Productivity systems and outboard brains
Y’know, like personal wikis and zettelkästen.
First considered December 16, 2024.
First published December 16, 2024.
Last updated February 21, 2025.
Status: Still quite unfinished.
Why bother?
There are people out there who ask “Why do I need a personal wiki when my collection of text files are fine”?
It is not assumed that a system will revolve around a single program such as Obsidian or Emacs’ org-mode, although many people quite reasonably swear by org-mode and put their entire lives into it.
Here’s what to look for in a good system.
Desiderata
- When you search for a thing you’re sure is in your system, you can find it easily.
- If you need to pause a task while you wait for a blocker to complete (say, someone who knows more needs some time to get back to you), you have a way to write down the incomplete state of the task and get back to it easily and quickly later.
- If you want to store images or other files in your system (some pictures can be worth at least a thousand words each) to illustrate a point, you can, easily.
- If you’re wondering what you can do now (say you’re trying to figure out what to do next), then your system will be able to surface things you can start and bury things you can’t or shouldn’t start yet.
On the other hand, you can waste a lot of time with one of these
On the other hand, you can waste a lot of time with an outboard brain if you put stuff in it that you never end up reading. This seems to be a problem with commonplace-book- and zettelkästen-type uses:
Most people simply have no need for lots of half-formed ideas, random lists of research papers, and so on. This is what people always miss about “Zettelkasten”: are you writing a book? Are you a historian or Teutonic scholar like Niklas Luhmann? Do you publish a dozen papers a year? Are you the 1% of the 1%? No? Then why do you think _you_ need a Zettelkasten? If you are going to be pulling out a decent chunk of those references for an essay or something, possibly decades from now, then it can be worth the upfront cost of entering references into your system, knowing that you’ll never use most of them and the benefit is mostly from the long tail, and you will, in the natural course of usage, periodically look over them to foster serendipity & creativity; if you aren’t writing all that, then there’s no long tail, no real benefit, no intrinsic review & serendipity, and it’s just a massive time & energy sink. Eventually, the user abandons it… and their life gets better.
• In practice 95% of the use cases can be naturally unbundled into disjoint apps, and the lack of centralization and cross-app hyperlinking has no real negative effects.
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