Excerpts from a conversation about personal information management

The note on semantic and operational distinction of notes is interesting. I personally ditched hierarchies when I switched to Org-Roam. I used to think all the time where a specific note would belong - should I organize my notes by dates? Should I use the datetree feature of Org-Mode? Should I put everything in one file or split between multiple files grouping notes by some categories or tags.

These days, the only question I have to ask myself is "in what context do I want to rediscover this note?". For example, I don't usually sit around thinking: "Didn't we discuss this SSH-related problem with Jeffrey and Anna back in May? Let me go to the may-2024 folder of my notes and grep through them...". Instead, I would just go to either of these notes titled: 'ssh' or 'Jeffrey' or 'Anna' and search for backlinks, where I will surely find my notes related to that discussion, even if they're spread out across multiple days and many notes in multiple places. And it doesn't really matter where specific notes are - which file, what nested hierarchy of headings, etc.

Zettelkasten really does work. You just need a quick an easy way of cross-linking different notes. I highly recommend this little book called 'How to Take Smart Notes', it's fairly small, you can go through it within an hour or so. And remember the famous quote of Richard Feynman: "Notes aren't a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process"... If you don't find a good way of taking notes, you won't be doing a good job of thinking.

Wiegley's "Today's agenda has 133 items on it," now joins David Foster Wallace's "I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today," in quotes I wish I could recite to others to express how I think and feel.

Tangentially,

> I have over 30,000 tasks in my Org Mode overall. 23,000 of them are TODOs. Several thousand of them are still currently open. I'm never gonna see them all. Even if I wanted to, I'm never gonna see them all.

I think this is interesting but I'm totally out of the loop.

He links to https://github.com/brabalan/org-review - what is that? What is org mode and org mode review? What is a sketchnote and how do you create one?

Just forget stuff like a cool person

Does anyone handle org-mode for attachments + mobile sync?

I use Autosync on android and a script that runs on my laptop. This works great for the text files, but the attachments/data files (say like screenshots) are a pain to find and open on mobile. Second, they're even more painful to add from mobile.

I'm fine with quite elaborate set ups if it solves this problem.

It seems this is excerpts from a video or screenshare. Does anyone have a link for that? I’m curious to see some of the things the speaker refers to.

While the authors both use org mode, this includes a broader discussion that includes various ideas and tips, including the books "Atomic Habits", "Getting Things Done", and "Building a Second Brain". (Updated, since my previous comment thought it was only about org mode).

org-review is interesting, but I just added another TODO state: DEFER

Then projects, todos, agenda items etc can go from TODO -> DEFER and I know that they're "not now" items. That has seemed sufficient for me. Tracking exactly when they're reviewed has been too much, and not everything needs a scheduled time in the future for review.

This is an excellent, if meandering, discussion -- lots of great nuggets in there I want to follow up on. Thanks for sharing!

I was hoping there is an audio/podcast version of this, but I haven't found it yet.

The approach in the article by strictly controlling everyone with AI sounds absolutely dystopian. I wouldn't want to work in such a company.

This is a satire ... right?

“Do not-doing and nothing is left undone.”