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Processes not tools
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Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Sep 27, 2018 at 08:42 PM
@ Pixelpunker: Thank you for the books (I’ve read the Organised Mind but the others were unknown to me) and thank you for starting a very interesting thread—albeit in what seemed like a rather provocative way.
@ J J Weimer: Thank you for helping me read through the lines of the original post.
@ All: Thanks for this fascinating discussion, which is indicative of the amazing value delivered by this forum. It’s also great to see so many new contributors.
Pixelpunker wrote:
>The book title was Keine Zeit? by Regula Schräder-Naef. Publisher was Beltz.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Sep 27, 2018 at 08:47 PM
Amazing, thank you! I wonder what further research has found out seven years after…
Amontillado wrote:
>I wonder if this is related to the doorway effect, which has a profound
>effect on my focus -
>https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-walking-through-doorway-makes-you-forget/
Posted by Ruud Hein
Oct 6, 2018 at 11:24 AM
1a) Mainstream is certainly a big help, but what delivers the biggest ROI for me is consistency.
I learned that through my, sometimes (en)forced, use of Evernote as a database for my personal life. I started using Evernote in 2005, entering little log/journal/diary style tidbits of information, as well as answers to questions like “who is”, “where is”, “when is”, “when was”, etc.
Several times I’ve wanted to use another program for this, but the way Evernote exported its information, and the way other programs could use that information, was never satisfactory. It’s only much later that Evernote is so popular, programs like OneNote have an importer for it.
As a result I’m now using Evernote since 13 years, longer than any other service, and probably software.
The resulting treasure trove is consequently 13 years of information located in one place; not scattered or restarted over a number of computer programs.
The value of that is that I know where my (personal) information is. There is no searching for the place to search; it’s going to be in Evernote.
The value of Evernote came from keeping on using it, keep adding information—not necessarily from the program itself.
1b) Now for the mainstream part, that is certainly helping by now. If I want to switch to something else, that switch is easier these days. And a service like Evernote is so big and popular now that if it ever were to go under, tens of services and tools would offer a myriad of ways to export and import information, or just build an interface on top of your existing local Evernote database.
1c) Of course you can’t always know ahead what will go and stay mainstream. What I look for when I try a tool like Everdo is “can I get my data out and how?” I can program in PHP and using PHP Desktop (Chrome + local server + PHP all in one) https://github.com/cztomczak/phpdesktop I can write tools to manipulate that data and transform it.
3) I think I get the spirit in which you write this. It’s of course more balanced than that. I’ve read books that should have been a blog post, and blog posts that should be expanded and explained in a book.
What you describe makes me recall Merlin Mann’s post about productivy pr0n http://www.43folders.com/2008/09/08/four-years where he writes, among other things;
> Thus, in time, phrases like “life hacks” and “GTD” became associated with
> everything from printing your own graph paper, to taking a nap, to making
> a living by pinching off lists of links to lists of links to Firefox
> extensions that help you use Facebook to more efficiently pretend to like
> people whom you’ve never met.
Those kind of blogs still exist and you can waste your life reading them—just as you can waste your life reading one “how to” book after another, of course.
One of the filters I use most these days is “pull” versus “push”: I find pages because I look for specific information. That information may end up in my system. If I just subscribe (“push”), I run the risk of adding Just In Case information
4) I love the cloud. That love started with Evernote: the golden copy is what’s on my hard disk, a synced version is always available elsewhere. My first reinstalls of Windows where I had to get back to Evernote and Gmail where an eye opener.
The cloud makes devices disposable; if something happens, it’s not the end of your digital stuff. Although I perform local backups, I’ve saved myself more often with a cloud restore than with a backup.
5) It’s definitely about the/your process. I like what you say about over-keep.
When it comes to pure “how to” information, or sometimes a reference on who said what, my process is that I bullet list (in the most excellent and delicious Dynalist, in my case) the steps or information. Writing it out myself, condensing the information in immediately reusable steps, works so much better for me than simply clipping a page.