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Last week I listened to the Deep Questions podcast, where Cal Newport warned against a concept he calls checklist productivity—the belief that if you get the right information about the steps that matter and then execute them, success will inevitably follow.

The problem is that checklist productivity just plain doesn't work.

Anything truly worth doing tends to be difficult. You can't break down something like writing a book, for example, into a simple checklist. If you want to do hard things, they're still hard whether you know the steps or not.

You have to put in the work and do the deliberate practice. You can't GTD your way around it.

Cal also talked about how AI "supercharges" checklist productivity because "it puts at your fingertips... the ability to execute all sorts of checklist productivity-style things."

Checklist productivity typically involves things that feel productive, but they really aren't. For a creator like me, that could mean optimizing my social channels or learning how to run Meta ads successfully. Are those things that I should do? Maybe, at some point. But when I do those things instead of the real work (writing/creating), it's actually a form of productive procrastination.

And while I see the slippery slope with AI, I don't think checklist productivity starts with your tools.

I think it starts with your notes.

The Role of Resonance

I grew up playing the violin. One of the things I love about the violin isn't how it sounds, but how it feels.

The violin makes sound by drawing a bow across a string, causing the whole instrument to reverberate. When you play the violin, you can literally feel the instrument resonating.

That's the picture I have in my head when I capture notes into my PKM system. I'm looking for the notes that make me feel something.

Not the things that might be useful someday. The things that make me curious, that resonate inside my soul.

The "useful" ones are easy to spot. You save an article because you can already see the job it's going to do — research for the piece you're writing, a tactic you want to use for the product launch, a quote that fits an argument you've already decided to make. Those types of captures seem responsible and productive. You know exactly what each one is for and how you'll use it.

That's also the problem. A note you saved for a specific reason can only ever point you back to that reason.

And that's the precursor to the checklist productivity Cal was describing earlier. You predict the work to be done, figure out what it needs, then go collect it. But you're always jumping ahead to the next item instead of asking what actually matters.

A checklist can tell you what's useful. But no one can tell you what resonates.

The Opposite of Resonance is...

One thing I always loved to do when playing violin was to put my hand on a string after playing an open string to abruptly cut off the note. By stopping the resonance, you stop the sound. The energy goes into your palm instead of the body of the instrument, and the sound gets muted.

There's a word for this: damping. Damping is anything that absorbs a vibration instead of letting it continue on.

Continuing with the musical theme, a piano is a great example of this. Each string has a felt damper that rests on it so that silence is the default state. Then, when you play a note by pressing down on a key, the damper gets lifted, a hammer hits the string, and the sound resonates.

There's even a pedal (the one on the right) that lifts all of them at once so the notes you play can keep ringing, effectively multiplying the sound.

Here's the point: When it comes to PKM, many notes are unintentionally damped.

It starts when you save something that might be "useful" but doesn't really resonate. You save it to your vault, but it never makes sound again. It sits in a folder having already told you everything it's going to tell you, because you decided what it meant on the way in.

And you can tell which kind you're saving at the time.

If you know exactly why you're capturing a note, it's probably damped. You've already defined it, given it a single purpose, and that's likely the only thing it will ever do.

But if you're not quite sure what you're going to do with something yet, if there's just a pull and no explanation, that's resonance. Those things that pique your curiosity but aren't tied to a task are worth paying attention to.

At first, this may feel a little backward. We don't want a big mess on our hands, so we save the things we can justify and feel vaguely guilty about the ones we can't. If we don't know exactly what something is when we capture it, we feel like we're being sloppy. But the opposite is true.

The notes you can explain are the ones that will never surprise you.

The Bottom Line: Capture What You Can't Explain.

A note you saved for a specific reason gets used once and goes quiet. But a note you saved because it pulled at you might still be ringing years later.

These are the notes you come across while working on something completely unrelated, and they set off three other things you'd forgotten you had — an old book note, a half-formed draft, an unfinished idea that suddenly has the missing piece.

You can't plan this kind of serendipity. But it's the whole point of PKM. And it only works because the other notes were already there.

That's the real value of a vault you've kept up for years. Not that you can find things in it. That you have something for your new ideas to vibrate against.

So you have to keep paying attention to what makes you curious, and trust it enough to write it down before you know why.

– Mike