Re: Overwhelmed and Need Help with Organizing

2024-09-05

The following is an excerpt from a private exchange that I am publishing with the permission of my correspondent. I am not sharing their name or email.

There are two parts to this which contain my initial response and the follow-up to it.

All the quoted/indented parts are from my correspondent.

Part one

I know I should dig into and read through more of the articles on your website, but I’m reaching out for help—consider this an SOS!

I will try to help. The short answer is this: you must start small. The longer answer follows below.

I’m struggling with organizing my life and my stuff, while dealing with information overload and FOMO, and it’s exhausting desperately trying to organize the current mess before I can even get started getting things done. Sometimes it triggers my procrastination because I feel like I learn best when I’m organizing my mind, and then I’d fall into the rabbit hole.

[…]

I also want to log/plot relationships between things, make Farley files, find a way to organize and group web clippings and annotate them, and more. Coming up with good tags and learning how to manage tag relations or hierarchies and probably a glossary (or something like that) of tags to know what tag to look for seems like a big challenge. You wrote on your blog that there’s no right way of using org-mode and that I should start slow, but I’m not sure how exactly I should start and what path to take afterward. There are so many web pages, YouTube videos, and forum posts on this topic that it’s overwhelming not knowing how to start or what to focus on, and I’m worried about making mistakes that could snowball later. I don’t need perfection, just something flexible that I can adapt over time and change easily.

There is no productivity in a vacuum and, as such, there is no method that will work regardless of the specifics of the case. Here you are describing various tools, methods, and requirements or wishes, but you did not express what you are working towards. What is it you want to achieve? Can you spell this out with clarity and certainty?

Knowing what we want is not as easy as we might think it is. Yes, we have a general idea but elucidating it with precision is hard. Though trying to do that helps us understand our situation better, which practically means that we can separate the essential parts from the inessential ones.

My first suggestion to you, then, is to establish a clear goal. This has to be a tangible outcome of you producing something that matters beyond the confines of the productivity suite of tools. So “make Farley files” (I do not know what those are, by the way) is not a goal in this regard. A goal is something like “write a research paper about THING”, “publish a blog post on the THING”, “develop an Emacs package to do THING”, where THING is what you care about.

My next suggestion is to keep a sense of perspective. You are making it too difficult for yourself right now. Remember to take a step back and relax. Think about what is the worst thing that might happen if you are indeed missing out on whatever the tech hipsters are using these days. The answer is “nothing worthwhile”. There are more important things in life.

Please understand that we live in a world where hype is key to generate clicks, views, comments, likes, and, ultimately, money. “Hype” is a word that comes from “hyperbole”, the Greek word for “exaggeration”; the word for overdoing something. So be careful not to fall for the hype each time you find some new app or method.

The reason I am writing this is to encourage you to be more considerate. All that “organisation and productivity” business is more hype than substance. It also is unimportant in the grand scheme of your everyday experience. Try to not pay attention to the trends and keep things simple. We have reached this point in history after millennia of not having fancy apps. We can be productive without a lot of pampers. This whole notion that “yOu AbSoLuTeLy NeEd ThIs ApP” is a distraction you have to avoid.

Focus on yourself and be mindful of what you actually want (the substance, not the hype). If you are of the mindset that digital “productivity” is the most important thing and that you must not miss out on the coolest trends, then you are setting yourself up for failure. You are doing so because the stakes are now too high in your mind: “what if I pick the wrong app?” and “what if this methodology is not the right one?” and “how will I ever recover my productivity now that I went down this rabbit hole?”.

There are a million questions like these and they all are predicated on the presumption that “productivity”, in the form of some cool new app and/or method, is essential. It is not, so take it easy.

Now you are prepared for my third suggestion: it is not the tool that makes you productive, but your mindset and concomitant work ethic. You can be perfectly productive with pen and paper or even without those, depending on what we are talking about.

All apps, no matter how well thought out they are, are tools which do wonders in the right hands but otherwise are clumsy implements which inhibit those who do not know what to do with them.

Like with a sledgehammer or a pickaxe, if you do not know how to use the tool, you will severely injure yourself. With these digital products the damage comes in the form of anxiety and a sense of disempowerment.

I could tell you about Emacs, and Org, and Denote, and all their best friends, but this is not the way to go. I do not believe in the marketing gimmick of a “second brain” and, more importantly, I dismiss the lazy outlook of our era for doing something sophisticated in a “too long; didn’t read” kind of way. You cannot do anything noteworthy without hard work, so either you will not read and stay where you are, or you will put in the effort and take as much time as is necessary to get better.

