Forgetting the Why
I’ve been forgetting the why. For a long time. Not a deep, philosophical “why am I here” or “what is the meaning of life” sort of why. A why the heck am I doing all of this type why. Why am I spending so much time doing this. What is the goal of all of this.
That kinda thing. Maybe a not seeing the wood for the trees sort of thing.
Like many people, I spend huge amounts of time reading and collecting information every day. From web articles, email newsletters, podcasts/webcasts, books, things I spotted on Substack, and so on.
Then I save chunks of those or the entire content of some of them (e.g. a web post saved to a Read It Later app or web clipped to Notion) for later review or to take notes on or in some cases keep. I’m collecting good information on topics that interest me most from both a life and work perspective. I am great at collecting, fantastic at it. But …
I spend so much time collecting and I rarely carve out time to do anything useful with what I’ve collected. And that leads to allocating big chunks of time to reviewing my PKM methods and redoing the way things are organized in my notes apps. So I’m great at collecting, decent to good at organizing and reorganizing, but I am completely forgetting the Why am I doing this? Why am I collecting all of this and trying to organize it perfectly.
Building up my PKM - our knowledge as one of my biggest assets - should be the answer. But I don’t think I’m achieving that as much as I could or should be. At this point it would be great to say something like “and then it came to me”, but that didn’t happen. I was in collect, collect, collect mode last night and I came across this lovely post from Anu Joy at Android Police: NotebookLM and Gemini are great together, but unstoppable with this app.
Her post got me thinking about useful workflows, and end results - a pretty good form of The Why. I’m not necessarily going to follow her workflow, though I do use the same three apps mentioned in her post - NotebookLM, Gemini, and Obsidian - amongst others. That part doesn’t matter though - what matters is that it got me thinking about my end result, what I want to get out of these tools and my collecting.
It was a great reminder that I’ve stopped thinking about that. Just as a couple quick example, I have sworn to myself many times that I want to be using these resources to improve my health and fitness, and upping my knowledge in areas that will make me better at my job. I’m not at zero in those goals. I’ve seen real evidence of some of that happening. But the percentage of those kind of results vs time spent obsessed with the collection part feels low, maybe even very low.
This thought that I’m spending too much time collecting/organizing/reorganizing and not enough time doing something meaningful with what I collect has been nagging at me for a while. I’ve pushed it aside many times. Today I’m hopeful that the urge to change this will stay with me. I’m energized by the idea of making a start on this, on rethinking my methods, focusing more on what I want to get out of them.
The one concept of a strategy for this at the moment is that I want to simplify and delegate. I want to simplify how I collect and organize and distill and I want to see where I can delegate some of the tasks to AI tools. Maybe tomorrow or next week I’ll lose this energy or hate that concept of a strategy, but just for today, it feels good.