Whenever I see a YouTube or post about some neat new tool or process and think about trying it out, the first question I ask myself is whether I think it will actually help me, or whether I am just being wowed by the output the poster is showing.
For me, the answer is nearly always the latter.
No matter how cool the person’s artfully crafted journal or intricate knowledge graph, or automated, integrated todo list looks, I end up realizing that what while what I’ve got may not look fancy, it works pretty well. Asking myself this question has easily saved me hundreds of hours of tinkering with this or that new thing.
But wouldn’t it be great to have a Hobonichi that looks like that, or to have all these time-saving automations? I don’t know. Maybe? But I remind myself that the point of most of those posts and YouTubes is not the thing itself and whether it is useful, but rather to drive engagement for the poster. I think the videos I’d actually like to see are the ones showing how the poster really uses their fancy thing every day. I suspect the answer is not so much.