There is no magic solution. We all have one brain that does the thinking and if we do not use it properly, no vaunted exomind will ever be a good enough arrangement for us. Of course, if you use the tools properly, then things change and a “second brain” starts to make sense. But you are not there yet (and once you are there, you will know not to be misled by such buzzwords).

My recommendation to you then is to forget about the advanced features of logging, plotting, linking, drawing, stamping, clipping, extracting, summarising, analysing, et cetera, and focus on the one and only basic thing that matters: you set a goal and you do it. If you cannot do this with consistency, then all that other stuff is just a glorified mini-game to make you feel better about the fact you are not actually doing what you are supposed to.

Please do not take my words personally. I am communicating to you in plain terms to focus your attention on the fundamentals. Work on those and master them. Once you have done that, then you can think about all the extras. And when that happens, you will be in a position of strength where you will (i) know what you need, (ii) are confident in your abilities, (iii) are in the flow of doing what you are meant to, (iv) have a clear goal that is realisable, and (v) have room for experimentation given that you can always fall back to the basics you are already an expert in.

If you must forgo the data you have accumulated in order to start small, then do it ruthlessly. Do not continue to carry it around as a burden: it will continue to weigh you down and make you suffer. Why harm yourself in this way?

Part two

I have a long list of such goals that I’ve built up over the years, such as learning different aspects of computers, like networking, or learning more about Linux and FOSS, or reading various articles on Wikipedia.

Sounds promising! Though note that this is the stage where you have accumulated a lot of information about those topics. Let us take Linux as an example: unless you are already using it, set a goal to switch to it in the near future. This involves concrete steps, such as:

• Find a distro that is good enough out-of-the-box to let you focus on what you need (e.g. Ubuntu or Linux Mint).

• Learn how to write an .iso file to a flash drive.

• Learn how to boot from this .iso file in order to eventually install the Linux distro on the computer.

• Start using Linux.

This brings another point about knowledge: it cannot be purely theoretical. You will never know Linux well enough if you do not experience it. When we are exposed to something, we understand it better in relation to ourselves. Through experimentation, else trial and error, we discover more of it and us. Eventually we form opinions backed by some personalised evidence.

All this does not require a sophisticated system of note-taking. Think of it more like a game. You set it up to run and then you play around with it. This is how I learnt Linux and Emacs, by the way.

For example, after noticing that your email client seems to break lines after a certain number of words or characters, I looked into it and ended up deep in the topic of optimal line length, how it’s related to the era of punch cards, and now I have several browser tabs open on that subject.

I understand this kind of curiosity because I have it as well. What I have learnt is that it is both a blessing and a curse: it drives you to learn more things and piece them together into greater systems, but it works counter to your reality as a human with limited time/resources.

Concretely, you cannot let your curiosity run rampant as it will definitely work against you: it will not let you focus on anything as you will always be chasing off the next thing that is remotely unfamiliar.

What I have mastered about myself is the ability to not go down rabbit holes. I know to appreciate what I have and to only explore a case in-depth only after I have estimated that it is part of what I can do with my available time and energy.

You can improve this skill as well. As with everything, you have to start small. Before doing something, ask yourself what I mentioned earlier: “what I am trying to achieve?”. If the answer is that you are simply curious, then this is not a good sign. Be consistent with yourself in asking this question and you will notice how the tasks that pass the test are actually not that many.

Remember that we are considering the case of eventually starting to do things. I am not arguing against curiosity in general. Once you are in the flow of achieving your goals, then you will have the requisite structure to be curious without undoing what you have.

When it comes to wanting a system or method of organization, I have two main goals. The first is to better understand, recall, and organize what I’ve learned. I want to take good notes that trigger my memory, something I can refer to whenever I need a review or when I’ve forgotten something. I also want to have a general overview and a mind map of my knowledge. The second goal is to create an organized archive of useful information based on what I already have.

Okay, this sounds more clear. Though it has to be couched in terms of the aforementioned. I think a system of note-taking and knowledge management is secondary and would thus encourage you to set it aside for the time being.

You already know that you can collect a lot of disparate data points. You have done this with many apps and on many topics. Finding yet another note-taking solution will not change this dynamic. And here is the trap people fall into. They think that there is some magical “one app to rule them all” and so they keep searching for it. There is no such thing though, so the vicious cycles invigorates itself.

Again, focus on the basics. Master the essentials and then you will know what you need as the next step.

