A lot of this note is paraphrasing Sam Matla. A lot of what he’s said has lined up with what I believe, so I’ve decided to keep it most as he’s worded it, but with my own links to other things.
Tools that allow you to build a Second brain like obsidian are great and can absolutely speed up your workflows and be more effective at what they do. This same problem exists with AI Tools. But for many, they’ve just resulted in another way to procrastinate.
Personal knowledge management can be a form of sophisticated procrastination. Making complex systems in a tool like Obsidian, makes you feel smart. Just because you feel good, doesn’t mean you’re doing good work or working at all.
Constantly tweaking your perfect system, or changing system entirely with that shiny new app that will make everything click. This is all just Premature Optimization, all for a click that will never happen.
The click that is being chased, doesn’t exist, because there’s no perfect system. But it feels good to chase it.
Link to originalSam Matla
Doing good work, almost always involves uncertainty, frustration, confusion, and disorganization. Trying to eliminate these elements is futile and is a robust exercise in procrastination.
Link to originalSam Matla
Personal Knowledge Management is not work. Nor is it a pre-requisite. If you think that it is, then you’ll run into issues. […] PKM is an aid to work.
Settling with good enough is the best thing you can do for your productivity and your work output.
Link to originalSam Matla
Principles for beating Procrastination
- Stick with one tool for the next 6 months (starting 2024-01-09 for me)
- Just Relax, and just trust your brain more. Dont fall for the Collector’s Fallacy
- Be project-based with your note-taking
- Improve your work capacity & output FIRST
- Set clear boundaries (for improving note system)
In the 4th point, Sam mentions that Obsidian gives you amazing search features. So you don’t need to spend a lot of time on organizing your notes.
My notes follow this pattern, the only organizing I do is for publishing. My /blog/ and /runbooks/ are getting published and they contain more topical information. So if I publish /runbooks/postgres/docker.md and later add another post to postgres, those notes will both appear in /runbooks/postgres/ in a ListPage with quartz. Though I do have some other folders like: gaming, books, projects that I might remove and replace with tags.
This is also why I think Dataview just gets in the way.
Sam likes to separate his capturing and Processing of information.