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I'm not unique in the kinds of projects I've tackled over the years. My projects tend to be technical, scientific, or legal/accounting, and tend to build on a lot of serendipitously found knowledge in articles, comments, mailing list posts, Github issues, research papers, as I read around or discover on the side while researching specific topics. I should have said, "I asked people who like to tell me I'm doing it wrong what they do...". There's a small subset of people I found telling me I'm wrong/insane, there's something wrong with me, I'm untidy, that I should do something else and I have a hoarding problem, etc... Among that subset, I found they consistently had no better solutions to offer when asked, and this is because they just didn't feel the need to tackle problems involving a lot of reading material that needs to be retained, referenced from and used as an increasingly authoritative knowledge base over time in order to complete technical projects using that knowledge. It is that lack of better solutions from armchair critics which has led me to believe I'm not necessarily "doing it wrong", even though I know perfectly well that it has problems, and what kinds of systems I would prefer to use if I could find or build them. One of those people was quite helpful though, and rightly pointed me to knowledge-base software (that they themselves weren't using mind), but somehow seemed to think I have a lot more spare time than I do to maintain the contents, and thought I was bluffing about that. I do actually take a lot of notes already, have been doing so for many years, and I know how long it takes me. When to take notes, and when to leave things in tabs (perhaps to take notes on later), is about prioritising long-term task flows. I'm sure there are people who have much better solutions than I've found so far, and perhaps they could show me someday. (Though, it's not likely to convince me if it involves closed-source software and locked away information, or too much time-consuming clipping process before you're allowed to move on to some other big task, as those do come up.) But I haven't met those people yet. Only critics who don't have better solutions, and think large numbers of tabs is a sign of mental laziness or something. Whatever I am, it's not lazy. Perhaps I should go to a tab-hoarders' conference and we can devise better tools there :-) |