I feel overwhelmed all the time. I know that a lot of people feel like that these days, so at least I’m not alone in this. I try to do a lot with UA Kathachitra and my personal life. And sometimes, I can fall into what some in the productivity porn1 circles call “the collector’s fallacy”. I came across this way back in 2015 (I think) on zettelkasten.de.
Now, I know Zettelkasten are the rage these days. There’s Roam Research, Obsidian, Tinderbox, Devonthink, Drafts, Taio…to name just a few apps that I’ve seen. Not to mention Emacs, Orgmode, and all the wonderful tinkering that accompanies them2. All of them promise that you will be able to produce things faster and better. That you will become a creator.
There’s just one problem: you still need to do the work. And be confident in the work that you are doing. Now, I have an ADHD fuelled brain that is sure that it will remember everything 3 combined with some perfectionist tendencies. So I want to hoard ALL THE INFORMATION.
Let’s get a glimpse into how my collection (read: hoarding) problem works. It looks like this:
- Hundreds of open tabs in multiple browsers4 (I’ve maxed out my phone’s maximum allowed on more than one occasion),
- Nearly 4000 bookmarks in Raindrop.io (mostly unread, or read and unprocessed),
- My RSS reader (The Old Reader & Reeder 4) regularly acting as a holding space for things I want to read,
- Outside of Raindrop and Reeders, in several other places, I have saved to read/listen/watch:
- tweets and twitter threads,
- reddit post and comments,
- YouTube videos, and
- podcasts, and
- A constantly growing backlog of media to explore between all the streaming services.
You remember the list of apps I threw up before? I try to test ALL THE APPS. This drives a constant search for the next shiny object that will help me DO SOMETHING with all this input5. I’m pretty sure that I’ve paid a lot of money for apps and services for notetaking and productivity that I have never used.
Really though, all of – the hoarding of information nuggets, the switching of apps, the quest for becoming more efficient – it’s procrastination. Procrastination driven by fear. Fear of forgetting. Fear of not knowing. Fear of getting it wrong when the work is out there. Fear of… who knows?
The first thing that Christian and Sascha write is “Collectors don’t make progress.” That hit me hard. It hit me hard when I first read it, and it hits me hard today, when I’m writing it here. There are times when I don’t feel like I’ve made any progress on turning information into something that I can use for my entire life.
Over the last few months, as Vaidehi and I have been finding better ways to work. We’ve been forced to. So, it’s time to simplify and let a lot of things go. I promise you, this isn’t because I’ve read Cal Newport’s new book (I haven’t, and I’m not adding it to the pile).
But how do I simplify? And how did I cope this long? That’s for another post.
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Productivity porn (or food porn, home improvement porn, or travel porn) is like regular porn. You watch someone else do things instead of doing it yourself. I look at how other people do things efficiently and think about how to apply those tactics to my own life. But I don’t actually do that – because that is hard. It’s also hard to figure out if something is useful for me if I haven’t settled into a system. Spoiler: I never do. So it’s a hamster wheel of the next system, the next app, the new hotness. It’s exhausting. ↩
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The two reasons I haven’t fallen down the Emacs rabbit hole is that it isn’t available on iOS and it’s not good at working collaboratively. ↩
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Spoiler: it doesn’t. ↩
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I’m ashamed to say that there was a time when I lost my shit on a poor QA tester who borrowed my phone to test a webapp our company was working on. He cleared the cache as part of his process, and I went nuclear because I had lost a few hundred open tabs. The sad part is that I could reopen most of them from memory… ↩
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I vaguely considered writing tech reviews, but honestly, I don’t have the money, nor the energy to keep up with all the services that I want to explore. And if I did explore them, I would be dropping the ball on my life, and the company that we’re trying to build.zettelkastenzettelkasten method ↩
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