Note Systems
Backlinks Were Supposed to Resurface Your Notes. They Do Not, and Here Is What Does
Backlinks promised to resurface old notes and mostly don't — they only link what you already remember. A good title and search box are what work.
Note Systems
A Note Has a Shape: The Six-Line Template That Makes It Findable a Year Later
The reason your notes never resurface isn't the app, it's that you file them with no structure to search against. Here is the six-line template I settled on, and where it breaks.
Note Systems
Your Notes Never Resurface Because You Built Them to Be Filed, Not Found
Four retrieval methods — search, folders, tags and backlinks — and the exact point where each one breaks down under a real workload. Naming notes for the future you, not the present one.
Note Systems
One Plain Text File a Day Replaced My Whole Note System
PARA and Zettelkasten worked until the notes piled up and retrieval broke. Then I tried one append-only text file per day — here is what survived a real quarter.
Small Automations
The Least Impressive Automation I Have Is the One I Would Miss Most
No scripts, no integrations, no scheduler. Forty text snippets, built over three years, that have quietly removed more friction than everything clever I have made.
Time Blocking
I Reduced My Whole System to Two Blocks a Day and Got More Done
After four years of increasingly elaborate calendars, the version that finally stuck has two protected blocks and nothing else. Here is what the elaborate versions were actually costing.
Note Systems
I Ran a Zettelkasten for Eight Months and Kept Two of Its Rules
The method comes with a philosophy that I do not think survives contact with a job. Two of its mechanics, though, are the best thing that has happened to my notes.
Time Blocking
The Difference Between a To-Do List and a Calendar Is an Estimate
Moving tasks onto a calendar forces you to say how long each one takes, and that forced estimate is the whole benefit. It is also why most people quit in the first week.
Focus & Deep Work
I Tracked My Actual Focused Hours for Six Weeks. The Number Was Two and a Half a Day.
Not two and a half hours of work — two and a half hours of the concentrated kind. Once I had a real number, most of my productivity habits stopped making sense.
Weekly Reviews
My 15-Minute Friday Review (the Habit That Killed My Sunday Dread)
The exact three-block, fifteen-minute weekly close-out I use every Friday, and why shrinking your weekly review is what finally makes it stick.
Small Automations
I Built Fourteen Automations and Deleted Nine of Them
The five that survived have one thing in common that I did not notice until I looked at the nine that did not. It is not how much time they save.
Weekly Reviews
The Five-Minute Version of the Weekly Review, For the Weeks You Have Skipped Three
Every weekly review system fails the same way — you miss one, then the backlog makes the next one worse. Here is the recovery version that is designed to be done badly.
Note Systems
A Year Into PARA, and the Archive Is the Only Part I Still Use
PARA organises notes into four buckets. After twelve months and about 900 notes, three of those buckets had collapsed into each other and the fourth had become the whole system.