bed talking about how awesome it was going to be when they finally did it.
I’m very guilty of trying all sorts of productivity software as a form of procrastination. The best one did, in fact, turn out to be index cards and a pencil.
The phhsical copy served an important purpose: it forces you to admit you will never do something and so give up on is. until I die it is safe to assume I will eat 3 meals per day. (It won't be 100% because of sickness but close enough) thus if I'm out of some food I will need a todo list to replace it. However if I never finish the ukuele I've started it won't matter and it is reasonable for me to give up on it.
What I gather is people really like the blank whiteboard. There’s something about Notepad and Excel, the freedom, the linitlessness, of having a blank canvas and being able to do anything.
Todo software is too opinionated. It’s not flexible enough to allow you to break rules. You can’t move things around in a way that allows you to control visual white space between entries. Everything “is something” (a task, an event) vs just being (text.)
The term that comes to mind, and one of my favorite concepts, is "progressive disclosure", which is a concept we really ought to be more mindful of.
One of the perks of just-a-text-file-with-a-bunch-of-addons is that it enables progressive disclosure - it takes no learning curve to just get in and use the tool on a basic level, but additional complexity (and power) can be introduced over time.
The problem with a purpose-built app is that there's a minimum level of new concepts to learn before the tool is even minimally useful, and that's a barrier to adoption.
A good example of this in action is something like Markdown. It's just text and will show up fine without you learning anything, but as you pick up more syntax it builds on top - and if you learn some markup syntax but not others, it doesn't prevent you from using the subset you know. There is a clear path to adding new knowledge and ability.
Right, instead of fomo over not using the extra features of utilizing the right flow - people tend to experience the want/need to incrementally increase complexity when using roll-your-own software
Ya, I don't need my todo list to have "docs" at all.
The whole point of org-mode is that it's so malleable, that you can extend it to be whatever you want it to be, much easier than writing your own, ad-hoc, bug-ridden reimplementation of org-mode.
Org-mode is the most appropriate answer. It is as simple or as sophisticated as we want it to be.
Obviously one needs to be an Emacs user first
> Obviously one needs to be an Emacs user first
Not true I use the Neovim plugin https://nvim-orgmode.github.io/. It supports everything I tried from the official org manual. https://orgmode.org/org.html
I use syncthing to sync it between my devices. https://www.orgzlyrevived.com/ works great on android.
> Obviously one needs to be an Emacs user first
The only reason why I still use Emacs daily is org-mode.
> Obviously one needs to be an Emacs user first
This makes it so infuriating that the top comment on Todo systems is almost invariably "just org-mode lol". Same as remote editing "just TRAMP lol".
I am not going to completely change my editor and rebuild two decades of optimization just to use two Emacs tools.
On-topic: TickTick or Todoist with a slimmed-down "Getting Things Done" system works really well. Almost no learning curve, and you get to free up so much mental bandwidth vis a vis remembering things and prioritizing things. And you don't have to do hamfisted tricks to make a 'simple' .txt system work. Bliss.
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When you start structuring your TODO list, you will miss adding stuff that isn't easy to fit into the structure to said list.
And possibly regret it 3 months later...
Also, if you are a developer by trade a lot of these features are quick and easy to implement.
And might even be fun to implement and maintain.
I think we have a winner. This sort of personal toolsmithing is fun, and you can try out some new programming language or whatever.
We all love a good excuse to build something small-to-medium sized for our own perfect "tailor fit" preferences.
All the excuses about other tools not being adequate are just what we need to say to ourselves to justify the time ;)
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Exactly. Most people wish they could customize their Todo app or system to their specific preference or need, but have no way of making it happen. Devs can, so they do.
What's interesting is AI is going to change this. Entering a prompt for an app that has all the features you want is already pretty trivial, and will only get better.
Which is why everyone likes spreadsheets. You learn a few formula and styling rules, and you’ve got a hammer for every nail that’s been bothering you (if it was actually a screw…shrugs).
I think in part because larger systems aren't typically custom made to the user's exact workflow (especially because users don't typically have one single workflow anyway!). So not only do I have to get into someone else's mind, but it feels ill-fitted to my own mind. Thus, it's also more inefficient.
Systems you design yourself for yourself naturally will come easier to us.
Yep, at the risk of repeating what you said: I think this is why so many project management / todo apps exist with their own flavor of the very basics. It's a reflection of those wishes that feel natural to us individually, and it just so happens many of these apps mesh well with our model of thinking and organizing.
This is also why it's so difficult to get teams on the same page about project management in their respective workplaces.