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Folders and plain text for personal knowledge management, and task management. Learn from the PKM principles rather than copying the practices you read about.
If you celebrate Christmas, I hope you’re reading this after the bulk of the festivities are over, and you’re looking to gently evaluate the year that’s been, while preparing for the one that’s nearly upon us.
Geet Duggal has written a 25 minute Medium article that’s 110% worth your time if you’re looking for inspiration for improving your hand-made task management system. If you’re not on Medium, I’m truly sorry I can’t yet share a Friend link. (FYI, I’m working on it)
I’ll be going over it a couple more times to learn from his method for capturing tasks in one big, messy pile, and revisiting these to determine what needs doing next.
His system, like mine, relies on plain text files and folders. It’s old and new at the same time:
Therefore, nothing I say here is terribly original. Except it is. It’s my take with its own unique twist that may or may not resonate with you. The same holds for your approach to productivity.
Geet and I both believe that —
…the single largest de-motivator when working on a project like this is the urge to just do it all at once. I call that “do big”, and that approach can make doing anything substantial overwhelming and uninspiring. So this is the way I think now: Think big. Do small. Small will add to big.
The article is looong, but presented in a way that’s easy to digest and review. I’m so pleased to see the emergence of more voices writing about simplicity, flexibility, portability and autonomy in the plain text realm!
Has it really only been a week since I last wrote about my adventures with plain text budgeting? I’ve spent several hours a day diving in over the past week and really feeling out how to do this. The manual nature of tracking financial data is helping me to see the larger consequences of a series of smaller actions.
A lot of people are going to prefer an app or a spreadsheet for this, but I know for certain I’m not alone in benefiting from doing the deep dive with my sleeves rolled up.
Here’s the two-pronged principle:
There’s no point outsourcing something (to a formula, or an app) when the benefits from being totally hands-on far outweigh the time saved and a pretty UI .There’s no medal for doing things the hard way, when the easier way would be a better fit.
==Keeping my records by hand is the perfect solution for me, where I am== ==today====.== I could write up how to do it, package it up nicely with pictures (and maybe one day I will), but that’s not going to help you if it’s the wrong size for your productivity frame. As always, I encourage you to do the work of discovering what you as an individual need, at this point in your life, when it comes to personal knowledge management.
See last week’s missive if you’re new to the concept of budgeting on digital paper. Further to that, Stowe Boyd kindly pointed me in the direction of the CalcCraft plugin, that looks very promising when it comes to calculations in Markdown tables!
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