Having guzzled that Kool-aid myself for a while, and I'm still shaking it off: PKM/zettelkasten/digital garden folks feel a lot like the GTD fad visited upon a new generation of victims.
It has a lot of audience and topic overlap with grindset/hustle culture. There's a large, insidious YouTube corpus promising productivity panacea if only you'll adopt whatever specific software and methodology is currently being blessed. The fetishization of a specific process and artifact is treated as whats important rather than cultivating writing habits and periods of reflection.
Neurodivergent and otherwise chronically-disorganized folks aren't going to find salvation there, but often find themselves suckered in to something like this.
I agree that there’s a lot of fetishisation going on. Which is fine, if that’s what you’re into. Graph linking and visualisation in particular seems like a total furfy.
On the other hand, I have derived great value from adopting a practice of writing discrete things I need to remember or refer to later into a folder of date-stamped .txt or .md files and then later surfacing them with a generic full-text search tool. I can’t imagine sitting down to do my taxes, for example, without that information at my fingertips. Others may have more luck retaining in-memory the multitude of small details life throws at you.
This, sadly, resonates with me. I've been pulled into GTD and a few other similar kool-aid stations, and it's not sustainable and mostly not valuable. It looks cool and feels cool but fails in the value department for me.
Yeah. As someone with ADD who over-medicated with Adderall for a period, this is the kind of shit I'd love to do. Organization for organization's sake. Making lists of lists and links to docs with more lists and connections to spreadsheets, etc. Spinning my wheels I'd call it. Reinventing the internet locally. I wonder how many of these people are eating 30+ mg of Adderall a day. It feels fun, but you're not actually doing anything.
Until you're at a reception dinner, seated beside someone you admire and you're instantly pulling up relevant research from your knowledgebase on topics they care about and are working on.
And then you're doing things, because they're flying you to Berlin and contracting you to do them.
how do you think research collaborations start? hint: it's not between complete strangers. so they had to have found the other useful in their own field previously.
