I kind of feel like a lot of this is “tool over technique” thinking.
For example, I just watched August Bradley’s “Life Operating System” video. And to be fair, he does some really cool stuff with Notion.
But if you think about it for a minute, the guy spent the mental effort to not only categorize everything in his life, but to develop an entire general-purpose information architecture system. He’s also hyper-disciplined to log and track everything in his system.
I have the sneaking suspicion that his success has far, far less to do with Notion than it does with those habits / cognitive processes.
Same sort of thing for Zettelkasten-based systems. I’m sure they’re useful if you’re willing to do all the effort of categorizing / maintaining the notes - but articles like this:
When asked how he published so much, Luhmann used to answer “I’m not thinking everything on my own. Much of it happens in my Zettelkasten. My productivity is largely explained by the Zettelkasten method” (original in German).
Because of statements like these, Luhmann’s Zettelkasten acquired a mythical status and has been deemed so valuable that it’s currently the subject of its own research project. But Luhmann never made a secret out of his method and it’s actually fairly simple to understand. And that’s good news! It means we can adopt his method and get the same benefits that made him such an eminent intellectual:
I don’t see that there’s any logical reason to believe that just using the method will inherently get you the same benefits. And it certainly feels bizarre to hear somebody attribute “thinking” to boxes with pieces of paper.
I’m reminded of Cal Newport’s observations, when looking for study habits that create student success, that most people are rather bad at answering questions like “so, how did you get to be such a great student?” You get lots and lots of explanations that aren’t replicable, and lots and lots of explanations that have nothing to do with them actually being successful.
There are definitely better ways to categorize notes, but I have the sneaking suspicion that the mental processes exhibited by somebody like August Bradley (deep thoughts about your personal information architecture, categorization, etc.) are more key than the adoption of a system that seems to have sprung out of obscurity just in time to create a couple of software startups. 