Change

Yesterday I saw a post on Hacker News, "Ask HN: How do I stop overthinking personal project management?". And that post really made me think. It felt like something I could've aksed.

I try to use less to achieve more . But there are (many) occasions where I feel overwhelmed by the project(s) I'm working on. Either there are too many things that need to be done or I (or my team) had some setback that I believe happend because of a tool. 9/10 times it's not.

And I had this feeling fairly recently, but it wasn't strictly related to any one project, more as a whole, personally. To set the stage: Lately I've been seeing more and more people using Obsidian, both at work and on podcasts and YouTube channels I watch. And everyone has a neat little system where they have everything organized and accessible. And here I am, with my paper notes.

So what did I do? I downloaded Obsidian and tried to take what I had of digital notes from before and organize it with tags, links, backlinks etc. And after 5–10 min, I realized what I was doing. I was procrastinating. And at the same time I was also becoming overwhelmed by all the different stuff I felt I had to do in order to become "organized".

Therefore, after my 5–10 mins of "forcing" myself to use Obisdian, because "that's what everyone else is using". I reverted my notes back to the way they were before and took a new note in my notebook about what I had done.

It made me realize that I really value the linear-part of taking notes by hand. And not spending frivolous amount of time organizing my notes. I do see the value in having organized notes, don't get me wrong, but I rather do that without any tool holding my hand. I apperiacte the simplicity of my notes workflow, where I mostly take physicial notes, but also take digital notes, using Helix.

Find something that works and stick with it, don't change it when you feel overwhelmed, don't blame the tool. When you are consistently changing, you are staying the same.