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A change in mindset made me drop a lot of my tools
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Posted by MadaboutDana
Apr 17, 2022 at 02:54 PM
Yep, loved @Dellu’s thoughts on “why take notes at all?” – it’s a question I regularly ask myself as I work through my thousands of notes and delete most of them.
Of course you change, and so does the world around you. But your resolution to actually do something with stuff you come across immediately is a great response.
On the other hand, sometimes stuff does “mature” if you leave it for a while and then come back to it (and I speak as a fellow linguist here!). And those notes can be the most valuable ones of all. Those are the ones I don’t delete.
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.
Posted by Amontillado
Apr 18, 2022 at 02:43 PM
I’ve written some in Markdown. I’m glad it’s available.
At the other end of the spectrum, I get good use out of Mellel, but currently I’m straying back to Nisus Writer Pro, my other go-to word processor.
It is not as reliable and stable as Mellel, which kind of bugs me, but in fairness it’s hard to find the rough edges in Nisus.
And, of course, it’s much more flexible than Markdown.
Posted by steveylang
Apr 18, 2022 at 09:14 PM
My experience has been a lot like OP, I only use Obsidian now but have stuff scattered across other apps and platforms. Once in a blue moon I actually will need to look for something really old, but more often than not most of my old notes have little value to me in the present.
But I am sticking with Obsidian because it’s versatile and relatively lightweight (easily passes the Moby Dick test on my 2013 MacBook Air.) I don’t obsess over deep linking but with some forward and back-linking here and there I find it easier to locate recent notes than with a folder-based system.
Posted by washere
May 8, 2022 at 06:52 PM
I agree. But can’t generalize, also depends on the field, genre, person, her quality level, etc. Faulkner wouldn’t need a computer, nor Einstein, but their assistants would have been much more useful to either with them.
That’s what I said a few times here, the biggest tool is the mind, but nobody talks about how to develop that for productive and/or creative purposes much, just software. Sort of software fetish.
BTW the guy in the clip below in silver on TV, Larry David who created Seinfeld and then Curb your enthusiasm, has a unique genius note taking system, secret to his success but you won’t find anything on that online + his mastery of his field & genre which took decades.
Dellu wrote:
>I find most of the notes I wrote a few years ago pretty useless for the
>current me.
>Even the snippets I had in Evernote long time ago, appear so awful when
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E33Z7-gY_js