# Unbundling Tools for Thought
source: https://ift.tt/yNa5Zkm tags: #literature #zettelkasten #notetaking #tools-for-thought uid: 202212271346 —
In practice 95% of the use cases can be naturally unbundled into disjoint apps, and the lack of centralization and cross-app hyperlinking has no real negative effects.
Journalling: 86% of the nodes in my personal wiki are journal entries. Mostly there’s no reason for them to be there, they are rarely linked to by anything.
Todo Lists: I used to write todo lists in the daily entries in my personal wiki. But this is very spartan: what about recurring tasks, due dates, reminders, etc.?
Learning: if you’re studying something, you can keep your notes in a TfT. This is one of the biggest use cases. But the problem is never note-taking, but reviewing notes. Over the years, I’ve found that long-form lecture notes are all but useless, not just because you must remember to review them on a schedule, but because spaced repetition can subsume every single lecture note. It takes practice and discipline to write good spaced repetition flashcards, but once you do, the long-form prose notes are themselves redundant.
And you could argue that I could have stayed in my personal wiki by implementing support for transclusion (to assemble all the fragments into one view) and improved the version control UI. But this advice can be applied equally to every domain I attack with a personal TfT and for which it is lacking: just write a plugin to do X. The work becomes infinite, the gains are imaginary. You end up with this rickety structure of plugin upon plugin sitting on top of your TfT, and UX typically suffers the death by a thousand cuts.
Process Notes: e.g. “how do I do X in Docker”. I often have cause to write notes like this and can never quite think of where to put them. But this can’t be a genuine use case for a tool for thought because there’s very little need to create links between process notes. So this is just a matter of finding somewhere to put them in the filesystem or in a note-taking app.
And most of what I see is junk. It’s never the Zettelkasten of the next Vannevar Bush, it’s always a setup with tens of plugins, a daily note three pages long that is subdivided into fifty subpages recording all the inane minutiae of life. This is a recipe for burnout.
I agree with this
Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt. Every link doubly so. The more you have, the more in the red you are. Every node that has utility—an interesting excerpt from a book, a pithy quote, a poem, a fiction fragment, a few sentences that are the seed of a future essay, a list of links that are the launching-off point of a project—is drowned in an ocean of banality. Most of our thoughts appear and pass away instantly, for good reason.
The more crap you have, the harder it is to find the actually interesting stuff. 202212271453
But the main drawback is: you don’t need it. The idea of having this giant graph where all your data is hyperlinked is cute, but in practice, it’s completely unnecessary. Things live in separate apps just fine. How often, truly, do you find yourself wanting to link a task in your todo list app to a file in Dropbox? And if you do manage to build this vast web of links: how often is each link actually followed?
If I needed to do this, I could do it (in the worst case) with Hook. Is having ideas connected even necessary? Response to #zettelkasten cynicism:
- Just because links aren’t often followed doesn’t mean that adding links is wrong. Adding a backlink to something means that the next time that you try to look up the thing that you added the backlink to, you have much more context about how you’ve previously thought about that thing or how it could be used.
The rest are “incidental reference” links: I’m writing a journal entry saying I’m working on project X, so I add a link to project X, out of some vague feeling of duty to link things. And it’s pointless.
don’t agree with this. Just because it’s difficult to link things to relevant atomic concepts doesn’t mean it’s not helpful. I have noted that I’ve done this
The natural conclusion of most tools for thought is a relational database with rich text as a possible column type. So that’s essentially what I built: an object-oriented graph database on top of SQLite.
This is basically capacities.io 202212271351, and what I thought about in 202207051412
The “one graph database” is an unproductive, monistic obsession.