Since I sell methodologies on YouTube, I often run into people who follow them only superficially. Zettelkasten may be hard to imitate, I thought, but surely everyone can adopt PARA successfully — I quietly hoped as much. Here's something that happened a while back.
I met one of the kind subscribers who watches my videos regularly, and we had a coffee chat. We showed each other how we used Obsidian and had a meaningful conversation about productivity. (Mostly about marketability.) The subscriber said they had enjoyed my PARA video, but it didn't seem to suit them, so they gave up on it quickly. So I asked whether they had applied some other framework, like Nick Milo's ACE — but no. They were building a method tailored to themselves. That struck me as a little odd. Productivity may be a field with no single right answer, but not using a framework is exactly the same as saying you'll build a framework yourself. It may sound like a leap, but to me it feels close to saying you'll become Tiago Forte or Sönke Ahrens. I cover why having a framework matters in another post. Frameworks — Falsifiability and Natural Selection
Methodologies and knowledge are everywhere, yet the world seems to have become one where it's hard to understand them deeply and turn them into sustained action. I suspect it's because information is so abundant that its value has dropped and we no longer feel it's precious. Information comes easily, so we use it easily, and the moment we don't see results we discard it. Then we go looking for another method — and drop that one just as fast. After digging through enough methods that way, people start trying to build their own. Not by modifying an existing methodology, but with a brand-new approach that overturns its very foundations. In truth, more often than building something, they're simply using whatever is comfortable for them. I've also seen plenty of people dismiss established methods without ever looking into them properly.
A methodology is a kind of religion. Just as only those who believe can enter heaven, you can only succeed if you place trust in the methodology. And that trust rests on understanding the methodology's principles, effects, and purpose.
The reason you have to trust the methodology is that every methodology requires a period of fumbling your way to fluency. You have to endure a stretch where you feel no benefit and everything is awkward, and when you fall into a gap where nobody can hand you the answer, you have to rediscover the effects, the principles, and the purpose, work out your own know-how, and climb out on your own. It's the same as driving. Just as a driving school can't teach you every possible case. In the end, you have to log more hours behind the wheel, meet a variety of situations yourself, and solve them.
In productivity methodologies, the classic examples of such a gap are PARA's Area vs. Resource sorting, and in Zettelkasten, the process of gathering notes and finally writing a piece from them. But without trust grounded in understanding, people hit that stretch and conclude "PARA is too hard to sort with" or "Zettelkasten doesn't help my writing," and give up.
If you don't use a methodology someone has researched and instead use whatever is comfortable, under the banner of "There's no right answer! The optimal method is different for every individual!", you probably won't make much progress. I always look skeptically at methods built from scratch rather than by finding problems in an existing method and fixing or improving them. A system built for convenience is unlikely to have a purpose or a principle behind it, and it won't have been criticized enough to be improved. It's just a method that happens to be comfortable for you. In swimming terms, you're doing a dog paddle instead of a stroke you learned properly. You'll float, and you'll get used to it quickly, but it won't be the best you can do. There's no need to dog-paddle when other people are there to teach you a good stroke. You need to stand on the shoulders of giants.
- PARA that fails
- You need to know a methodology's principles, effects, and purpose.