<story><title>Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method</title><url>https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CGamesPlay</author><text>This is your friendly reminder to avoid the productivity hacking tarpit. It feels productive to think about productivity but oftentimes you&amp;#x27;re confusing movement for progress. I&amp;#x27;ll give two specific pieces of advice for people who are thinking about switching from methodology &amp;#x2F; app A to methodology &amp;#x2F; app B.&lt;p&gt;1. You might find something that B does that is just so difficult to accomplish in A, so you want to switch. But before you do, you should spend a week living with the difficult path to do that thing in A. You will likely find that learning the muscle memory to do that thing in A was actually the difficult part, and once you&amp;#x27;ve overcome that hurdle it isn&amp;#x27;t difficult any more.&lt;p&gt;2. You might switch to B and feel that &amp;quot;now, everything is so organized!&amp;quot; However, it&amp;#x27;s very likely that you could have &amp;quot;switched&amp;quot; from A to A and you&amp;#x27;d feel the same way. What I mean by this is that by switching, you&amp;#x27;ve forced yourself to revisit all of your notes. If you forced yourself to revisit your notes without switching, you&amp;#x27;d see the same effect.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bachmeier</author><text>I wouldn&amp;#x27;t consider this to be a productivity tool in the usual sense (i.e., like Todoist or GTD). Instead, it&amp;#x27;s about facilitating deeper thought and making new connections between ideas. For a professional content creator, which includes most academics like Luhmann, the entirety of your career is your collection of notes. You can store them on paper, in the computer, in your head, or however you want, but those pieces of knowledge are all you have. Dismissing these tools as merely an arbitrary reorganization of a static collection of documents is like dismissing Javascript because we have html. Good luck creating Google Docs with only html.</text></comment>
<story><title>Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method</title><url>https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CGamesPlay</author><text>This is your friendly reminder to avoid the productivity hacking tarpit. It feels productive to think about productivity but oftentimes you&amp;#x27;re confusing movement for progress. I&amp;#x27;ll give two specific pieces of advice for people who are thinking about switching from methodology &amp;#x2F; app A to methodology &amp;#x2F; app B.&lt;p&gt;1. You might find something that B does that is just so difficult to accomplish in A, so you want to switch. But before you do, you should spend a week living with the difficult path to do that thing in A. You will likely find that learning the muscle memory to do that thing in A was actually the difficult part, and once you&amp;#x27;ve overcome that hurdle it isn&amp;#x27;t difficult any more.&lt;p&gt;2. You might switch to B and feel that &amp;quot;now, everything is so organized!&amp;quot; However, it&amp;#x27;s very likely that you could have &amp;quot;switched&amp;quot; from A to A and you&amp;#x27;d feel the same way. What I mean by this is that by switching, you&amp;#x27;ve forced yourself to revisit all of your notes. If you forced yourself to revisit your notes without switching, you&amp;#x27;d see the same effect.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ibn_khaldun</author><text>This, this is the post to read.&lt;p&gt;It is indeed a tarpit that traps people who mean well and legitimately want to Get Things Done. The knowledge work&amp;#x2F;&amp;quot;second brain&amp;quot; community will have you convinced that everyone who you run into online is a PhD candidate. The irony is that a lot of people intend to &amp;quot;simplify&amp;quot; their workflow but end up reaching for more things to pile onto it. The breaking point for me was the first time I loaded Obsidian. It is a nice program but it incentifies Doing Too Much, at least for my taste. Granted, what influences a person to even care about how they take notes varies. The chaps over at Zettelkasten.de actually advocate for a very simple approach to note taking that can work anywhere. Personally, I&amp;#x27;ve found that it&amp;#x27;s best for me to do the bulk of my work in a Plain Text environment -- plain like the text box that I am using to type this comment plain.&lt;p&gt;Alhamdulillah.</text></comment>