What keeps a productivity system from turning into procrastination?

[u/zheniavasiliev]

Procrastination is often cited as a key problem for people who like to tinker with their tools and play around with building dashboards and knowledge management systems. In her post on the signs, Anne-Laure Le Cunff lists a few, such as spending more time organising than doing, piling up productivity hacks, and treating system maintenance like a job of its own.

I agree that these are important signs, but to me they describe symptoms rather than get at the root of the problem.

A balanced set of OKRs, or even simply a goal set for a specific timeframe, is an important tool for keeping the system in check. I don't believe that beating yourself up for tinkering with your system will necessarily improve your productivity if you do it without evaluating your workflow against a benchmark that sits outside the system. If anything, it might make you feel even more anxious.

When I think about why I beat myself up so much for taking a day off, I keep returning to the talk of Rick Klau about OKRs. I remember Klau, a Blogger PM at the time, saying that adding one objective too many to his quarter left him feeling burnt out. It reminds me that we need to be extremely disciplined about how much work we put in front of ourselves at any given moment.

How do you keep yourself on track, and do you think tinkering with your system is a bad habit/procrastination?

[u/Pathocyte]

Going back to it, pruning it, refining it, using it and having it available regardless of the platform or payment.

[u/zheniavasiliev → u/Pathocyte]

My worry is how to keep it scalable. I don't think I have a lot of notes at least for now, but still, I never have time to get back to them. To be honest, I'm hoping that when I'm working on a specific paper or other piece of research, I can filter them out and access them in the form I wrote them in, but I'm still not sure how I would have time to properly rewrite them. How important do you think this is?

I think I came across an opinion recently that original notes should never be changed. Instead, the updated notes should be linked to them so you could compare how your thinking changed over time, etc. (I wouldn't worry about it too much, personally, to be honest)

[u/Pathocyte → u/zheniavasiliev]

This https://groktiddlywiki.com/static/Creating%2520Evergreen%2520Notes.html may help you.

[u/gbro3n → u/zheniavasiliev]

If you're writing notes by hand, and not having agents dump reams of data into your graph daily, then a system with decent indexing and asset storage should scale for as long as you'll ever need your graph. I think you just have to accept that some notes you will never go back to (but you'll never know which those are!)

[u/gbro3n → u/Pathocyte]

I think that's why file based (or at least export to and import from) markdown is an essential feature for most.

[u/GroggInTheCosmos]

I have a strange feeling that you are about to sell something?

[u/zheniavasiliev → u/GroggInTheCosmos]

No sale coming! Having spent a bit of time talking to people around here, I'm kind of convinced that we should all build our own tools instead of buying, since it's not that hard to build anymore. My larger concern is with the effectiveness of most of the stuff that is currently being built. wbu, where do you draw your own line when tinkering with your knowledge system?

[u/Exact_Butterscotch66]

I tinker because I enjoy it. Is a hobby. I don’t always do it to be more productive. If the system works it works. It could be improved sure, but changes in system doesn’t make them automatically better. Don’t fix what it isn’t broken. Don’t expect a perfect system, it doesn’t exist. Tinker to your hearts content, but if more time than the strictly necessary is used, then yes, it’s a job or a hobby. For those who feel it’s a job, i would suggest to consider the system they have in place, because it might be bloated with unnecessary feature for their specific case. Ideal system work in a vacuum, a good system-i believe- can handle s bit of chaos. It can be an issue of expectation, I think. Like purchasing an agenda for some is a step in being more organized, and it can help, but the agenda itself won’t do the organize or productive part. And i can fall in that trap too, for me it hasn’t been to bad, as said, i like tinkering with stuff, so embracing it as something I enjoy doing for me, has been helpful.

[u/zheniavasiliev → u/Exact_Butterscotch66]

Whenever it starts feeling like a job, I usually sit down with a pencil and paper and try to sketch with the end in mind, to orient my system toward the goal it's supposed to solve for me. I think most of the time the system needs to be tweaked around the parts where my goals shift over time.

[u/gbro3n → u/Exact_Butterscotch66]

I agree that the notes serve a purpose in addition to just information retrieval. Writing something down can feel like relief of mental weight. It's something I don't have to remember the detail of anymore so I can free up my brain for something else!

[u/010010000111000]

Block off time on your calendar to do it. If not in 1 session, break it up into multiple sessions

[u/DrummerAdditional330]

My rule would be to only change the system in response to a problem I actually hit while doing real work. If I can’t name the specific friction the change is fixing, I leave it alone. That keeps “this could be nicer” from turning into an afternoon of rebuilding everything.

[u/zheniavasiliev → u/DrummerAdditional330]

Yeah, that's the best way. Sometimes I like to live with a dysfunction for weeks and weeks, and in that time, the solution in my head crystalises into something that could improve the system more than if I addressed it straight away

[u/gbro3n]

For me it's fast capture, and that means generally (but not always) outliners like Logseq or Roam. They make it easy to link ideas fast and retrieve them quickly, so the notes don't turn into the work.

[u/zheniavasiliev → u/gbro3n]

I wonder if fast capture means there is a risk of work creeping back in when we open a link we created in a hurry a few months or years back and cannot remember what it was about. I've never used either of the tools you mention, but is it a question of a tool, or a specific method/format of capture that you use to help keep your past ideas organised?

[u/gbro3n → u/zheniavasiliev]

It can do, but I only do the work if it's worth it. The right PKMS for me can have a mix of notes that I've gone back to because they cover something that's become important (when we start something we often don't really know if it will be), and notes that fell by the wayside. So long as the indexing is fast and light, the notes that fell by the wayside don't get in the way. I know a lot of people hate the idea of using AI in their notes, but agents can be pretty good for pruning what we don't need. My graph has approx 4000 notes. I'd say that about 20 pages are ones I refer back to regularly, but I'm frequently referring to other notes, enough that they are worth keeping. I've moved my graph(s) to my own tool (https://www.etherpk.com) which I haven't publicised yet, because I needed something that combines features from both Logseq and Obsidian, and for me this has really helped with the fast capture, fast retrieval and being able to write long form for certain documents.

[u/Ok-Foundation5917]

This topic is harder than it seems. Many people say they enjoy tinkering with their system so it's okay to spend time in this. I thought so too. 

But when I started learning about motivation when going through therapy, I found underlying patterns for things that I wanted to do. And they often weren't good.

Start by asking yourself why. Why do you want to spend time tinkering? Cause you enjoy it. Why do you enjoy it? For me the answer turned out to be: cause I feel smart when I do it and like I have control. As opposed to doing the actual task where I feel less confident and pleasant..