[…] missing out on whatever the tech hipsters are using these days. > So be careful not to fall for the hype each time you find some new > app or method.

We have reached this point in history after millennia of not having fancy apps. We can be productive without a lot of pampers. This whole > notion that “yOu AbSoLuTeLy NeEd ThIs ApP” is a distraction you have > to avoid.

Your minimalist (?) philosophy resonates with me, and while I do enjoy experimenting with different apps and methods to find what works best, I think I’m not someone who gets caught up in trends. My focus is always more on self-improvement and efficiency.

Good! Then pick one app and stick with it. It does not matter which one it is, because it is not the app that makes you productive. Once you have the app, start with one goal, such as “use Linux” and make it happen. Do this with more realisable goals and make a habit of accomplishing what you have in mind. No more rabbit holes that lead to nowhere!

I’ve always been fascinated by the organization in encyclopedias and the work of people who created systems of naming or classifying things. Being organized and right to the point feels like an art form to me. If a book lacks this kind of “art,” even readability, I find it torturous to read.

All of this likely influences my desire to take the chaos in my mind and organize it into a neat, structured system—like a well-organized library, or even like the Lego analogy you mentioned on your blog. I admit it might sound a bit idealistic, but that’s the way I see it.

Being neat and tidy is fine. The question is practical though: where do we start from? And my answer to this is “start small”. Pick some small thing you can actually do and do it. Let the system emerge organically through your continuous efforts.

Right now you are an outsider to this endeavour. You are not practising the relevant skills and are only theorising about how you might like something. What you are missing is experience, which will immediately ground you in the specifics of what you can and cannot do. This goes back to my example with Linux: proceed to the next phase of actually committing to the project and realising it.

I know many productive and efficient people who aren’t like me in this regard. Their desks are always a mess, they probably lose things in that clutter and can’t find them when needed, yet they still get things done. They don’t care about the things that matter to me, and they’re not interested in the “art” I mentioned. Sometimes I wish I could be more like them, but then I’m reminded of how much I dislike not being “artistic.”

Each person has their own way of conceptualising their immediate milieu. There is no right or wrong here. What we all have in common though is limited resources and an embodied mind. We cannot afford to have a purely theoretical exposure to the world. Our reality puts us out there and forces us to make decisions. Time is not on our side, in the sense of mortality, but also in the sense of having only a few hours per day to carry out our activities. We eventually get tired and lose focus or motivation. As such, I think that all of us, despite our individuality, need to have a sense of the here-and-now, because it is the constant in our life.

Now that we’re on the topic of managing tasks and staying focused, I have to admit that one of my major goals is improving my time+task management. I do appreciate simplicity, and it all sounds simple in theory, but in practice, I often struggle with managing my time and concentration. It’s probably another rabbit hole, but without exploring it, how else am I supposed to learn ways to improve?

If by “managing time” you mean to keep track of it, then this is definitely a rabbit hole. Do not go there. Time management happens organically: we do something we like, which necessarily means we do not have enough resources for other activities. Every action is a trade-off and we decide which path to take.

Instead of focusing on the structural level, such as managing time, go back to the basics: pick something you want to do, do it, and forget about the time dimension. As you get in this flow of working, you will eventually establish patterns that will form a certain structure. You will be doing certain things and not others. Once you are competent in this regard, you will know if you actually need some time tracking app or not (I do not, for example).

[…] focus on the one and only basic thing that matters: you set a goal and you do it. If you cannot do this with consistency, then all > that other stuff is just a glorified mini-game to make you feel better about the fact you are not actually doing what you are > supposed to.

Agreed, but based on the goals I mentioned, how precise should the goals be defined, or how should they be divided into smaller sub-goals? What’s the best order to approach them in, and how many should I work on in parallel? How do I prioritize them? What if a new goal emerges from one that I’m already working on, like needing to learn something new while I’m learning something else? These questions might seem trivial, but they’re still something I find myself preoccupied with.

There is no formula here. It depends on the specifics of the case. Some tasks are more involved than others and have more prerequisites. Others are more straightforward. But if you overthink something, it will always become complex to the point where it is virtually impossible to do anything with it.

Check the scenario with Linux, for instance. There are only a few steps for you to start using it on a computer. Instead of writing all the sub-items down, start with those top-level items and work your way from one to the other. If there are sub-tasks, you will discover them along the way. But do not lose track of your goal: move to the next top-level item.

As you have noticed, I am repeating myself: start with the basics, engage with it instead of overthinking it, and remember that your time is limited.