A Farewell to Productivity Pr0n

I’ve been chasing the productivity dragon for years. I started off with a little G.T.D. man. What’s the harm? All the cool kids are doing it!

That path lead to OmniFocus, dalliances with online tools such as Asana, several open source things I can’t even remember the names of and most recently for years Things 3.

Alongside these sorts of productivity apps are also your notes or “second brain” apps. I’ve been a digital note-taker first for years at this stage. Paper notes to me are transitionary, not permanent.

What do I store? How to’s, Configuration snippets for techy devices, lists of holiday plans and packing lists, learning notes on different subjects and hobbies, blogging ideas, how to clean the coffee maker, Quotes, How to use the sterilisation tablets that clean my water bottle. A random assortment of varying importance. I have been through many different apps and methodologies over time.

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I’ve used Evernote and OneNote back in the day. I was a hardcore Bear user for a long time, even through the salad years where V2.0 was a whisper of promise that never seemed to arrive.

Then most recently Obsidian. It’s what the cool kids use right?

Obsidian could offer me a graph of my notes, plugins, themes, back links folders, tags…. All these bells and whistles to improve me! Make me better. A Second brain! Backlinks! A connected map of notes. Tabs! Markdown! What a plethora of stuff to play with and tweak!

I found myself a few weeks ago watching yet another productivity guru ¹ explaining his workflow and his 13 (Yes 13!) plugins to see how I can improve, tweak and change my setup. Do I need templates. Different folders. What plugins am I missing? Is it good enough?

I realised I was watching yet another man in yet another video telling me surface level chuff about the basics of this tool that I’d seen in every other video I’d seen. An ocean wide rush through features that is a puddle deep.

The scales fell from my eyes. There was no great revelations to be found here. Nothing speaks to me about why this is better than any other tool, nor nothing relevant to me that I didn’t already know. Lots of the complexity seems for complexities sake. And of course the video ends with a “We’ve only scratched the surface, please like and subscribe for more Obsidian content”. Ahh the promise of more complexity. More hidden knowledge. The productivity dragon is in another (the next?) castle.

I vocalised the nagging feeling. “Who gives a shit?”

I started moving my notes to Apple notes that night.

I don’t want a tool where half the time in the tool is fiddling with how to use the tool. I don’t want to watch any more 30 minute videos from these “productivity gurus” who like an ouroboros eating itself is a factory making productivity videos about how they write and plan to make their productivity videos, or sell plugins and scripts for the. tools to then amke videos about the tools 🫠

These videos also always Eem to have no sense or examples of how people who aren’t in their content creation bubble actually work and live.

I don’t need a tool which makes me feel like I need to spend half my time wondering how I should polish and stare at and idolise the tool.

I no longer care about your custom tweaked Zettelkasten, PARA, your 30 minute introduction video, your getting started PDF you’re selling for $80, or even for free. It call all jump in the sea.

Forever*Notes is being bandied around at the moment. Previously I would have been all in. Promises of “signifiers” Obsidian style backlinks. I’m giving it the stink eye. Nope. No thanks. I’m happy for you, but I don’t want it. I don’t need it.

I write down basic, simple information that I need in a basic simple way and that’s that. If I need to keep it for reference, I keep it. If it’s served its purpose it’s gone. And that’s that.

Merlin Mann one of the O.G. Productivity people on the internet has a great quote on his becoming disenfranchised with this sort of stuff and says it best as quoted in this New Yorker Article

Not long afterward, Mann posted a self-reflective essay on 43 Folders, in which he revealed a growing dissatisfaction with the world of personal productivity. Productivity pr0n, he suggested, was becoming a bewildering, complexifying end in itself—list-making as a “cargo cult,” system-tweaking as an addiction. “On more than a few days, I wondered what, precisely, I was trying to accomplish,” he wrote. Part of the problem was the recursive quality of his work. Refining his productivity system so that he could blog more efficiently about productivity made him feel as if he were being “tossed around by a menacing Rube Goldberg device” of his own design

So Here’s what I use now and my “system” ²

For daily work tasks and meeting notes in the real world I have a Rocketbook I scan and upload to iCloud and a frixion pen to write in it with because I’m a messy boy and constantly make mistakes.

