A change in mindset made me drop a lot of my tools

Posted by Dormouse
Apr 18, 2022 at 11:44 AM

I share many of the views in the thread.

I find the evangelism around markdown a productivity trap - there are too many useful things that you can’t do, or not without a convoluted workaround. I like the idea around plaintext but find most of the systems rubbish. I like easy headings, I like folding. But if I want to move stray words and phrases around, it’s easy in Word but not markdown. I have always done my writing in simple text, I don’t need markdown, and editing works much better in Word.

I have pretty well always written in projects. I do find wikilinks extremely useful - but that’s as part of a current workflow, not as part of a long-term knowledge system. And wikilinks aren’t in markdown, although some markdown PKM apps use them, and are used in a variety of programs, some of them rich text.

I think the criticism of Luhmann and his zettelkasten overdone. His actual process was very much centred on writing and projects and he didn’t collect masses of dead thoughts. His was an active thinking system. The issue, I feel, is the recent reimagination of zettelkasten, largely led and popular with students whose main idea is that it’s a way of stuffing more facts into their recalcitrant brains. They feel in urgent need of a second brain. And their ideas are centred on knowledge not thinking. Even thinking of his zettels, Luhmann would be able to track through them and see how his ideas had developed and what hie might have missed and where he might have gone wrong. If it wasn’t active, it was simply junk in the attic.