Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism has left a lasting impression with me. A lot of his ideas around technology were incredibly useful and helped me come down from some kind of lockdown-inspired extremism into something a little more grounded, and a little less bingey. Whenever I’m in the grips of meta/tool-sickness, once I figure out that’s what’s going on I’ve probably forgotten something useful from that book.

He has a podcast, but I don’t listen to it much. A recent epidsode, however, had some stuff about note-taking and I have been deep in the grips of fussing around with that so I used it for my dishwashing and coffee making soundtrack this morning.

His key take is “get rid of friction,” which … yes. Back in the heyday of 43 Folders, most of my impatience came less from the content itself and more the constant riffing on “methodologies” that sounded more and more abstract, overthought, and overwrought. I just stopped believing any of it. Because there are only a few occurrences of the word “yarn” in my 20-year-old blog archive, I was able to find an entry in the non-public archive:

Date: November 14, 2005 at 10:05:06 PM PST

I’ve never hit a gtd adherent. I need to be up front about that.

I thought about picking fights with a few, I guess, but it’d involve barging into the comments over at 43 Folders like Bruce Lee in “Fist of Fury” and fighting with people who want little more than to be more efficient and get more work done. They don’t deserve to be antagonized for that.

Sometimes I read a comment from someone who insists that his routine involves some insanely arcane and convoluted use of yarn and a special shell script he whipped up that reads crap down from his Backpack account and then squirts it into his Palm, makes a redundant backup on the server he maintains in Malaysia and produces printed 3x5 copies in triplicate, one of which he pins to his infant son’s sleeve before leaving for the morning (“If I died, I couldn’t live with him thinking his father went out the door without an action list and a plan!”).

Sometimes, I was saying, I read something like that and I want to find that person and give him a noogie or burn two of his four backup copies. One, because I imagine that the “system” being described is a giant lie concocted by someone caught up in the thrill of inventing systems instead of actually, you know … using them to get stuff done. Two, because if these people are making these systems work for them then they’re surely VERY POWERFUL BEINGS we should hate and fear because we’re all going to end up working for them.

Newport’s take in 2024 is a little more kind, but comes down to “if you like building systems, build ’em, but, like, acknowledge that you’re indulging a hobby.”

He shared another idea I’ve come to appreciate in slightly different form: While you want to remove friction from the note-taking process, it’s not a great idea to hyper-atomize your notes and truly empty your brain of ideas in the hopes that The System will glue them all back together.

There is such a thing as too little friction. Whenever I’m playing around with a todo thing now I seldom enable “quick capture” or “get this into the system by forwarding an email into it” unless my overall operating state is pretty mindful and deliberate, because I know what it means to capture something without considering it much. At best, congratulations, you’ve just added a puppy to the box without a plan for feeding it or taking it to the vet for shots. At worst, it slips into the bowels of The System and becomes an ongoing source of guilt until you burn the system down and start a new one. The remedies for those possibilities just add more friction at point of capture (so great, you managed to launch capture with a single keystroke, but you still have a metadata chore), or require a disciplined maintenance approach.

That is todos, which are not notes, but the challenges seem similar. I’d also have to fiddle around with org-roam and a few other systems a little more to weigh how much discovery they offer at point of capture. He was wise to keep his criticisms vague, because differing feature sets + extensibility makes generalizing fraught.

I will say that mastering org-capture was a mistake for me, personally, because it became too easy to create a proliferation of atomized, siloed entry points into the system. Friction is a sweet spot thing, and I still struggle to find that sweet spot.

Dune

I rewatched Dune last night to feel prepped for the second part. Initial reviews for the new release have seemed positive, saying that it reaps the rewards of the world-building and groundwork done in the first installment.

I didn’t like part 1 very much. It was fine, but the break-point didn’t work for me and there was just enough deviation from the source material right around that part of the story that I got distracted by it.

That was a bummer, because I’d built the coviplex partially in anticipation of Dune, but between streaming issues that made the picture quality poor and not-unseeable differences of opinion, it was a little bit of a letdown.

Last night it worked much better for me. I was able to shut off the part of my brain that was busy reconciling source and adaptation, and the picture quality was way better thanks to a solid stream, so I caught more. I’d still prefer some slightly different choices here and there, but this is an adaptation of a book I read yearly from age 13 to some time in my 30s. And, tomorrow this time I will be parked in the theater finishing the story. Not watching the (occasionally glitchy, low-res) credits roll and thinking “nobody’s even sure he’s going to get to make part 2.”

Running shoes day

Al wants to start running. I told myself I’d pick it up again when I got my weight down. Well, it’s down and I’ve got a potential running partner. So we’re going to find running shoes today. I do well with Brooks Addictions, but they have changed a few times over the years. I’ve really liked my Hoka Speedgoats for fast walks and hikes on less technical terrain. Curious to see what the shoe people recommend. Anyhow, looking forward to trying to pick that back up again. Endurance running is the physical thing I seem to be built to do competently without a ton of focus, and it’s time to shake off winter.

