I tried all of them: Notion, Obsidian, Logseq, Google Keep, Docs, OneNote (when studying at uni), Evernote, recently Capacities, Appflowy and even Remarkable e-ink tablet. They all start nice and fancy with each app offering something slightly different. You think “Oh, this could be the one because I can now do this and sort everything out”. None of them actually improved my productivity, help organise my thoughts or get things done. Here is why I stopped using them.

The promise of a clearer mind when you organise, categorise, store and maybe even share your thoughts and knowledge is an appealing one. I’m someone who cannot shutdown their brain and it constantly churns new ideas all day everyday. Before we rush ahead, I do try mindfulness to keep my thoughts at bay and it does help. Naturally and over the last decade, I thought I needed somewhere to write things down to get them out of my head and maybe revisit, work on them. On a regular day, I can go from thinking about my research work on neuro-symbolic systems to trying to come up with a novel small language model architecture for more efficient learning. Then switch to doing admin, remembering to buy something to eat and so on.

Rather than a knowledge management and productivity tool, they all become a dumping ground. Landfill of half baked stale todos, notes, pages, links, tags, categories, more tags, more categories…

As I started using tools like Notion to sort things out by making notes, pages and then fancy tables of information for links, references etc. I noticed they all served one purpose: a dumping ground. For people who are familiar with Linux, it is akin to /dev/null. You pour your heart and soul into organising all that information to never properly make use of it because more information is coming in and the overhead of managing it becomes the focal point: Which tag? Which category should I assign this? Is it is new a topic / object / thing / todo? What is it? Let me recap:

I have this great idea. Which category is it? Do I tag it? Which tags did I have? Is it linked to this or that? Dare I use AI to categorise it for me? Which category did the AI use…

So overtime, the debt builds up and the very solution that I sought becomes the problem overwhelmed by tsunami of information. You can so easily over do it and get caught up working the tool. I can colour code my items, prioritise tasks, link different notes together so I get this nice looking picture. For example, Obsidian creates this graph view of your notes where nodes are notes and edges are links between them. But hang on? What was I trying to do in the first place? There is a reason I was thinking about or researching something. That’s what’s important to me, not whether I would ever revisit this item because I categorised and linked it correctly.

To-Do and a scratch pad

I soon realised that the only thing I care about is the goal I want to achieve. I was thinking about something or reading something in order to do something. That to-do is now the only thing I write down. To mitigate my brain from processing everything in memory, I use a good old-fashioned pencil and paper (or a whiteboard). But wait, what happens when the paper notebook fills up? I do what I did with all the knowledge management tools I used: I dump it and start again. Well, I chuck it in an old cupboard to maybe revisit years later in a nostalgic way and appreciate how great my handwriting was.

Now, my revised process is:

  1. When I get an actionable thought or idea, I write a to-do so it doesn’t eat my mind in the background.
  2. If I’m thinking of something or reading something I scribble notes into a notebook which helps me learn or remember. I just write whatever my mind wants to write. It is actually quite liberating because my paper notebook doesn’t pop-up suggestions or have AI all over it.
  3. If it is not actionable or I don’t scribble about, it most likely isn’t a high priority thought or maybe not worth as my time is limited.

The scratch pad or the white board is the working memory and the to-do list is the execution stack. They are not this big promise of all my knowledge and thoughts put together. I don’t think the latter is possible and that’s why none of the tools I mentioned at the beginning work.

Let’s look at another example surrounding meeting notes. I’ve seen a lot of teams use Notion to keep track of their meetings. Firstly, no-one looks back at meeting notes beyond figuring out if there was something they should be doing because it is their job to do something hopefully. If you are in a regulated industry then it is more of a record keeping exercise rather than productivity. Therefore, I propose to remove all these, and especially AI generated meeting notes, to just let people keep track of what they need to do and any information they need to do it. Everyone can do that in their own terms or at most with a shared to-do board, e.g. kanban board.

Avoid being a knowledge transcriber

One of the core problematic patterns that I observe in this space is related to the idea I call knowledge transcribing. A knowledge transcriber is someone who takes information and mainly reformats it without doing much with it. The hope is that you internalise some of it such that the reformatted version is your own. However, when using tools like Notion you are formatting it in the way the tool wants you to. A paper notebook’s only restriction is perhaps it has to be A4 sized, otherwise write whatever you make of it. I sometimes see my students do this when studying or when they are in a meeting. They take notes by clicking about, maybe bullet points or a table. Then they make a new page for a topic we’re discussing, click somewhere, something else pops up. Now, did they actually process any of it or just transcribe it?

The counter-argument is that you transcribe in the moment and then process later. I believe in that case all you need is a scratch pad, not tables linked to other pages and AI pop-ups. Just write the keywords that will help you remember and process later. Often all it takes is just a couple of keywords for us to remember items from a meeting or revise a topic. If you write those keywords in Notion, then you have to figure where to write them, what to do with them etc.

In conclusion, the productivity sweet spot is probably just below what these tools offer and what works for you. Some may consider a pen and paper with a to-do list a lower bound whereas others feel like they need a fully fledged personal knowledge management platform.