Baldur Bjarnason

The promise and distraction of productivity and note-taking systems

– Baldur Bjarnason

A while back I did a deep-dive researching and prototyping note-taking tools. It was the logical continuation of my life-long interest in writing and creativity tools or, at least, I thought it was at the time.

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. The systems helped banish procrastination, keep track of customer or team needs, connect those needs to information and new ideas, and link that to the tasks at hand.

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. The purpose of notes in this school of thought is to improve the quality of your output and that’s unfortunately a very, very different thing from productivity because, quite often, making things better means being less productive:

None of these things are productive.

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.

The harms of the productivity cult are well-documented but my qualms aren’t limited to the crowd that misapplies what are supposed to be flexible systems as rigid rituals and short-circuiting mantras.

What worries me is twofold:

  1. The promise made by many of the avid promoters of various note-taking systems.
  2. The distraction. Many of these approaches that are great for focus and productivity specifically distract you from the work itself. The system becomes the work.

The Promise #

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 – one of the reasons for the persistent popularity of a variety of scams and cons – is your second.

When you adopt complex rituals wholesale, you create spurious associations that conceal cause and effect in a cloud of correlations. It makes it harder for you to tell whether whatever productivity improvement you might perceive was caused by something you did, whether it was something secondary to the ritual – the thrill of novelty, for example – or whether it had entirely external, even random, causes.

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. Productivity is usually a question of timing, volume, and minimum viable quality – how much acceptable work you can accomplish on time – and despite these generally being activities that generate incredibly specific statistics, it’s impossible to know for sure the factuality of these numbers because of the above-mentioned cloud of correlated events.

You can’t even rely on large-scale studies to get yourself on concrete footing because productivity research is dominated by behavioural economics and psychology, two fields that are wracked with poor replication, fraud, more fraud, even more fraud, then some more fraud as a treat, numberwang, and just general vibes of bullshit (“Psychological fictions are, so far, mainly useful for producing papers.”)

We rely on biological and medical research to guide us away from superstitions, ineffective naturopathy, and homeopathy, but in behavioural and productivity research, the scientists are themselves playing the role of the homeopath, ritualistically reinforcing pre-existing notions and superstitions.

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?”

That’s because “subjective” is a particularly useless term. There are different kinds of subjectivity. The quality of a piece of writing is subjective to the reader but it’s relative from the perspective of the writer or editor. And things that are relative become objective if they’re placed within a frame of reference.

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.

“Is this a good murder mystery?” comes with enough of a frame for it to be sort of objective to many readers, as long as they are mature enough as readers to have learned to appreciate that enjoyment is often orthogonal to how well-made something is. But “is this short story a better murder mystery than the last one I wrote?” if posed to people who are experienced writers or editors in that field is very likely to have concretely useful answers.

This is why writing and creativity tools have always interested me. I can find ways to gauge whether adopting a tool, approach, or app has improved my writing, but it’s much harder to assess whether adopting a note-taking or task management system has improved my productivity because the likeliest cause of any increase in productivity is my decision to try to be more productive in the first place.

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:

That’s just to name a few. And while I firmly believe that concentrating on these issues in code does improve productivity as well, the evidence for that is sparse and subjective, for the reasons I outlined above.

But good code is good code, so assessing whether a process or tool improves quality or not is something you can realistically do, even on your own.

A work can be made better and the lessons you learn from making it can make the next one better as well. Productivity doesn’t have this same cycle of positive reinforcement as the statistics measuring it are usually proxy measures of a complex system of interlocking variables.

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 can be vibrant and living and vividly engaging – crawling with life like a pile of rotting leaves. Garbage work is often the beginning of something. Sometimes it’s the soft and soggy shell of a brilliant idea. Garbage can be fun and great, even if it isn’t well made.

It’s the “stagnant and boring” part that’s depressing. I’m not going to name names here, but the work of most people who make a living promoting and teaching productivity or note-taking is so tediously bland that it makes your average LinkedIn grift sound edgy enough to be a Naked Lunch reading.

The rest are serious-sounding blog posts written in an academic style – 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.

And they seem to by and large have shit taste in books. Their examples tend to contain too many Jordan Petersen and Malcolm Gladwell books.

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. But when you trawl through the essays, blog posts, and forums where people share the complex magic spells they call “process”, you find out it 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 as their lives and careers – or “big ideas” – cognitive shortcuts that extract and portray book points and conclusions free from their original argument like green beans suspended in jell-O.

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.

Books are maps to territories that are completely internal to the reader. By focusing so heavily on extracting the surface symbology of the map itself, these process-heavy note-takers risk losing sight of the territory. A book’s territory is the reasoning and argument that the book presents to you as a path you take through your own psyche. The goal isn’t to remember everything the book contains. Remembering a book’s contents is useless. The book exists to contain what it contains. If the contents are important, you keep a copy of it for you to look things up again.

But that isn’t the point of reading. 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. “Action items” from a book are external and forcing yourself to follow through on them is exhausting.

The easiest – and hardest – path to taking different actions is to become a different person, to be changed. It’s hard work. 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 – but it’s one of the more worthwhile efforts you can make in your own life.

Personal growth is harder, but represents a more robust change than your hand-curated, itemised list of petrified metaphors parading as high concepts and actionable items.

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.

—“But, Baldur, what you’re railing against is just how modern education works.”

Well, no. 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.

There’s a strong divergence in most countries between how education is practised – the role it’s playing in our society – and what we know to work when it comes to teaching. Modern education systems are the pinnacle of the principle of “what can be measured gets managed”. Most of the education that takes place within these systems is unmanaged and haphazardly applied because it can only be measured through unreliable and inaccurate proxy variables.

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

And maybe that’s what some of these readers are doing.

I am being harsh and unfair, I know, but most of these guys are charging real money for their courses whose effectiveness, as I’ve been arguing, is next to impossible for the buyer to assess. At least with courses that pitch themselves as “do X better” you can ask yourself afterward whether you now do indeed to X better.

Managing your references, notes, and what you’ve read is an essential part of knowledge work, but the reading (or watching, if you’re in that kind of field) and the output needs to be at the centre of whatever you’re doing.

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.

That could be a simpler version of your existing system. Or, it could mean just throwing notes into Apple’s Notes.

And even if you stick to your current system, making sure that your priorities are in order, that the system itself is the least important part of the process and that the output should not be sacrificed on its altar…

That on its own can make a world of difference.