It works like this:

It is not controversial to assert that Emacs is an environment all its own. You can find libraries and packages that allow Emacs to acknowledge and talk to outside environments, so it’s not a closed environment, but it’s different enough that there’s some fiddling involved to get it chatting with the outside world.

The iPhone could also be considered an environment all its own, but it’s an environment built with an eye on a broader context. iPhones have a pretty easy time doing things like talking to iCal or Outlook with a few button clicks, for instance. Now, unlike Emacs, there’s a point with the iPhone where no amount of grunting or straining will matter, and if you want it to talk to something else nobody else has bothered to make it talk to, there’s an SDK you can download.

All that said, when Emacs and iPhone can both respond to a particular requirement with “there’s an [app | elisp package] for that,” the iPhone variation will usually involve a quick download and three or four fields in a configuration screen, tops.

When I got an iPhone, I was a pretty heavy Emacs org mode user. The smartphone I had prior to the iPhone was a BlackBerry, and the BlackBerry never really talked to my Mac on any useful level: lost contacts, extra contacts, a new contact for every phone number I had listed for what had once been a single contact, crummy calendar syncing, forget about bookmarks syncing, etc. etc. etc. Because the BlackBerry sucked for me as a Mac user, and because iCal was anemic when it came to todos, org mode was able to fend off everything.

I won’t go into a lot of detail about org mode except to say that it’s neat. You just open a “.org” file in Emacs and start typing using a pretty simple notation. For instance …

* PracNet

** TODO Look at reviews: can we get user information to the front page? (ASP)

   DEADLINE:

** TODO Look at inside pages: make a toolkit for callouts that can fit into the CSS

   DEADLINE:

When that text appears in an Emacs buffer in org mode, it’s nicely color coded. A few keystrokes make it easy to cycle between “TODO” and “DONE” or some other status.

As with all things Emacs, it’s very customizable.

Then the iPhone came along and promised me that if I would accept a few small tradeoffs, it would sync up with a lot more of my stuff: bookmarks, addresses, e-mail, etc. etc. etc. I’d have all that stuff in my pocket, and when I returned home my Mac would automagically commune with it to learn what had changed in my absence.

org mode fell by the wayside, and the little ecosystem I’d created within Emacs crumbled because it was no longer a place to live … just a place to visit when I needed to push text around.

So MobileOrg strikes me as fascinating and horrifying at the same time. All it does is this:

You save your Emacs org mode files on a WebDAV server, load MobileOrg onto your iPhone, and you’ll have org mode on your iPhone and it’ll all sync up, just like Remember the Milk or ToodleDo or any of the other todo services that have “an app for that.”

“If you are a MobileMe user, you already have access to a WebDAV server: iDisk,” says the MobileOrg site in a manner I cannot help but read as insinuating.

“Sucker … walked away from Emacs and even took the extra step of slurping the MobileMe kool-aid thinking it’d harden your resolve against ever returning. Well … fine … keep your precious iDisk … it will become the tool of your re-liberation.”

Less than two years ago, when I was venturing forth from org mode and getting to know the iPhone as a way to keep all my Stuff in sync, MobileOrg would have had me at hello. Now it just gives me the shaking fits.

With Emacs, you don’t just go “la la la … I’m gonna add org mode back and call it a day!” You think to yourself, “I love org mode. I wish there was an easy way to turn an e-mail message into a todo …” and the next thing you know you’re dealing with how to configure GNUS.

Then you think “All my calendar stuff is in Google calendar … how can I get it into my org mode agenda?” and that means you’re off reading this guy’s page and just getting angrier and angrier.

Then you go in the kitchen and make a drink, and while you’re making it and calming down you think to yourself, if I’m doing all this stuff in Emacs anyhow, what would it hurt to follow Twitter in Emacs?

Now you’re not drinking because you’re angry … you’re drinking because you wonder what happened to you and it makes you sad. But you’re drunk, so it seems like a perfectly good idea to build an entire Web site using nothing but Emacs because then you can get a LaTeX version of it for if the asteroids hit and their radiation destroys all HTML. And having decided to do that, part of you thinks about how glad you are you have org mode, so you can organize the lengthy process of making sure you never have to leave Emacs again.

It’s knowing what’s in store for me as I sit here with MobileOrg on my iPhone and the necessary WebDAV share all set up that makes me read this and just want to spit nails:

At its core, Org-mode is a simple outliner for note-taking and list management. You can learn the basics for using it in five minutes. This may be all you need, and Org-mode will not impose more complex features on you.

That’s right … because org-mode is just a collection of lisp running in an editor. It cannot impose more complex features on you. The genius of org-mode is that you will eventually impose more complex features on yourself.