(2022-04-22) Martin Automations Time Spent In The Environmentand Then What

Jess Martin: Automations, Time spent in the environment, "And then what?". Yesterday I was musing on automations for note-taking apps and I was struck by the idea that automations in our tools can go too far. It seems there is some amount of desirable friction in working with our tools that changes the tool and our selves for the better.

The manual work of moving things around, creating new pages, manually linking, etc is core to internalizing the system in our minds.

Consider another example of a tool-user and their environment: a woodworker and their workshop.

I wanted to express my gratitude. His shop is a bit of a cluttered mess, so I offered to clean it up for him. "No no"

But looking back, there’s something intuitively right about a woodworker cleaning their own shop. Cleaning the shop is a productive use of “time spent in the resulting environment” that sharpens the woodworkers’ familiarity with that very environment. For starters, they ensure that everything was put in the correct place. (Also, "correct" may not be logical/objective.)

furthermore, a workshop is a highly malleable environment. It’s often in the process of “cleaning it up” that we notice the possibility of small ergonomic improvements

This leads me to a principle: favor workflows that encourage time spent in the environment.

Notice that this conclusion is actually about workflows, not strictly automations

The original automation which triggered my tweet was a Readwise to Roam integration.

this workflow isolated from other workflows does not encourage time spent in the environment. In fact, you could be reading in Readwise every day, open your Roam after a few weeks, and find it cluttered with quotes, book notes, and daily entries. Has that fostered time spent in the environment?

But this raises an even more important question that we should be asking, about our automations and all of our workflows: I’ve taken all of these notes and captured all these quotes (gathered all of these materials). And then what?

as Brian Sholis puts it: Andy Matuschak worshippers have pilfered the “sliding windows” but haven’t internalized how he spends 2-3 hours every morning in Bear, typing and thinking

why are you taking notes at all?

I’ve given this question some thought and have come up with a few answers for myself. I’m researching how computers can be more expressive tools for humanity. My knowledge tools help me in three ways:

• Increasing the rate at which I learn and utilize new information
• Improving collaboration with others. By writing coherent notes about topics, I’ve found that I have written artifacts that I can share with others
• Triggering “interesting inbounds.” Writing notes and publishing them, whether through my weekly newsletter or my Lab Notebook, has sparked some really interesting conversations and interactions which have helped me further develop my thinking. (Thinking Out Loud)