> How do you know? Maybe their set of habits are a complicated system which they are just not aware of being a system, thus not they are not talking about as they consider it as natural or just obvious.

You're absolutely right. But with that you are also just arguing about the definition of "system" - everything is a system in one way or another depending on where you draw the line. If I scribble stuff into my notebook and throw it away once it's full, you can call that a system.

By system here I meant a system or product that has a well-known name they can point to, like Zettelkasten or GTD or BASB, etc.

> If I scribble stuff into my notebook and throw it away once it's full, you can call that a system.

If you do it regulary, then yes, it is. A system in that space is mostly definied by habits and rules. Regulary doing the same stuff again and again, even if it's braindead simple, is basically what people consider as a system. Though, whether it's good, is a different topic.

> By system here I meant a system or product that has a well-known name they can point to, like Zettelkasten or GTD or BASB, etc.

Yes, that's what I'm curious about. Zettelkasten is not very complex. Actually it's even very simple. The whole secret is to use reference in your notes and connect them by using a simple naming/numbering-schema. Not much work, not much system. People do that with their notebooks all the time.

The whole cargo-cult growing from it is a different problem and indeed something really bothersome at some point. But GTD and BASB are also not much more complicated if you take the gist of them.

Maybe people are stimulated to build big trades of them because they are just so quite simple and obvious? Many undefinied are, many space for people to paint their thoughts and habit on the canvas.

Right, iterating on your workflow is a normal part of work.

> I see a similar trend with org-mode users. It's great and all on a technical level (I've used it myself in the past) but it's easy to fall into the elisp and customization rabbit hole.

I think part of the issue is that people try to jump into the middle of something which has evolved without going through that evolution themselves. In other words, they need to go to the starting line and iterate from there rather than pushing through to the finish line. I have seen some complex workflows in Org mode, but those flows were built up over years.

The software analogy would be premature optimization. Developers attempting to use tools which are meant for scaling without knowing the how or why of these tools. If you don't know why you should use something, then you might not be to the point where you need it.

I learn the most about how to tackle a problem once I stumble across the need to fix the problem. The best tools are those I find when I then go in search for the fix.

I went through multiple stages with org-mode myself: 1) Just use it naively, instead of the ad-hoc note-taking I did before. 2) Customize it heavily, including a system for citation management. I definitely wasted a lot of hours reading documentation and blog post. But I also ended up using that system for 5+ years consistently. 3) Switch to paper notebooks for calendar, tasks and note-taking.

During 2), I often felt overwhelmed by the ever-growing list of TODOs, in particular those that scheduled at regular intervals.

With paper notebooks, and manual migration of tasks from one month to the next, it's easier to say "no" to things.

But, now that I've filled up three 200-page notebooks, I do struggle to find some old notes, or even remember that they exist.

So, maybe I will revert to an org-mode based "archive" for long-term ideas.

> I often felt overwhelmed by the ever-growing list of TODOs

This is an issue with a global set of todo lists. I follow a butchered BASB type of system. I just keep all ideas in resources folders. Todo items go in those folders, but those are just ideas rather than actual todo items. Then do an occasional review to determine what I want to work on. Whatever I decide gets a folder in projects and todo items get actual deadlines. If I can't work on it, then it gets archived and maybe I'll go back to it later. The only todo items I'll look at are in those project folders and they make progress based on deadlines or they get ditched.

> I think part of the issue is that people try to jump into the middle of something which has evolved without going through that evolution themselves

This is so true. I use a small subset of Org's features, and I have grown my workflow really slowly.

I also have very minimal dotfiles, yet I consider myself an advanced Emacs and Unix user.

It doesn't need to be a timesink. Also, as you say, complicated workflows are the consequence of iterating through many years and are likely paying off the efforts multiplied by a big factor.

I know elisp and I never use it for org-mode. Actually all of my use of org-mode can be summarized in this short comment.

I use org-mode as 'outline mode.' I only do this with it:

* asterisk denotes a level

* asterisk next to an asterisk denotes a sub-level of a level

* sublevels can have sublevels, effectively making them a level, by the above rules

Then you press tab to expand a level or sub-level, press tab again to contract a level or sub-level.

That's it! I tried some of the org-mode add-ons but never found them useful; this is the only one I use regularly.

I've been using Dynalist very similarly. I agree that it's a very simple approach but works well.

org-mode is outline-mode plus some extra markup like timestamps or links. Those are the basics.

Then, you can create views of one or several combined files. For example all items with a timestamp in the near future (deadlines). The standard view for organization is called org-agenda.

Aside from that, you have many other features which you won't need to use initially. For example, the ability to embed code and do literate programming.

Also, better keybindings and a table editor to die for.