This is the 'official' explanation, and definitely true.
But most of it is selling that next productivity upgrade that we communally all seem to obsess over here. People sharing their note graphs is the same as the guy on youtube with a sixpack promising a new and revolutionary 5 minute ab routine.
And while the 5 minute ab routine certainly won't harm you, that body was built from months of discipline and required a full fitness routine, as well as careful calorie counting.
Just like actual productive note taking and creative thinking is about spending time with your notes every day, and not the software.
> “Just like actual productive note taking and creative thinking is about spending time with your notes every day, and not the software.”
This is very cynical reasoning. I’m not sure what this passage means.
For example, ‘productive note taking’ is a fraught statement to begin with, and the passage ends with the suggestion we’re wasting time—my guess.
I’m not making this minor point to have an argument, rather, to highlight a curious idea. Learning is arduous and a mixed bag. The cynical take down, or the undercutting joke is a bit of a psychological trick to snap us out of difficult decisions for spending too much time practicing and not enough time actually doing. Some might say whatever sport you make of learning, in the end it’s just ‘work’ … and doing nothing is also good use if our time for mental health.
So THEN, all this focus on note taking and learning how to learn is maddening and seems wasteful—not working and earning, not learning more of what employers pay money to do, and not just using the time to do nothing and be healthy. So the cynical argument (I’m starting to think this also could be a ‘joke’; XKCD) is to say all these note taking efforts are simply money making schemes.
Maybe some are. And, my personal take, maybe the note taking problem is just an interesting language/computer/information problem at _human_ scale.
> But most of it is selling that next productivity upgrade that we communally all seem to obsess over here.
True, this is the "tool fetish" that is associated to any activity, for example obsessing over sneakers when the objective is the routine job (and maybe, not jogging at all); the same principle applies to notes taking.
One could even extend it to being "excessively interested" in programming languages, when the objective is actually building products.
Daily processing is incredibly powerful, but once you've got the knack it's not hard to take useful notes that you won't refer to again for months or years. When I solve a tricky problem i file the solution under whatever keywords are relevant, and if I run into that problem again I can generally find it. (In the rare case that i don't, it didn't take long to file the answer so I'm unharmed by the note taking, and indeed likely helped nevertheless, as putting it into words helped my brain understand its properties.)
But most of it is selling that next productivity upgrade that we communally all seem to obsess over here. People sharing their note graphs is the same as the guy on youtube with a sixpack promising a new and revolutionary 5 minute ab routine.
And while the 5 minute ab routine certainly won't harm you, that body was built from months of discipline and required a full fitness routine, as well as careful calorie counting.
Just like actual productive note taking and creative thinking is about spending time with your notes every day, and not the software.