Links and Notes - September 8th 2025

Getting back on the GTD Wagon

After a hiatus of about 6 months, I'm back on the GTD train.

This sounds like a familiar story told by anyone who struggle with productivity and attention. You are trying out a framework. You drop it for another shiny tool because trust me this time it's the one that will work. You go through another one. And then you return to the old one and declare to the world that "you are back".

Mercifully, that's not my story.

This year we finished building a house. And with it, many many projects came to a close. It was a relief to mark projects as complete during my review. It is a glorious feeling to look at the system and actually see things done while knowing that all that work put into the next actions and other habits actually paid off. Did I do it perfectly? Absolutely not. Would I have been wrecked without the bits that I did do. Absolutely yes. So why the hiatus?

At work, we have finally switched away from Jira. If you've used Jira, you know what a blocker it is to moving at the speed of thought. "Oh I have a quick task to add. Let me watch this spinner run every single time I take any action". So, I managed all my job stuff within my GTD system. I even paid for a commercial license of Obsidian as per their terms of use at the time because that's how critical it was for my daily work.

But I digress. We've switched away from Jira, to Linear. If you've used Linear, you know what an enabler it is to moving at the speed of thought. "Oh I have a quick task to add. Let me alt+tab, hit c, type in issue title, hit tab, type in a quick description, escape, press a to assign, p to set priority, and hit ctrl+enter to save".

We live in a blessed timeline for project management tooling.

But I digress.

What does this have to do with GTD? Well, once I switched all my work including projects and daily tasks to Linear, it meant that my GTD system was a little broken. The entire point of it is to have everything inside of a single system. But by the needs of the company, I literally cannot do that anymore. So, while projects on the homefront were taking a small break, I opted to set aside the GTD system for a little bit and just focus on improving how I work at buffer using Linear.

And while it's been great, the feeling of "I'm keeping too much in my head and am stressed out about most of it" has increased over time. It's time to start getting back into completing all the pending stuff around the house now that the move has completed. There are boxes to empty. Things to get rid of. Things to organize better. The list is endless. But I'm also conflicted with how this will work with a large chunk of my daily life sitting in another tool.

To be honest, I don't quite know what it looks like. Maybe I cleanly separate the two? I don't know. But it's going to be an interesting experiment as I look to get back into the GTD system deeper than ever before. In fact, just this weekend, I finally managed to snag a physical copy of the 2015 edition which I've been trying to get my hands on forever. As I work through it though, if I find anything worth sharing, I shall be dumping it into the blog in the hopes that it may find someone who goes through a similar need in their life.

The lofi spam

Kind of sad to see such a massive influx of AI generated lofi music. In a way it's inevitable given that it's simple melodies set to a particular vibe. Of course it would be replicated by AI. But today I realized just how far that future has progressed already when I came across a Lofi track which was recommended to me. For some reason, while it played in the background, something tickled my brain and made me actually click through to check the channel more deeply. What I found was near 3-5 hour videos of Lofi music produced almost daily. And if that weren't enough, the videos themselves contained an overwhelming number of comments by other Lofi channels. My guess was that the vast majority of them would be AI generated music and... upon closer inspection, they were.

It's mind boggling the sheer volume of AI generated music that's filling up this space. By just clicking on the top comments of the video I found 15 other channels like this within minutes. How many more of these exist? I don't know. I don't want to know how deep the rabbit hole goes. But it does have an instant parallel with the story by 404media titled, AI Generated 'Boring History' Videos Are Flooding YouTube and Drowning Out Real History. And it's exactly what it sounds like. Mass produced AI generated long form history videos full of inaccuracies and irrelevant AI art voiced by crooning AI generated readouts. And it's exactly the same pattern with the comments as well.

To be honest, this is all very depressing. It's one thing for me to be able to generate AI music or videos if I wanted to. It's a whole other thing for the space where I seek out interesting things made by humans to become filled up with mass produced AI generated content.

Remember, AI didn't invent the lofi category. It learnt from it. The channel Lofi girl helped popularize the entire format of lofi songs laid on top of a chill looking mascot. The 1000's of hours streamed that took over the internet was a phenomenon born out of human creativity.

I worry that when AI slop fills up the platform, our chance to serendipitously engage in human crafted experiments will suffer. After all, the magic isn't purely in the act of consuming the creation. It's in learning about the who's and the how's behind the creative work too. It's in the actual engagement with the content AND the creator. And when the who is basically a bunch of bots generating comments to each other and the how is a prompt run automatically each day with no further thought given to it, where then do we find the magic connection?

Maybe the silver lining here is that this all of this will make us realize how mindless our consumption has become in the age of endless feeds and auto generated playlists. Pure consumption with none of the connection. Maybe this will rebirth the days of content curated by people who care. Experiments surfaced by those who dare. And maybe, just maybe, the overwhelming volume of AI generated content will finally make us appreciate again the creators who dream, and love, and cry, and laugh, and turn their emotions into a moment in time which we can all enjoy.

This blog doesn't have a comment box. But I'd love to hear any thoughts y'all might have. Send them to [email protected]

Posted on September 08 2025 by Adnan Issadeen