Simplify both side of the 2nd brain
So, maybe the core problem of PKM(Personal Knowledge Management) is not the method, not the tool, even not the habit. The real problem is making an objective. A complete and concrete objective sounds like a simple output of normal daily task, but the more attempts of building 2nd brain, the more difficulties we found to do this.
After read some pages of the new book "Bullet Proofed Notes Taking", I abort to read it any further.
No matter which methodology of the 2nd brain, like GTD(Get Things Done), Zettelkasten, or this concept from the book, they all say that we should centralize all information/tasks into one bucket, and then turn them to a meaningful/concrete notes to connect with other notes. The ultimate goal is to support our objectives about the work or life. This is really an idealistic concept, I was convinced several times to implement this concept over and over, but most times they failed.
Get to the bottom of the reason, I gradually figured out the breach: The iterations of breaking down of an objective.
When I focus on notes taking and trying to find connections with other notes, I almost forget that why I am doing this. Maybe I have a problem needed to solve, or a goal I want to achieve. But lack of further breaking down processes, the "goal" or "objective" always degenerate to a tag or a folder's name. Lots of notes belong a goal, but they don't have further more clear relationships with each other.
This also result to another helpless symptom: Too-divergent topics/notes. It means that every notes seems can be connected with multiple notes or may not be connected to any notes. Too many connections can deplete our energy, and so do no connections at all. If any of new note would take more and more energy to connect with our own knowledge network, we can't afford this of course.
So, what is the cure?
One thing we should know is that we need to simplify both side of the 2nd brain. For the objective, we should break it down to several small objectives further and keep doing this until the smallest objective is done. On the other side, for the note, we need to shrink it to a bullet/numbered sentence to move to the objective note.
Simply put, we take notes as normally we do, they are still fleeting notes. But we simplify fleeting notes to our objective map and then we can remove them to reduce mental energy costs of this procedure.
Is that work? Let try it out.