I was a mess; How productivity nearly killed my motivation — Fortunately…there is hope!
There’s no doubt that many of been always keen to make things better and faster. No surprise that I also got interested in Productivity -scene. In this brief post, I summarise my findings so far.
Good, Bad & Ugly
There is no abundance of To-Do and Note-taking apps. Every week comes new, shiny and even “better” tool to manage it all. At least, I thought.
There are nothing good or wrong in productivity apps; they just exist. It is solely my decision if I want use them or not. In fact, I know several extremely productive persons who don’t any tools, except calendar for appointments.
As Mac -user I like Things 3 to-do app, I’ve used Evernote in the past, Alfred-app is excellent, Craft note-taking is good etc. Loads of good stuff.
You must have noticed that in note-taking space, especially following apps are hot topics; Notion, Obsidian, Mem, Bear, Joplin, Amplenote. Earlier, Evernote was a king and Microsoft’s OneNote. To-Do app Wunderlist was great.
To Understand the Process
Traditional note-taking (and to-do) process goes like this:
Especially Evernote’s Capture-part satisfied me with previous (figure 1.) process. There is multiple ways to capture and collect information:
- Write
- Scan (or take a photo)
- Record audio
- Send email to Evernote
- Screenshot
- Save web-page
Organising notes can be done with Folders and #tags.
Searching and retrieving notes is easy due to powerful search-tool including state-of-the-art OCR (Optical Character Recognition).
And that’s not all! I could also copy link from a note into another note. Linking; which is now days hot topic. Pretty!
So, What Was My REAL Problem?
With clear answer: Collector’s fallacy. Which simply means that one saves everything that is even little interesting and “I might need that link/XYZ/article/screenshot… someday…”-attitude.
In practice, it is not note-taking. It is collecting stuff. Which ultimately leads to waste of space, and info overload.
Second problem: usefulness. My thousands of notes didn’t serve me. Of course there were few articles & notes which I used frequently. But 99% I didn’t read later anymore. In addition to that, I didn’t learn anything that I could not have been learning without collecting enormous pile of info stuff.
Final, third problem: maintenance & app switching costs. Putting folders in place, tagging notes, trying new apps (and importing/exporting notes) took time and effort. By the way, it is great way to pretend (and even I believed myself!) to be productive!
There is hope!
All these different experimentations, frustrations & effort have led to knowledge what to do & what not to do.
I strongly believe and know, it is very easy & feasible to have simple & effortless productivity system in place.
I’ve nearly finished my book related to Digital Productivity & Knowledge Worker’s Best Practices.
I’d appreciate to hear your comments, struggles and wishes that what you would like to have covered deeply in the coming book.
Feel free to comment and contact!
