burning complexity, celebrating simplicity
I just got back from a few weeks of vacation, and now it's time to pick up my passion project right where I left off. But there's a problem: Even the thought of resuming this stalled project feels like an enormous undertaking. Instead of diving into my first Pomodoro session head-on, I have found myself putting it off day after day. I tell myself I'm "not ready" yet and that I should "ease into…
On the surface it may seem that simplifying your (digital) life will feel like a breath of fresh air. In my experience it's the opposite of that. Complexity feels completely rational and comforting, while ruthless simplicity feels unnatural and wrong every step of the way . I have written about this perceived duality of the two voices . One is the "default voice", which feels very familiar and…
Stop worrying about setting up a PKM system the right way. Stop worrying about atomic notes and "discovering connections". Stop worrying about the software you're using for it. Just do the thing that this PKM system is supposed to bring into existence. That's it. This is my message. You don't even have to read any further unless you're really curious how I am going to defend the thesis that…
For a guy who has already (gently) bashed Second Brains, it would be an unlikely move to quote Tiago Forte let alone write a whole post to promote his ideas. I have already gone on record saying that I think the "E" part of Tiago’s CODE is probably the most overlooked part of the apt acronym. I believe that too many of us are caught in collecting and refining. So much so that we don’t even…
See if you can relate to this. There's a stratum of conscious mental activity that keeps telling you something and/or that "just" makes you feel a certain way. But then there's another stratum that feels like it's definitely placed above this first stratum (in the overall hierarchy of strata) that has the first stratum as it's object of reflection. Let's call them 'voices'. The "default voice" and…
A bit of backstory Ok, I gotta come clean. This is a clickbait title. It is misleading if understood literally. But it is actually true if interpreted right. Let me explain. I stopped trying to write anything for this blog in the fall of 2025 after posting just two posts. There were some objective reasons for that. Reasons that made me almost incapable of doing anything at least marginally…
Starting any kind of "work" amidst what to me looks like chaos and an incessant stream of distractions is a challenge. Starting "creative" / "knowledge" work even more so, of course. Somehow along the way, I have internalized this idea that to do anything at least mildly cognitively challenging and something that requires at least a bit of focus and concentration, I need to have a "perfect"…
The Overview (The Devices & Just a Bit of ‘Why’) My systems used to be a mess . They still are. Just a little less than before. Here, I will only talk about the main ‘infrastructure’, two levels deep — the devices and the software layer that allowed them talk to each other. Not stuff like PKMs and specific app setups, at least not in detail. So, what follows is a quick tour of my old ‘digital…
I think some people are just wired that way — they create complexity out of everything. Watches. Wardrobes. Second brains in Obsidian. Gigantic Zotero libraries. Notion workflows. Music collections. Self-hosted everything. Six devices. Eight browsers. Fifty email aliases. (You want to know how the hell the latter four even happened, here’s your recipe . Thank me later.) That was me. Well, still…