Preface

I've been meaning to write here for a long time but never really got around to it for one reason or another. There was always something keeping me from here. As I rested on my laurels having initially launched the site, and my final exams period beginning, then the thrust of Summer Vacation, and so on, I got caught up in it all. Reflecting on it more now, I think I was more afraid to be messy here.

The name of this entry is more a joke at this point. I've had 'Notes on Notetaking' as an empty link on my site since I created a writing section here. What could possibly be said about notetaking? I can pretend you asked. And having returned with more insight, the answer is really not much.

Productivity systems are bulky

Productivity systems are useless when they become the object of productivity.

I recently stopped updating my Obsidian vault when it dawned on me I'll never revisit this information ever again. Productivity systems in general are bound to fail when they're cumbersome to maintain or just contain useless information. Using a system like a second brain or Zettelkasten tends to become the whole thing to be productive about. Massive networks of hyperlinks, references, tiny thoughts and redundancies –all compiled in a nice diagram that deceptively suggests everything's related.

I suppose this diagram undermines my authority on personal knowledge management (PKM). My second brain has roughly the same number of connections as a tardigrade. Having spent a considerable amount of time contemplating my notes systems I can certainly say there is a narcissism to PKM I recognized in my former self that is shared among the people who obsess over productivity tools. It's a narcissim I recognize in other productivity fetish circles, that expensive stationery and pretty notes suggest deeper thought and that wasting time learning clunky software is some kind of badge of honor. The aestheticism of PKM tools implies that these productivity systems are reserved for only the highest-level, most sophisticated thinkers with the best thoughts.

Digital Minimalism

I recently read Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport in an attempt to curb my digital consumption habits. Picking up my phone at any hour of the day, scrolling through Instagram or answering messages, I get a profound feeling of guilt: like I'm doing something I'm not supposed to be doing. My intuition was right, I think I was just too afraid of missing out to act on my impulse.

I read the whole thing in a single day. While the book can be overly-dramatic in describing the 'David and Goliath' struggle between social media companies and their users, it's a quick read that approaches the issue of digital hyper-consumption with long-term and pragmatic fixes. My favorite parts were rarely about social media but instead the discussions on the importance of solitude, practicing ambulation (going on contemplative walks), and seeing the importance of doing things for the sake of doing them. All-in-all, the book is a well-balanced look at the attention economy and techniques to use digital technologies in critical ways.

As a result, I've chosen to take on Newport's suggestion of a 'digital declutter' to reset my brain before clarifying how digital technologies will serve the underlying objectives driving my consumption. So far, it's been pretty awesome. Having only recently started the declutter, I lay awake at night most nights thinking about all sorts of things but it all comes back to the profound realization: I have so much enery. No matter how long my day is, how much I do, my brain is never tired. I want to be challenged. The book was kind of an awakening in this way. There is something so profoundly uncurious and docile about the people who live through their phones. It's certainly not their fault, Newport writes extensively about how social media apps are carefully engineered to ensnare unsuspecting users. He points out how companies have recently pivoted to marketing social media as a foundational technology, that it's something everyone should just use and they'd be crazy not to. On top of this, Newport emphasizes the importance of critical consumption: using digital technologies with express intent. People are oftentimes distracted by social media because they're effectively 'digitally sauntering' with no purpose, leading them to scroll endlessly.

Wrapping Up

While I read digital minimalism to clarify my relationship with social media and other forms of digital consumption, it also taught me that activities don't have to solve a problem to be valuable. Back to the subject of second brains, I have to say it only really seemed to create new problems

Second brain technologies rely on the assumption that the limitations of memory diminish productivity when it could not be further from the truth. If anything, second brains prove that memory is a relatively negligable parameter in the productivity equation. Memory decays gracefully. Even if we were not supposed to forget, wouldn't the past become impossibly complex to navigate, leading to new redundancies? There is supposed to be distance and weight to the past as there is with the present, but they're not supposed to be the same. Memory is not flat or permanent.