Cal Newport on note-taking 🔗
Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism has left a lasting impression with me. A lot of his ideas around technology were incredibly useful and helped me come down from some kind of lockdown-inspired extremism into something a little more grounded, and a little less bingey. Whenever I’m in the grips of meta/tool-sickness, once I figure out that’s what’s going on I’ve probably forgotten something useful from that book.
He has a podcast, but I don’t listen to it much. A recent epidsode, however, had some stuff about note-taking and I have been deep in the grips of fussing around with that so I used it for my dishwashing and coffee making soundtrack this morning.
His key take is “get rid of friction,” which … yes. Back in the heyday of 43 Folders, most of my impatience came less from the content itself and more the constant riffing on “methodologies” that sounded more and more abstract, overthought, and overwrought. I just stopped believing any of it. Because there are only a few occurrences of the word “yarn” in my 20-year-old blog archive, I was able to find an entry in the non-public archive:
Date: November 14, 2005 at 10:05:06 PM PST
I’ve never hit a gtd adherent. I need to be up front about that.
I thought about picking fights with a few, I guess, but it’d involve barging into the comments over at 43 Folders like Bruce Lee in “Fist of Fury” and fighting with people who want little more than to be more efficient and get more work done. They don’t deserve to be antagonized for that.
Sometimes I read a comment from someone who insists that his routine involves some insanely arcane and convoluted use of yarn and a special shell script he whipped up that reads crap down from his Backpack account and then squirts it into his Palm, makes a redundant backup on the server he maintains in Malaysia and produces printed 3x5 copies in triplicate, one of which he pins to his infant son’s sleeve before leaving for the morning (“If I died, I couldn’t live with him thinking his father went out the door without an action list and a plan!”).
Sometimes, I was saying, I read something like that and I want to find that person and give him a noogie or burn two of his four backup copies. One, because I imagine that the “system” being described is a giant lie concocted by someone caught up in the thrill of inventing systems instead of actually, you know … using them to get stuff done. Two, because if these people are making these systems work for them then they’re surely VERY POWERFUL BEINGS we should hate and fear because we’re all going to end up working for them.
Newport’s take in 2024 is a little more kind, but comes down to “if you like building systems, build ’em, but, like, acknowledge that you’re indulging a hobby.”
He shared another idea I’ve come to appreciate in slightly different form: While you want to remove friction from the note-taking process, it’s not a great idea to hyper-atomize your notes and truly empty your brain of ideas in the hopes that The System will glue them all back together.
There is such a thing as too little friction. Whenever I’m playing around with a todo thing now I seldom enable “quick capture” or “get this into the system by forwarding an email into it” unless my overall operating state is pretty mindful and deliberate, because I know what it means to capture something without considering it much. At best, congratulations, you’ve just added a puppy to the box without a plan for feeding it or taking it to the vet for shots. At worst, it slips into the bowels of The System and becomes an ongoing source of guilt until you burn the system down and start a new one. The remedies for those possibilities just add more friction at point of capture (so great, you managed to launch capture with a single keystroke, but you still have a metadata chore), or require a disciplined maintenance approach.
That is todos, which are not notes, but the challenges seem similar. I’d also have to fiddle around with org-roam and a few other systems a little more to weigh how much discovery they offer at point of capture. He was wise to keep his criticisms vague, because differing feature sets + extensibility makes generalizing fraught.
I will say that mastering org-capture was a mistake for me, personally, because it became too easy to create a proliferation of atomized, siloed entry points into the system. Friction is a sweet spot thing, and I still struggle to find that sweet spot.
Dune 🔗
I rewatched Dune last night to feel prepped for the second part. Initial reviews for the new release have seemed positive, saying that it reaps the rewards of the world-building and groundwork done in the first installment.
I didn’t like part 1 very much. It was fine, but the break-point didn’t work for me and there was just enough deviation from the source material right around that part of the story that I got distracted by it.
That was a bummer, because I’d built the coviplex partially in anticipation of Dune, but between streaming issues that made the picture quality poor and not-unseeable differences of opinion, it was a little bit of a letdown.
Last night it worked much better for me. I was able to shut off the part of my brain that was busy reconciling source and adaptation, and the picture quality was way better thanks to a solid stream, so I caught more. I’d still prefer some slightly different choices here and there, but this is an adaptation of a book I read yearly from age 13 to some time in my 30s. And, tomorrow this time I will be parked in the theater finishing the story. Not watching the (occasionally glitchy, low-res) credits roll and thinking “nobody’s even sure he’s going to get to make part 2.”
Running shoes day 🔗
Al wants to start running. I told myself I’d pick it up again when I got my weight down. Well, it’s down and I’ve got a potential running partner. So we’re going to find running shoes today. I do well with Brooks Addictions, but they have changed a few times over the years. I’ve really liked my Hoka Speedgoats for fast walks and hikes on less technical terrain. Curious to see what the shoe people recommend. Anyhow, looking forward to trying to pick that back up again. Endurance running is the physical thing I seem to be built to do competently without a ton of focus, and it’s time to shake off winter.