On Note-Taking Systems

I have tried, at various points, to use Notion, Obsidian, Roam, Bear, Logseq, a plain text folder, and a physical notebook. All of them worked. None of them stuck for more than a few months. This essay is my attempt to figure out why.

The seduction of the system

There's a specific kind of productivity content that I think does real harm: the elaborate note-taking system tutorial. You've seen them. A person shows you their Zettelkasten — thousands of linked atomic notes, a network of knowledge built over years. Or their PARA folders. Or their Building a Second Brain workflow. The implicit promise is that if you copy their system, you'll get their results.

The problem is that the system is the output, not the input. The person in the video has a useful knowledge base because they've been thinking seriously about their domain for years and happen to use that tool to store it. The tool didn't create the thinking.

I spent embarrassing amounts of time organizing notes I would never use, tagging things with taxonomies that added friction without adding clarity. Migrating between apps whenever the next one seemed better. Building structure about thinking instead of just thinking.

What actually helps

When I stripped everything back, I found the only note-taking habits that survived long-term were the boring ones.

A single running log. One file, newest entries at the top, dated. No folders, no tags. When I need to find something, I search. Turns out full-text search is extremely good and taxonomies are not.

Writing to think, not to archive. The point of writing a note isn't to have the note — it's to clarify the thought. If I write a paragraph trying to explain why something confused me and the paragraph helps me understand it, the note has done its job whether or not I ever read it again.

Not fighting the medium. I have a bad habit of trying to make digital notes feel like physical notes and physical notes feel like digital notes. They're different. Paper is for thinking in the moment. Digital is for things I might want to search later. Mixing them up creates friction.

On Obsidian specifically

Obsidian is the most capable of the tools I tried and the one I keep coming back to, mostly because it stores files as plain Markdown on disk. That means I'm not locked in. I can read and edit notes with any text editor. I can version control them with git. The data isn't held hostage by a company.

The graph view is mesmerizing and useless. I've never navigated to a note via the graph. I've found many notes via search. This is not a knock on Obsidian — it's a knock on my tendency to optimize for the visual and the architectural over the functional.

The thing that actually matters

I've watched myself spend forty minutes setting up a new note-taking system and twenty minutes writing code. This is exactly backwards.

The note-taking system is not the point. The work is the point. A system that gets out of the way and lets you do the work is better than a system that is interesting to think about.

For me that's currently: one Obsidian vault, flat folder of Markdown files, daily note for scratchpad stuff, search when I need to find something. Embarrassingly simple. Works fine.

If you've found something that works differently, I'm genuinely curious. Email is in the about page.