Comment by torben-friis
11 hours ago
There is a subset of people that spend time developing complex setups as a hobby. It's the adult equivalent of the student who had school notes in perfect handwriting with 7 different colors and underlines.
Nothing against it, you just need the warning early on to avoid the timesink if you want things done and follow the wrong guide.
It really baffles me that a forum full of people who casually deep dive into all corners of tech regardless of its “usefulness” can’t understand people might want to do the same with their personal notetaking or organization.
I can't speak for those commenters, but I think a lot of people have gone down this path and felt like it was a negative experience for them. I'm sure other people don't, but since a lot of these deep dive resources come from "productivity" communities, it's not surprising there's people that didn't feel very productive reorganizing their second brain, even if it seemed kinda intoxicating in the process.
I also feel like there's an odd assortment of people in the note optimization community that tries to present themselves as super human taskmasters, like Neo on a keyboard. The Roam research videos do not look like they're trying to teach me to use Roam. They look like they're trying to sell me a cozy aesthetic and vision of merging my brain with a computer to become greater than. I just want a note taking app.
It just ticks exactly the right boxes for people who are into STEM without really being satisfying at the end of the rainbow. Personally I'm done trying to do more than just some tags and backlinks.
> There is a subset of people that spend time developing complex setups as a hobby. It's the adult equivalent of the student who had school notes in perfect handwriting with 7 different colors and underlines.
This is a perfect analogy.
This reminds me of people who build elaborate Notion "second brains" that serve no purpose other than to develop/demo them.
On the other end of the spectrum you have me, who’s been only vaguely organising my files for years. I am currently collecting my data from across different hard drives I have and running hashdeep as a first step to identify duplicate files. Even though I’m not organising the files themselves well, I do maintain backups. Both in the form of ones that are replicated ZFS snapshots, but also files that I’ve manually copied between drives and computers.
The amount of data has grown to too many TB now, so deduplicating things is the first step of cleaning up.
It remains to be seen if the reorganised files will be a sane and measured thing, or if I will go too far in the other direction and create a way too elaborate system of organization for my files.
I have been toying with the idea that since I am currently using hashdeep to get file hashes of all paths on different drives, I could collect all the files organized purely by hash in terms of paths on the file systems, and keep the hashdeep records for future reference, imported into queryable DuckDB databases to help me find related files etc. (For example, to find back to which other files were once under some given directory path.)
Blob storage basically. Perhaps something along the lines of Perkeep (formerly Camlistore) https://perkeep.org/
But I would really like to also do an effort of having the data organized in a way that makes it easy to determine which files I need more copies of (favorite photos of important moments, etc) and which ones I need fewer copies of (random screenshots of games, etc), and which files I can discard completely.
What do y’all do to organize all of your files? And how much data do you guys have that you consider important for the rest of your life?
I have an inbox/ folder and a daily/ folder.
Inbox is where all new docs go to, I just use #tags and file references.
It's like the people that build their complex arch based linux distro just to run neofetch and btop.
Mine really does help me, though I'm not very organised, I just dump my notes in a handful of folders and rely on the search function (which could be a lot better in obsidian, it always finds unrelated stuff first). Still it's magnitudes better than that crap they call onenote which I unfortunately am required to use at work.
I'm really averse to meticulous organisation so a good search function is key. Tagging and categorising stuff will never work for me. I've been thinking about looking for other plugins for that.
I know that it's just a super common distinction between pilers and filers, but I really struggle to comprehend the usefulness of just "dumping everything" in one place and hoping that search will sort it out.
At a certain threshold, doesn't it just become impossible to remember what you do or don't have in that pile?
When search fails, is it because it isn't there? Or is it because the search just didn't find it?
As everyone has learnt the hard way, when you have a long to-do list, you will be tempted to suddenly spring clean your room, and it will make you temporarily feel productive... but it will not, in fact, shrink your to-do list.
Making an elaborate Obsidian setup is very much the same instinct.
>There is a subset of people that spend time developing complex setups as a hobby.
More than a hobby. There's entire businesses that are just moving from one system to another and convincing your followers that they have to move too.