Comment by Aurornis
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 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.
Sounds similar to playing video games: the rules are simple, so once you understand them, you can feel mighty and powerful simply by accomplishing banal tasks. Makes for a great dopamine rush.
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.
I used to use caldav but then stopped because there was once a bug on the server side where I couldn't delete events. The main thing I also don't like is there's no encryption or privacy really from the provider unless you go with a more a less proprietary solution like from an encrypted email provider. The closest I saw was EteSync but it requires special apps, and can include special bugs :)
I also don't need my immediate todo list on a calendar. I organize my to-do list simply as "Immediate", "Future", "Distant future", and then put things under heading. Sometimes I add a due date if there is one.
I just had a few markdown documents in a "todo" folder, eg <work>.md <project1>.md etc. Recently I changed it to org-mode because that's a syntax designed for the purpose. https://nvim-orgmode.github.io/ works excellently.
Never been an emacs user in my life. I spent about 5 minutes perusing https://orgmode.org/org.html and was able to do the same.
I use syncthing to sync it between my devices. https://www.orgzlyrevived.com/ works great on android.
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.
> Same. I dabbled in the second brain fad for a while, until I realized I already have a first brain.
The way you chose to describe keeping engineering notes as "second brain fad" is telling. It says you mindlessly tried to follow an organization scheme even though you felt no need to adopt an organization scheme.
In other words, you somehow hopped onto a solution searching for a problem you didn't had.
That's perfectly fine. Fads are defined by those who, like you, onboard onto something for all the wrong reasons and without spending any time thinking about what they are doing and why they are doing it.
Of course, those who end up searching for problems that fit a specific solution end up not finding it. That's the fad part.
In the meantime, engineering logs are indeed time tested and a tried-and-true technique. Those who use it to solve problems they have will naturally see their problems solved by them. That's why you see blog posts like this, and people commenting on how they scratched their itch.
My first brain forgets things quite often. My second brain which is a terribly organized Obsidian Vault does not.
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.
OR to put is differently - everyone has their own needs they are trying to get done. Each one need individually is simple so it is easy to demand that need is added too. Until the whole system for each different need becomes so complex it collapses under its own weight and you move to a new tool. This cycle seems to repeat every 10-15 years at all companies. JIRA is the tool everyone talking about today, but there were many others in the past, and there will be a different one in a few years.
Generally the tool isn't the problem: NEVER put ticket numbers into long term storage as in a few years you won't be able to reference them. That is version control, design documents, and anything else that isn't the ticket system itself. You can talk about who is working on ticket 12345 and the problems they face, but if anything is going to be written down you need to summarize the ticket without a number.
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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.