(2024-09-24) Bjarnason The Promise And Distraction Of Productivity And Notetaking Systems

Baldur Bjarnason: The promise and distraction of productivity and note-taking systems. A while back I did a deep-dive researching and prototyping note-taking tools.

But, the more I researched the audience – both through interviews and reading through so, so many forum threads – I realised that a substantial portion of the paying audience for note-taking seemed to be completely disinterested in the role notes have in helping shape and improve the output. What they wanted from their note-taking systems was productivity and control.

They care about the output in that it needs to be on time and on spec. What this audience isn’t using note-taking for is to improve their creative output, because they don’t seem themselves as working in that domain.

That’s valid. It clearly works for a lot of people. But it’s also a kind of note-taking that doesn’t interest me at all. I did my postgraduate degrees at an Art, Media, and Design faculty. I’m thoroughly of the “art journal”/“improve your creative work” school of note-taking.

So, whenever I decide to have another go at researching note-taking – gather an overview of common approaches, that sort of thing – I honestly get depressed.

Many of these approaches that are great for focus and productivity specifically distract you from the work itself. The system becomes the work.

The idea pitched by most note-taking systems is that they will help you understand more, think more clearly, and improve your memory. This is a pretty standard promise of snake-oil type scams throughout history, which should be your first warning. That these are also exactly the characteristics we are notoriously bad at assessing ourselves

Because we can’t multiverse ourselves into a genuine controlled study, you don’t even know whether the improvements you think you see are actually real.

The irony here is that the “empirical” research and numerical navel-gazing of productivity and behavioural research is less objective than the allegedly subjective question of “is my work better than it used to be?”

There are different kinds of subjectivity

For example, “is my writing good?” is a question with only useless subjective answers, but “is the technical documentation for this API better now?” is, for our purposes, mostly objective.

The applies even more to coding than to writing because while the tools for measuring coding productivity are largely nonsense (“lines written!”, “no, lines deleted!”, “no, number of commits!"), the tools we have for measuring code quality – while still relative (see above) – are more concrete:

• Unit test coverage.
• Type coverage.
• Documentation.
• Clear names for things.

That, in and of itself, isn’t what makes me depressed when I do this research.

What makes me depressed is that, if you assess the systems people are promoting through the lens of output quality, most of it looks like stagnant and boring garbage.

It isn’t the “garbage” aspect of it that’s depressing

Garbage work is often the beginning of something. Sometimes it’s the soft and soggy shell of a brilliant idea.

It’s the “stagnant and boring” part that’s depressing

either so tediously bland that it makes your average LinkedIn grift sound edgy enough to be a Naked Lunch reading. It’s either that or serious-sounding blog posts written in an academic style and about as decipherable as a Lacan lecture that has been round-tripped five times through Google Translate from French to English and back and then published with the paragraphs out of order.

The actual writing in the field tends to be off-putting but what’s even more depressing is the understanding much of it exhibits. Something about being an avid promoter of note-taking systems seems to distract them from clear, analytical reading.

The distraction:

It begins with differing definitions of “understanding”. What they aim to get out of the books they read seems to be different from what I want

What the various systems mean by “understanding” a book is always quite vague and subjective

mostly boils down to “action items” – productivity bullshit that pretends that books are road maps towards replicating the envy-baiting theatrics that “successful” people portray

or “big ideas” – cognitive shortcuts that extract and portray book points and conclusions free from their original argument

Good books, those that are worth reading, do not have big ideas. They have big arguments. The “big idea” is never on the page but in your head – the thoughts that engaging with the argument inspired.

The purpose of reading is to be changed. Sometimes the change is trivial and temporary – a piece of fiction that brings some joy in your life. Sometimes the change is profound – a shift in your perspective on life.

It takes a lot of practice at learning how to explore and engage with a text – to take them as maps of varying quality to internal worlds of varying worth

That isn’t to say there aren’t books out there built around action items and process, but it’s important to note that these books almost always explicitly contain their own action items and processes – often spelled out in detail. Adding a convoluted process on top just layers on the indirection and distracts you from following the plan the book is laying out for you.

What I’m railing against is how most modern education systems work, yes, but that’s not how modern education works, which isn’t as widely practised despite being fairly well grounded in research. Modern education systems are the pinnacle of the principle of “what can be measured gets managed”.

Still, good teaching exists, as does good reading. It’s not the norm but it’s out there

If your system is distracting you from fully engaging with your reading and iteratively improving your writing, coding, or art, then I’d argue that it’s doing you a disservice and that you’d be better off simplifying your practices.