Connections – another type

I’ve been on an endless quest for the right organizational system. As I’ve previously mentioned, I am much more motivated by the setup step than the implementation step, thus the “endless” part of this quest. I’ve used a ton of applications/journals and so far I get a couple days to a couple weeks into it and then it lies fallow for ages (just look at the update frequency of this blog).

For personal project/task management I’ve settled on GTD for quite a while now. It has two overarching principles that resonate with me:

• Get everything out of your head an into a trusted system. Your brain works for short-term memory and problem solving, but long-term storage is better left to an external system designed for that purpose. Otherwise you have this constant nagging in your head to refresh all the long-term stuff and it impacts your ability to do problem solving.
• You don’t work on projects – you work on tasks. So saying you need to work on “cleaning the garage” is not helpful – you need to come up with an actionable next action and say you’ll work on that.

I’ve tried lots of apps, as well as pen and paper, and nothing seems to work noticeably better than anything else. So I’ve selected something that covers all the bases:

1. Allows quick entry
2. Understands the idea of contexts and next actions
3. Shows me only the next actions
4. Allows me to add “must be done today” tasks that I can see quickly
5. Syncs across devices

That covers the basic GTD workflow, except for the “Reference” part. This was covered by Evernote, then One Note, then pen and paper, then Google Docs, and none of that really worked out for me. I found a basic note taking application called CherryTree that had more-or-less what I was looking for, but I wanted to sync it across devices (without resorting to Dropbox sync).

And then I stumbled onto Obsidian, The Second Brain, and the Zettlekasten system. The Second Brain idea in the abstract, and Zettlekasten in the concrete, also espouse the first point of GTD – get things out of your head and into a trusted system.

The idea here is that the brain is good at making tactical decisions and coming up with ideas, but could use some help when it comes to persisting longer-term ideas that need quick retrieval at arbitrary times in the future. So rather than spend cycles constantly refreshing an ever-growing list of tasks and facts, get them into a trusted system and free those cycles up for more creative work.

Keeping in mind that I like the “setup” phase more than the “doing the thing” phase, we’ll see how this goes.