But I know the feeling. I've seen videos about people who have special physical filing cabinets for notecards that take up an entire tabletop. They have to figure out how to number these things, which can open up a can of worms and lots of differing opinions.
This can seem farcical at times. Sometimes the knowledge-management world can seem like a manifestation of OCD or perfectionism.
But to be clear, I don't want to discount in any way that such approaches could work for many people on many projects. My general take is that if a person is being mindful about the _effort in_ versus _benefit out_, they'll probably end up in a pretty good place.
For YouTubers in a niche of a niche, sometimes there is a positive feedback loop to just go deeper down the rabbit hole. For example, once a content creator has "committed" to a paper-only Zettelkasten system, what are the chances they are going to "mellow out" and move to a hybrid paper+digital system?
How do you know this? What do you mean? They are in the top X% of software engineers and computer scientists in terms of ... (some kind of productivity)?
I'm not familiar with Porter, but Wiegley is a heavy contributor to a number of open source projects, is the author of the Ledger plain text accounting system, has been emacs maintainer since 2015, operates his own software consultancy, and is very active in several open source discussion lists. The guy is a dynamo.
Perhaps I should have said "impactful" instead of "productive", but in my experience the two tend to be correlated.
John Wiegley has authored a number of highly used open source tools and libraries. So has Adam Porter (although perhaps not as much as John).
I wasn't comparing them globally with all SW engineers. My point was that they likely have accomplished more than most, if not all, the commenters in this submission. I, personally, would be cautious in criticizing their workflow unless I can demonstrate something better. Otherwise it's just armchair criticism.
Many of these are points I would agree with, except:
> [comparisons to] commenters in this submission
I wouldn’t make claims as to the level of accomplishment here, not least of which because I’m not willing to pick any one definition of accomplishment.
For example, I’ll avoid the temptation to conflate visibility and popularity with productivity.
> be cautious in criticizing their workflow unless I can demonstrate something better
Yes, making assessments based on comparisons against alternatives is important. And I’m inclined to give their approach attention and consideration, especially for people with their mindset and skillset. But generally, I’m not willing to grant any particular level of broader applicability for a given audience.
So I would reframe this discussion as a question: “Which of their practices are likely to work for [me/my team]?”
Like so many things in life, valid generalization is hard. Especially hard when no one knows the correct answer, so instead we assess better and worse. So, reinforcement learning. And RL in complex environments with large action spaces can be very data intensive!
>This can seem farcical at times. Sometimes the knowledge-management world can seem like a manifestation of OCD or perfectionism.
>But to be clear, I don't want to discount in any way that such approaches could work for many people on many projects. My general take is that if a person is being mindful about the _effort in_ versus _benefit out_, they'll probably end up in a pretty good place.
>My general take is that if a person is being mindful about the _effort in_ versus _benefit out_, they'll probably end up in a pretty good place.
It would be too coarse-grained to say I'm categorically dismissive of paper-based systems. My views are more nuanced.
Right, I'm aware of Luhmann and Zettelkasten and ZK-inspired systems. I'm glad it works for him and many others.
Still, if one goes down the rabbit holes of ZK and knowledge management systems, you will sooner or later find some videos that leave the realms of productivity and venture into the farcical.
This is important to recognize: "There is a common mistake people [make] when [using] PARA, Zettelkasten, GTD, Bullet Journals [...]. / They assume each system is universal. / These systems were [NOT] built for mass consumption." - 2022 blog post by Zain Rizvi titled "PARA vs. Zettelkasten: The false binary" https://www.zainrizvi.io/blog/para-vs-zettelkasten-the-false...
Right, I may have read your comment as generally dismissive of personal knowledge management systems in general, but I see you have a much more nuanced approach. Thanks for clarifying!
> For a YouTuber it's more advantageous to keep switching between various systems to keep generating more YouTube content.
That's a factor, yes, but before I will grant that it is more (or less) advantageous, we would need to have a much longer conversation. (Right now, however, I'm not particularly interested in running experiments and drawing conclusions about how to best optimize YouTube content creation.)
But I know the feeling. I've seen videos about people who have special physical filing cabinets for notecards that take up an entire tabletop. They have to figure out how to number these things, which can open up a can of worms and lots of differing opinions.
This can seem farcical at times. Sometimes the knowledge-management world can seem like a manifestation of OCD or perfectionism.
But to be clear, I don't want to discount in any way that such approaches could work for many people on many projects. My general take is that if a person is being mindful about the _effort in_ versus _benefit out_, they'll probably end up in a pretty good place.
For YouTubers in a niche of a niche, sometimes there is a positive feedback loop to just go deeper down the rabbit hole. For example, once a content creator has "committed" to a paper-only Zettelkasten system, what are the chances they are going to "mellow out" and move to a hybrid paper+digital system?