Powerfully Powerless Tools
Warning
Some tools must choose to be dumbed down. PKM tools are one example.
The Tools for Thought Software as a Service market keeps doing the same thing.
They're too complicated to use. Calendars, Objects, Comments, Backnotes, Blocks, Tasks, etc, etc, etc...
To pull out the most from these tools, you must first grow some skillfulness in these tools and aggregate enough information over a threshold. For team tools, you must ensure this for every member.
Picking a tool by its feature list instead of where it can take you is like prepping for an exam by making perfect notes instead of actually studying.
To successfully harness the productivity tool, you must flow at one point.
The tool and the infra fade out and you only see the content.
Our brain has to outpace the tool. It has to work more than the tool does.
Even Notion is too complicated for personal task management.
Based on my experience, tools must have the minimum friction, only having...
- Journal. You write daily notes.
- From there on, highlight keywords by adding double brackets.
- Regularly explore the double-bracketed keywords. Write more details.
- Voila! You realize that things are interrelated in a way you never imagined.
Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge. -- Winston S. Churchill