We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.>"Virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions," Aristotle said. The writer Will Durant interpreted it thusly: "We are what we repeatedly do… therefore excellence is not an act, but a habit." https://dailystoic.com/we-are-what-we-repeatedly-do/
What Aristotle talks about in Ethics is not only a habit or actions but also what drives that.
Related is that motivation is fleeting and only leads to individual acts. Discipline on the other hand is what builds habits. It's what you do day and and day out that leads to success or failure.
Discipline is important, but without motivation you will end up doubting why you are working so hard on something you don't care about. In my mind, motivation is continually reminding yourself of what outcomes you're working towards, so you don't lose sight of why you're working so hard.
For example, motivating yourself to work out by thinking of that sporting hobby you'll be able to take up or thinking about how great you'll feel when you've reached your goal weight.
Lisa: Where does a man get inspiration to write a song like that?
Jeff: He gets it from the landlady once a month.
The successful ones have a repeatable process for balancing creativity with the time required to produce a work of art. They tend to have a daily practice of challenging / improving their skills. They setup a dedicated studio, and work at reducing disruptions and so on.
Creative workers regularly discuss the ways to get ourselves to work when we feel a total lack of inspiration for something with a looming deadline, as well as ways to create conditions where some kind of creative inspiration is more likely.
There is also the fact that sometimes "inspiration" can lead to a long process, I am finally nearing the end of a multi-year process of grinding away at drawing a comic book that came from the simple idea of "what if I told a story from two sides, with the characters changing designs to ones that scream 'Good Guys' or 'Bad Guys' depending on which side we are currently following".
> I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.
That sounds cool.
Game of Thrones was like that. You just got a good hate on, for one of the characters, and they went and spoiled it, by telling their story.
The Boltons were bad news, though. Even the author hated them.
Another one that I like, and it isn’t clear who said it first, is:
Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.I ended up releasing the note-taking/reminder app as a subscription service [0], for reasons most obvious. Over time I wanted more from these notes...
I wanted a way to separate notes of different clients -- folders. I wanted a way to categorize all notes related to different topics of interest -- tags. I wanted an email to send me a summary of notes in a folder to submit my invoice or produce a weekend reading list -- email summaries. I wanted to do all my bookkeeping in my notes, and on..
I ended up releasing the parser for the notes as an open source lib [1]. Which could add a nice layer on top of any plain-text note system running locally.
0. https://www.tatatap.com 1. https://github.com/tatatap-com/sowhat
I'm curious, do many people use the SMS note save feature? Or is many people the wrong unit of measure for an SMS service? (I've wondered if users would have a reversion to things like this as well...)
Edit: Just saw now, you've submitted this on showHN before, maybe tweak the timing for the post and the title for better results ?
My favorite system for knowledge management is Google Docs(due to obvious advantages- online drive, WYSIWYG etc), and for metadata/task-management tasks(GTD, working things out, mind maps, todo lists, solving software problems) is a plain cheap notebook and a pen.
If you study GTD the hardest aspects of GTD are sticking to routine, and it's very easy to fall off the GTD routine. Its hard to do weekly reviews, its hard to create next tasks etc etc.
Once you establish a cycle that works, its magic.
GP should be diligent to download his spreadsheets periodically.
At the same time my notebook information is a mix of personal things, work things and lots of other notes, scribblings, and free form information(mind maps, doodling, random writing), I need this just because creating a meta-data knowledge graph, list in the brain is just too much work, stressful and its like a offline store for your brain's functions.
Software tools don't work well for this kind of information input and putting it in either GDrive would not be good. Hence the notebook and pen.
Another big thing I've noticed is the personal productivity system is a catalyst that helps you do work, its not your main work itself. There is little incentive in storing what time you went to gym ten years back. Information/Feature pollution is a bug not a feature.
Unfortunately, Org-mode in emacs, like anything in emacs is a full time project in itself, a huge time sink that has little return on time investment. Use a tool to make your life better. Don't spend time wandering in sub goals trying to make the tool, that makes your life better. The former gives results, the latter is just a long play time sink, where you will forever make the tool better, you will never arrive at making your life better.
Everything can break in weird ways. What you said is equivalent to, well, if the US internet infrastructure was attacked and disabled.
Notice at some point you are just making a wiki. And of course now you have the added effort budget of maintaining the wiki on top of your regular work.
I have seen random posts on the internet where people were migrating their notes systems to org mode or markdown. If you ask me that's too much meta work to do, in order to do your main work.
The entire idea behind making a knowledge system, or a todo system is to help you do things. If you are doing whole project to set these things up, I wonder what the actual goal of this system even is.
I migrated to org from Things some 12 years ago and since I started bare-bones (just todo entries, no special config) and grew as my needs arose, I never felt I had to invest lots of time in my setup.
Agree that some people overdo things and the tools become projects on their own though.
They got a court order, contacted Google, and did a Google Takeout of literally all of my data.
Now I use markdown doc on a remotely encrypted share via WinSCP.
You can write them everywhere, read them everywhere, send them everywhere, effortlessly back them up and copy them. You absolutely own a text file on your computer. They're maximally cross-compatible (barring some quirks like UNIX/DOS linebreaks). Every computer and phone has a basic text processor.
Compare with a dedicated tool like Evernote - I now have to worry about the installing it, maintaining it, having my workflow broken by a new update, the developers selling my data to China, etc.
In the end I wrote a small tool to assist with starting each day with a blank journal and all remaining items from the last day. Syntax is primarily markdown. Everything stays in a single text file.
For some reason, I prefer pens over pencils.
A bit more meta is that the habit itself is primarily all I need. I journal, write things down, etc... and almost never look at them again. The habit of doing is all it takes for me to set my day on the right trajectory.
If you read it, TFA is more than just a folksy phrase like "make it a habit."
It’s the ritual. Any productivity system can be made to work once it becomes a habit and therefore your default action.
I think .txt files or Org mode are attractive to devs because they feel like something we’d be doing anyway during our day. the same system will work with a paper journal or even a fresh piece of paper every morning if, and only if, it can be integrated into your natural daily workflow as an automatic habit. I personally found that paper is better for me because I get to it before unlocking my computer and being confronted with work and communications and notifications that compete with it. However, I have a lot of peers who couldn’t hang on to a paper journal or TODO list during the day if they tried, so digital formats win.
The real key is to make it a habit and learn to stick with it.