Hey, a little bit off-topic, but: here comes a very original HN experience. The author himself writes that tools are the least important, but for the HN crowd, it seems that tools are above anything. In consequence, the thread here is mostly about the tools only. Combined with the favorite topic of self-organization, this can serve as highly illustrative material about HN.
I think part of it is that the nature of the work done by a solo founder is very different from that of many HN readers.
It's a matter of scale. "Why use a database? CSV files do everything I need." That's true for many projects but not as much when you have a few TB of data.
Some jobs require you to scale in several dimensions: types of projects/data, number of observations of data like email, number of reference files, and people you interact with. I'm not a solo founder but I've been there too. Once you're managing data that's too large for your brain, you need a system that scales, like GTD. Tools are useful but not at all as important as the system. I've tried a lot of tools, but GTD has been the constant that has (to some extent) kept me from giving in to the stress. You can't understand the scaling issues until you've worked in that type of position, where the stress of managing stuff and dealing with stuff constantly coming at you can overwhelm you.
OP here. Thanks for reading the post! I agree with you. It seems that the HN crowd is very much interested in tools while I explicitly mention that the tool question is the least important one. I'm curious to know why folks are more interested in tools than principles or why there is little discussion about the principles.
Re-reading your post, I would say it comes from implied disagreement with your deprioritization of the right tools. You also use the word system a lot in the essay, which mentally translates to tool for a lot of people (myself included, if I’m not careful.) It’s also hard to do more than mildly agree or disagree with GTD and energy management principles. I also suspect anyone disagreeing with your main point, coming into this thread to insist they can remember everything to do, would be attacked. I agree more variety in the discussion would be nice.
