I spent four hours last Sunday afternoon rearranging my “Life Dashboard” in Notion instead of actually calling my mom like I promised. I was tweaking the hex codes for the gallery view icons, making sure the ‘Priority’ property was color-coded just right. By 6:00 PM, I felt exhausted, like I’d done a full day’s work. The reality? I hadn’t actually produced a single thing. I hadn’t even checked off a task. I had just moved the furniture around in a room I never sit in.
We need to stop pretending that “organizing information” is the same thing as thinking. It’s not. It’s just digital hoarding with a prettier interface. Whether you’re a Notion person or an Obsidian person, we’re all basically just squirrels burying nuts we’re never going to dig up.
The Notion Trap: Productivity as Interior Design
Notion is the worst offender because it makes you feel like an architect when you’re really just a decorator. I used it for three years. At one point, I had a database for every book I read, every coffee bean I bought (I tracked the roast date and altitude, which is embarrassing), and every “insight” I had while walking the dog.
What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. Notion encourages you to build systems for problems you don’t even have yet. You see a template on YouTube from some 22-year-old “productivity guru” and suddenly you think you need a complex relational database to manage your grocery list. I once spent $40 on a “custom OS” template. I used it for exactly six days. Total waste.
The more time you spend making your notes look good, the less time you spend actually understanding what’s in them.
I genuinely believe Notion is designed to keep you in the app, not to get you out and doing work. It’s too slow. It’s too heavy. I’ve waited five seconds for a page to load just to write down a phone number. That’s not a tool; it’s a hindrance.
Obsidian and the Cult of Connections
Then there’s the Obsidian crowd. I moved there because I thought the “graph view” would magically make me smarter. I thought if I linked enough notes together, some brilliant epiphany would just emerge from the ether. I know people will disagree, but the graph view is a glorified screensaver. It looks cool when you post a screenshot on Twitter to show how “complex” your brain is, but it provides zero actual utility for getting work done. It’s just a digital attic full of boxes tied together with string.
- You spend more time “linking” than writing.
- The Zettelkasten method is mostly just a way to feel busy while avoiding the hard work of synthesis.
- Markdown is great until you realize you’re spending twenty minutes troubleshooting a plugin update instead of writing your project proposal.
I tested my own output over a six-month period. When I was deep in the Obsidian “Second Brain” rabbit hole, I produced 427 notes. Out of those, only 12 were ever referenced again for an actual project. That’s a 2.8% utility rate. I was basically a data entry clerk for my own ego.
The “Second Brain” is a Lie
Tiago Forte’s whole concept of “Building a Second Brain” has done more damage to my personal productivity than the invention of the infinite scroll. I used to think he was a genius. I was completely wrong. The premise is that we need to save everything because we might need it later. But “later” almost never comes. We’re just creating a massive pile of digital clutter that we have to manage, tag, and migrate every time a new app comes out.
Anyway, I digress. The point is that our brains aren’t meant to be hard drives. They’re meant to be processors. When you outsource your memory to a software program, you stop doing the heavy lifting of actually learning. If a piece of information isn’t important enough for you to remember, or at least remember where to find it in 10 seconds, it’s probably not worth saving in the first place.
The part nobody talks about
I’ve developed a genuine hatred for Readwise. There, I said it. It’s a service that literally automates information hoarding. It shoves highlights from books you barely remember reading back into your face, and then you dutifully sync them to Notion or Obsidian. It’s like keeping every receipt from a grocery store thinking that’s going to make you a Michelin-star chef. It doesn’t work that way. Knowledge requires friction. If it’s too easy to save, it’s too easy to forget.
I might be wrong about this, but I think the obsession with these tools is actually a form of anxiety. We’re so afraid of missing out on a “key insight” that we’ve turned into digital packrats. We value the *collection* of ideas over the *execution* of them.
How I actually work now
I deleted my complex databases. I stopped using bi-directional links. I stopped tagging things. Here is my current “system” which is probably “wrong” according to every productivity nerd on the internet:
- A physical notebook for daily tasks. When the page is full, the old stuff dies.
- A single folder on my computer called “Notes” with plain text files.
- Search (Cmd+F). If I can’t find it by searching, I didn’t need it that badly.
It’s boring. It’s not aesthetic. It doesn’t have a graph view. But I’m actually finishing things again. I’m not playing “Productivity Sim City” anymore.
I sometimes wonder if we’re all just using these apps to avoid the terrifying reality that most of what we read and think doesn’t actually matter. It’s easier to format a database than it is to write something original. It’s easier to link two notes than it is to change your mind about a difficult subject. Are we actually getting smarter, or are we just building more elaborate filing cabinets for a life we’re too busy to actually live?
Go call your mom. Delete the template.