In Calendar.app I enter appointments and meetings that I need to remember. I have a personal one. A work one (Shared with my wife) and a family one (Shared with the whole family)

In notes.app I write the thing down that I need to refer to. Some are permanent. Some are ethereal. I have folders for topics such as instructions, home, games etc. I tag topics as well. I do have a daily note I process into other notes as required or just bin off at the end of the day if it’s just full of waffle.

In reminders.app I write lists of things I need to do, and I check and tick them off every day. If I don’t do something, I move it.

If a thing needs a folder. Like “Work”. Or “Holiday”. Or a specific project then yeh, I make it. If I don’t need it anymore, I delete it. I have an archive folder for stuff I want to keep just in case. But I try and delete a lot. I don’t need to keep notes detailing my 5 year old thoughts on home made hummus, or what headphones I was going to buy.

And That’s it. That’s as complex as my goddamn system gets now. No fiddling, no tweaking, juts the facts.

I’ve never been happier, freer and more productive. Barely having a system is my system. My flow is has much less friction as a result. Apples apps help with that. They have a great UI with the essential features and they stay out of my way.

My system is a go kart. It has the pedals I need and and it does the thing. It’s not a sports car with 100 dials and settings and modes I can play with before doing the thing I wanted to actually do.

So do I miss anything?

I do miss Markdown. Markdown is I think one of the greatest inventions ever. It makes word processing apps like Microsoft Word seem insane to me. Why would I use such a weirdo bloated app when I can just flow with something like IA Writer.³

Apple Notes formatting is like a cut down markdown. With side bumpers.

You have Headings. Sub Headings. Code blocks. Bold. Italic. Underline. Strike through. Columns. Learning the keyboard shortcuts for these is well worth the time , but I would still rather type in Markdown.

I’m extremely salty about it having no support for single line code snippets as well I love using them.

Now I just give any amount of code its own line and get on with it. I’m not frozen by options and possibilities. I’m not finding a plug in to tweak the thing to do it the way I want. I just rolled with the punches and wrote my stuff.

I realise not everyone is like this. I think this post will really piss some people off. But I’m talking about me at the end of the day.

I think some people will work efficiently within these types of systems. Some peoples notes are probably way more important than what I’m putting in. I can see backlinks and things being way more important if you are studying a very specific topic ⁴, but for my basic, daily standard use cases, I don’t need a “System”. Maybe I’m just basic…and that’s ok.

I think if you’re self employed, or using Obsidian as your project/task manager or as your single writing tool for blog posting also makes a big difference to the scope of the software. Again, something these productivity people don’t quite get when they’re relaying this stuff to normal people is the differences in the notes and use cases for this sort of knowledge bank.

I think like me, lots of people ⁵ think they need this stuff before they even get started. Who doesn’t like a cool tool and a system and a special little group you can feel part of. A community you can hitch your wagon to and see how something changes and evolves and what’s new and happening and what are people doing….

But if you get to your “Who gives a shit” moment like I did, and just write your notes use the search bar and forget all this extraneous bullshit you just might find you like it better…

I certainly do. And I’m not going back. Ever.

I’m not picking on Lawley specifically. There’s a whole bunch of these sort of videos on YouTube and they are cookie cutter similar in format. Here’s a folder. here’s how markdown works, here’s how tags work blah blah blah. ↩
It’s…Barely a system. That’s why I like it. ↩
All my long form writing is done in iA Writer. As it’s not a note. it’s my writing. ↩
I used a specific Obsidian block to study ITIL4 and found being able to flitter through pages like a wiki really helpful. I would still use it if I was studying for an exam or extremely focused single topic. ↩
Including a lot of these video creators ↩