A Great Illustration of Toxic Productivity

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@curtismchale
Thanks for the post. For what it may be worth, I find your videos to among the more useful around. I also appreciate both your expertise and down to earth style. :slight_smile: I hope you did not take any of my comments as disrespectful or dismissive in anyway. I tried to make it clear that I have and do learn a lot from some of the videos—yours included. It is just that too many such productivity oriented videos and podcasts are produced by those who don’t have to deal with the complexities of large organizations. I’m blessed because as the equivalent of the CEO, I have a lot of control of my schedule and the staff who report to me. Many people don’t have that luxury.

I’m using Obsidian primarily for my research files. I’d love to be able to use Obsidian as my professional project note and meeting note application. The problem I run into is the friction in viewing PDFs and other documents that I need imbedded in my meeting notes for quick reference. An example are spreadsheets of five year financial projections when I’m in a meeting with the finance committee and our CFO. Opening a spreadsheet or PDF within Obsidian while in a meeting is less “elegant” and with more friction than an app like Apple Notes or Craft. The other issue I have not been able to resolve is how to send the follow-up tasks in an Obsidian meeting note to a task manager. There was a Things plugin but the last time I checked it was abandoned (a concern I have with depending on plugins). I know there is a Todoist plugin but I don’t want to use Todoist. With Craft I can seamlessly send the follow-ups as grouped, discrete tasks to OF with the URL embedded. I can do essentially the same things from Apple Notes to Reminders. I suspect these friction points are the limitations of plain text files. I’d love to know if there is to a solution to my two friction points—if there was I’d probably jump to Obsidian in a heart beat! :slightly_smiling_face:

Anyway, keep up the good work. Your videos (and I’m sure your courses) are among the worthwhile. :slightly_smiling_face:

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@curtismchale I steer clear of a lot of videos in “PKM” but I sub to your channel and get your PKM weekly so I’d say keep up the good work. :blush:

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Agreed! @curtismchale 's channel is in the top 10% of YouTubers I follow, even if you include old tractors, and hit-and-miss engines (which is saying something).

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Strange. I just tried it in four different browsers, and they all worked fine when I pasted in the address https://www.youtube.com/@curtisgmchale

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At no point did I feel any comment here was “disrespectful”. Really I do my channel based on what I’m interested in, which is reflected in my slow growth because I don’t follow fads.

The Obsidian community is really early, in many ways it reminds me of the early WordPress community (I build WordPress sites). There are lots of new plugins and lots that get abandoned. I’d expect over the next year or two that the plugin contributions slow down and we get a bunch that are stable that you know will be around.

For follow up tasks, I just did a video last week about sending notes to OmniFocus with the title and link. It’s not individual lines, but I’m going to work on a Shortcut to take task templates from Obsidian to OF.

@AppleGuy thanks.
@JohnAtl thanks as well

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I’ll be sure to check out the video, I always learn from you post, much appreciated!

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Stop looking for the perfect productivity app, it doesn’t exist. You always have to put some thought using the tools you use. I like Cal Newport’s approach: stick with a tool at least for 6 months, and if there’s any friction

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The recent (and continuing) improvements in CloudKit performance and apps in general have been astounding to me. But my opinion is that folks who expect their ever expanding needs to be met in a (near) perfect manner will, at least for the current state of the art, continue to be disappointed at times.

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I think that people throughout history have been able to achieve great things without a “Roam research” or a perfect “Obsidian workflow”.

I mean, Cal Newport has a post doc, publishes a lot in his field, and publishes best selling books. Still, he uses trello and an analog planner; along with google documents to store his top goals and quarterly plans. Also, he uses physical books and a rather simple system in Evernote to manage his writing, writing it at the end with word.

Ryan Holiday also has an analog system. At a recent interview with the author of Peak Performance he also shared a simple system for writing all his books.

My point is, all this new and shiny tools introduce a lot of friction without the user knowing it. Always chasing the last shiny tool. All of this isn’t new, see for example this article. Since the beginning of GTD, people realized there is a market, where you get money incentivizing people to try the next shiny tool. Nowadays we see it clearly with this content creators that NEED YOU to change the tool you use, in order for them to keep getting views.

I honestly don’t even watch YouTubers that aren’t academics, engineers or in general “real hard working people”, when looking for advice about this tools. This is why I enjoy Cal Newport’s podcast, a normal guy, using regular tools accomplishing a lot. Instead of people that don’t have a real job and get money from algorithmic ads directed toward you.

Just try a tool for a month, realize the friction points and see if you can make something to improve them or tolerate them, then stick for 6 months with that tool and finally reevaluate.

Realize there is not a perfect tool. No tool will do the thinking of organizing everything for you. You need to have a plan, and organize all you want to do manually.

There’s a lot of successful people out there that don’t use Tana, Roam, Obsidian or the next new one that will appear in the next month to get things done.

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I was just perusing the GTD forums this morning and David Allen’s company still has folks running old versions of MacOS just to keep their Lotus Notes and eProductivity systems running. Some serious longevity there.

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The CIA used Lotus Notes for many years and collaborated with Lotus during its development. They continued to work with the company mostly on improving security. It had a lot of fans.

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I was one of them. I tried to make the switch to One Note when my workplace migrated to a locked down IT environment, but it just never took.

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:exploding_head::scream:

…

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YES! The change in mindset for me was that I realized I was doing so much work administering things and searching for information and not as much time doing the things. So, I changed my systems to de-prioritize “productivity,” and prioritize the actual doing of the things I wanted to do. I still have tools (albeit, fewer of them), but I re-designed the systems for using those tools to intentionally reduce my need to be fiddling with them and the information buried inside. As a result, I really have been able to do more things and I can concretely see where I’m procrastinating/distracted instead of masking that procrastination and distraction by pretending I’m being productive while rearranging, reorganizing, and otherwise administering my work.

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Next Tuesday I have a video on 3 Shortcuts from Obsidian → OmniFocus. One for project templates, one for single line tasks, one for a project extracted from a list in a note.

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Yeah, but then I’d have to do something useful :scream:

Anyway, I just know that the next one will be The One

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Awesome, I’ll be sure to check it out!

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Fun essay from The Verge. Don’t read too much into my sharing it. :slight_smile:

For me it was also nice to peek at more Chinese-made task apps.

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This quote is priceless:

A singular productivity tool that works for everyone is a unicorn — beautiful, perfect, and completely fictional

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Somehow that reminds me of this:

There’s no one workflow. It’s amazing what some people come up with. :slight_smile:

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