I’ve been involved in a big, many-tendrilled history/medicine non-fiction project (it’s now growing public branches) for more than 20 years, but I baulked at all ‘Productivity’ systems a few years ago - even though I originally thought my untidy butterfly mind really needed it. The people pushing them seemed to have increasingly alien (that is, tidy) mind-sets, and I realised that what I naturally kept in mind, which came to mind when writing, was likely more important than thoughts I’d recorded and had to look up.
Obviously, as an historian the purely factual side - events and dates and even important quotes - needed a repository (DT or Tinderbox) but I realised that my own writing - notes, plans, thoughts, directions, conceptual connections, outlines - were becoming static and quite quickly inertial. So I went native and did all of my (creative, for want of a word) writing analogue, except for longer pieces - Abbott’s mini-analyses, and essays arising from connecting them (all Scapple and Scrivener). Hence my delight this morning to discover Joan Westenberg: her ‘Mental Reboot’ is very similar to what I found myself moving towards at the end of the last decade. If you’ve had any order of negative reaction to software systematisation (‘tyranny of tools’) and PKM, you might well be delighted, or at least intrigued, too:
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/i-deleted-my-second-brain
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/i-spent-90-days-rebuilding-my-brain-here-s-what-i-learned-b7844d4127c5d542
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