And Another Thing!

#perspective #alternatives #writing #note-taking #platform

Decision Fatigue is Real, I've Decided

There's a fine line between genius and madness, right? What about between chasing the new and learning from the old? In this case I'm talking about PKM.

It started with Zettelkasten (worth the read), after trying many ways of capturing and gathering my thoughts. There were paper notebooks and individual pages and sticky notes and scrap paper to try to hold it together, but the physical methods I tried all failed me in ways I couldn't cope with. What happened when I left my list at home, or I needed to capture something bigger than the paper in front of me?

You might be thinking, "well duh, why aren't you using the Internet you fool?"

Snark aside, it's true. There are plenty of articles out there discussing the finer points of physical vs. digital note-taking. I have tried a lot of options along the way. Just a few:

The one that stuck and worked best for me was Roam Research. I was lucky enough to be grandfathered in while it was being developed, so I have one graph that's "free" and I used it daily from January 12th, 2020 until I switched to Obsidian on May 24th, 2024. I'll break out another note all about my take on Roam and other similar offerings, like Obsidian and Logseq and other PKM options, other than to say that I like all three for different reasons.

It's very nice to have a platform that I can use as my second brain, and that I have snapshots of (hourly at the moment, nice feature they added). It's helped take some of the load off of my mind, and combined with therapy has made such a huge difference in my mental state.

Granted, getting to this point hasn't been easy. One of the early pitfalls was getting sucked into the method more than actually using the system itself. If you start to see something like "meta to-do lists" that involved working on the system you're using - it's a slippery slope to madness.