Minimizing friction is surprisingly difficult. I keep plain-text notes in a hierarchical editor (cherrytree), but even that feels too complicated sometimes. This is not just about the tool… what you actually need is a combination of the tool and the right way to use it.
(Every tool can be used in different ways. For example, suppose you write a diary in MS Word. There are still options such as “one document per day” or “one very long document for all”, and things in between like “one document per month”, which all give different kinds of friction. The one megadocument takes too much time to load. It is more difficult to search in many small documents. Or maybe you should keep your current day in a small document, but once in a while merge the previous days into the megadocument? Or maybe switch to some application that starts faster than MS Word?)
Forgetting is an important part. Even if you want to remember forever, you need some form of deprioritizing. Something like “pages you haven’t used for months will get smaller, and if you search for keywords, they will be at the bottom of the result list”. But if one of them suddenly becomes relevant again, maybe the connected ones become relevant, too? Something like associations in brain. The idea is that remembering the facts is only a part of the problem; making the relevant ones more accessible is another. Because searching in too much data is ultimately just another kind of friction.
It feels like a smaller version of the internet. Years ago, the problem used to be “too little information”, now the problem is “too much information, can’t find the thing I actually want”.
Perhaps a wiki, where the pages could get flagged as “important now” and “unimportant”? Or maybe, important for a specific context? And by default, when you choose a context, you would only see the important pages, and the rest of that only if you search for a specific keyword or follow a grey link. (Which again would require some work creating and maintaining the contexts. And that work should also be as frictionless as possible.)
Minimizing friction is surprisingly difficult. I keep plain-text notes in a hierarchical editor (cherrytree), but even that feels too complicated sometimes. This is not just about the tool… what you actually need is a combination of the tool and the right way to use it.
(Every tool can be used in different ways. For example, suppose you write a diary in MS Word. There are still options such as “one document per day” or “one very long document for all”, and things in between like “one document per month”, which all give different kinds of friction. The one megadocument takes too much time to load. It is more difficult to search in many small documents. Or maybe you should keep your current day in a small document, but once in a while merge the previous days into the megadocument? Or maybe switch to some application that starts faster than MS Word?)
Forgetting is an important part. Even if you want to remember forever, you need some form of deprioritizing. Something like “pages you haven’t used for months will get smaller, and if you search for keywords, they will be at the bottom of the result list”. But if one of them suddenly becomes relevant again, maybe the connected ones become relevant, too? Something like associations in brain. The idea is that remembering the facts is only a part of the problem; making the relevant ones more accessible is another. Because searching in too much data is ultimately just another kind of friction.
It feels like a smaller version of the internet. Years ago, the problem used to be “too little information”, now the problem is “too much information, can’t find the thing I actually want”.
Perhaps a wiki, where the pages could get flagged as “important now” and “unimportant”? Or maybe, important for a specific context? And by default, when you choose a context, you would only see the important pages, and the rest of that only if you search for a specific keyword or follow a grey link. (Which again would require some work creating and maintaining the contexts. And that work should also be as frictionless as possible.)