I spent $420 on productivity apps in 2022. I know this because I went back and checked my bank statements during a particularly dark Tuesday last month. $420 for the privilege of feeling like I was getting things done while my actual output—the stuff that pays my mortgage—dropped by exactly 15% compared to the year before. I was a fraud. A well-organized, highly-tagged, digitally-optimized fraud.

It was November 14, 2019. I remember the date because I was sitting in Espresso Vivace in Seattle, vibrating from too much caffeine, trying to figure out why my Roam Research graph looked like a literal spiderweb but I couldn’t remember a single thing I’d read that week. I spent four hours that afternoon tweaking CSS code to make my bullet points look like tiny minimalist squares. Four hours. I didn’t write a single word of the report I was supposed to be working on. I just made the place where I was supposed to work look pretty. It felt like progress. It wasn’t. It was just a socially acceptable form of playing with Legos.

What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. We’ve been sold this idea that a ‘Second Brain’ needs to be this pristine, interconnected vault of human wisdom. It doesn’t. If your system requires more than five minutes of maintenance a week, you’re not building a brain. You’re building a hobby. And it’s a boring one at that.

Notion is a dollhouse for adults (and I hate it)

I know people love Notion. I know the templates are beautiful. But I actively tell my friends to avoid it like the plague if they actually want to get work done. I hate it. I hate the way the slash-command menu pops up every time I try to just type a sentence. I hate the way people spend weeks building ‘dashboards’ with weather widgets and lo-fi hip-hop Spotify embeds just to track a grocery list. It’s a dollhouse. You’re just moving furniture around while the house is on fire.

The friction is the problem. If it takes three clicks to record a thought, that thought is dead. It’s gone. I’ve lost more good ideas to Notion’s loading spinner than I care to admit. I’m biased, sure. I’m irrationally angry about a software product. But I’ve bought the same $12 pocket notebook four times now because it doesn’t have a loading screen. I don’t care if it doesn’t sync to the cloud. At least it works when I’m standing in line at the grocery store and finally figure out how to fix that bug in my spreadsheet.

The best note-taking system is the one you actually use when you’re tired, cranky, and have thirty seconds before a meeting starts.

The 4% rule of note-taking

I tracked my ‘capture rate’ for 90 days last year. I took 1,200 notes. I’m talking highlights from Kindle, random shower thoughts, and meeting minutes. At the end of those three months, I went back to see how many I actually revisited or used for a project. The number was 48. That’s 4%. The other 96% was just digital landfill. It was junk.

We have this hoarding instinct with information. We think if we save the link, we’ve saved the knowledge. We haven’t. A second brain should be a filter, not a vacuum cleaner. I might be wrong about this, but I think most of the ‘knowledge’ we capture is actually just a way to soothe the anxiety of forgetting. But guess what? Forgetting is a feature, not a bug. Your brain forgets the boring stuff so you have room for the stuff that matters. Stop fighting it.

Anyway, I digress. The point is that over-engineering your system is a response to the fear of missing out on your own life. You think if you tag it #wisdom, you’ll become wise. You won’t. You’ll just have a tagged link.

My “Good Enough” 3-step process

After my Seattle meltdown, I deleted almost everything. I moved to a system that is objectively worse by ‘expert’ standards but actually works for me. It’s messy. It’s ugly. It’s perfect.

1. One Inbox: I use a single app (Drafts) or a physical notebook. Everything goes there. No folders. No tags. Just a raw dump of text.
2. The Sunday Clear-Out: Once a week, I spend 20 minutes looking at the dump. If something is actually useful, it goes into one of four folders: Work, Personal, Archive, or ‘Maybe Later’.
3. Folders > Tags: I know the gurus say tags are better because a note can live in two places. They’re wrong. Tags are a maintenance nightmare. Folders force you to make a choice. Is this for work or not? Pick one and move on.

That’s it. That’s the whole trick.

A note-taking system is like a kitchen

Think about your kitchen for a second. You don’t buy a $500 sous-vide machine before you know how to scramble an egg. Or maybe you do, and it’s currently gathering dust in the cabinet above the fridge. Most people approach a Second Brain like they’re outfitting a Michelin-star restaurant when they’re really just trying to make a sandwich. You need a sharp knife and a clean counter. Everything else is just clutter.

I used to think I needed Obsidian with 40 plugins and a custom ‘Zettelkasten’ workflow. I spent more time reading about how to take notes than actually taking them. It was a loop. A recursive nightmare of productivity porn. I finally realized that the more complex the system, the less I wrote. Complexity is a wall. Simplicity is a door.

I’ll be honest: I still get tempted. I see a new app on Product Hunt with a ‘graph view’ and my heart skips a beat. I want the shiny thing. But then I remember that 15% drop in my income and I go back to my boring-ass folders. It’s not sexy. It doesn’t look good on a YouTube thumbnail. But I actually get my work done now.

I still wonder sometimes if I’m missing out on some higher level of consciousness by not having a perfectly linked ‘digital garden.’ Maybe there’s a version of me out there who is 20% smarter because he uses nested tags and backlinked metadata. But that guy probably hasn’t finished his actual work yet. Does any of this actually make us smarter, or just more organized? I honestly don’t know the answer.

Build a system for the person you are when you’re exhausted, not the person you wish you were on a Sunday morning after three coffees.