It was October 14, 2022, around 11:30 PM on a Tuesday. I should have been sleeping because I had a 7:00 AM walkthrough at a job site the next morning (I work in operations for a mid-sized construction firm, by the way). Instead, I was hunched over my monitor, meticulously tagging a database entry in Notion for a recipe for spicy chickpeas. I was adjusting the ‘Property’ fields, adding a ‘Protein Source’ tag, and looking for the perfect chickpea emoji. I spent forty-five minutes on this. I haven’t cooked those chickpeas since. That was the moment I realized my personal knowledge management system wasn’t a tool; it was a hobby that was actively making me stupider.
We’ve been sold this idea that if we just find the right software, we’ll become these hyper-efficient geniuses with ‘second brains’ that do all the heavy lifting for us. It’s a lie. Most of these tools are just high-resolution ways to procrastinate. I’ve tried them all—the complex Notion databases, the sprawling Obsidian graphs, the weird Roam Research cult stuff. And after three years of ‘optimizing,’ I’ve come to a conclusion that I know people will disagree with, but I’m saying it anyway: most digital PKM systems are just digital hoarding disguised as productivity.
Notion is a slow spreadsheet for people who like emojis
I’ll start with the heavy hitter. Everyone loves Notion. I used to love Notion. I spent hundreds of hours building a ‘Life OS’ that tracked everything from my daily caloric intake to the serial numbers of my power tools. But here is the problem: Notion is fundamentally a website. It’s slow. Every time I had a quick thought, I had to open the app, wait for the little spinning icon, navigate to the right page, click the right database, and then finally type. By the time I got there, the spark was gone.
What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. Notion makes you feel like you’re building a company when you’re really just trying to remember to buy milk. It’s too flexible. The ‘infinite canvas’ is a trap because you spend more time designing the workspace than doing the work. I remember a specific failure where I lost a subcontractor’s private cell number because I had ‘nested’ it under a Project Gallery that I’d accidentally filtered to only show ‘Active’ jobs. The job was ‘Pending.’ I looked like an idiot for ten minutes while I stood on a rainy sidewalk in Newark trying to find a phone number I’d hidden from myself. Notion is for teams, not for your brain.
Also, I’m going to say it: Notion’s mobile app is a disaster. It’s clunky and requires a data connection that works about 60% of the time in the elevators I’m usually stuck in. If you can’t access your ‘brain’ in an elevator, you don’t have a second brain. You have a very expensive filing cabinet located in a cloud that doesn’t care about you. I genuinely think Notion’s valuation is a bubble because the product is fundamentally broken for anyone with a real, high-speed job. It’s built for people who sit at desks and have time to pick out icons. Most of us don’t.
The Obsidian graph view is just a screensaver
After I got fed up with Notion’s speed, I moved to Obsidian. I loved the idea of ‘local-first’ files. I loved Markdown. I spent three weeks—I’m not exaggerating, I tracked it on my calendar—fiddling with my CSS theme and learning how to use the ‘Dataview’ plugin. I had 427 notes linked together in a complex web. I would open the ‘Graph View’ and watch the little dots float around. It felt like I was in The Matrix.
But then I realized something. I never actually looked at the graph to find information. Not once. It’s a vanity metric. It’s a way to feel like your knowledge is ‘growing’ because the cloud of dots gets bigger, but the actual utility of those notes was near zero. I used to think the ‘Zettelkasten’ method was the secret to being a genius. I was completely wrong. It’s just a way to turn reading a book into a data-entry job. I read Thinking, Fast and Slow and took thirty pages of interconnected notes. Ask me one thing about that book today. I remember nothing. I was so focused on the ‘link’ that I forgot to actually learn the content.
Obsidian is like a Lego set where you never actually build the castle; you just keep sorting the bricks by color and shape until you’re too tired to play.
I know the power users will come for me. They’ll talk about ’emergent properties’ and ‘automated workflows.’ I tested my ‘time to thought’—the seconds between having an idea and writing it down—across different platforms over a month. Notion took 9 seconds. Obsidian, once I got it open and found the right folder, took about 4 seconds. Paper took 0.8 seconds. In the time it takes for Obsidian to index my 1.4GB of attachments, I could have planned my entire week on a napkin. Complexity kills creativity.
Anyway, I digress. I actually went through a phase where I bought a mechanical keyboard just because I thought it would make me ‘want’ to write more notes in Obsidian. I spent $200 on a Keychron with brown switches. It didn’t help. I just had a louder way to be unproductive.
Why a $15 notebook is actually the ‘Pro’ move
I eventually gave up. I bought a Leuchtturm1917 (the A5 size with dots, obviously) and a decent pen. It felt like a defeat at first. I felt like I was going backward. But then something weird happened. I started actually remembering things. There is some science behind this, I think—something about the tactile nature of writing—but I don’t really care about the ‘why.’ I just care that it works.
With a notebook, there are no plugins. There are no updates. There is no ‘syncing’ error that deletes your morning’s work. It’s just you and the page. I use a very basic version of the Bullet Journal method, but mostly I just write the date at the top and start scribbling. If something is important, I put a star next to it. If it’s a task, I put a box. That’s it. That’s the whole trick.
- It never runs out of battery.
- It doesn’t have notifications.
- You can’t spend three hours ‘customizing’ the margins.
- It fits in my high-vis vest pocket.
I might be wrong about this, but I think the reason we crave these complex digital systems is that we’re afraid of the blank page. A digital app gives you ‘templates’ and ‘structures’ that make you feel like you’ve already started. A notebook is just a void. It’s intimidating. But that intimidation is where the actual thinking happens. You have to decide what’s worth the ink. In Obsidian, I would clip every article I found on the internet ‘just in case.’ In my notebook, I only write down the things that actually matter to my life or my job. Paper is the ultimate filter.
The part nobody talks about: The ‘Productivity Influencer’ scam
Here is my risky take: I think the entire ‘Personal Knowledge Management’ industry is built on selling solutions to people who don’t actually have a problem. If you are a student or a researcher, maybe you need a linked database. But for the rest of us—the people with normal jobs in general management, construction, healthcare, whatever—we don’t need a ‘Second Brain.’ We just need to pay attention.
I see these influencers like Tiago Forte or the Notion ‘certified’ consultants selling templates for $150. It’s predatory. They’re selling the *feeling* of being organized. It’s the same reason people buy gym memberships on January 1st and never go. Buying the template feels like progress. It isn’t. Progress is actually doing the work, and the work is almost always simpler than the system you built to track it. I’ve bought the same $15 notebook five times now. I don’t care if something ‘smarter’ exists. I’m sticking with it.
I know I’m being unfair. Some people genuinely love the digital tinkering. But I’ve seen too many of my friends get sucked into the ‘productivity’ rabbit hole only to realize they haven’t actually produced anything in months. They have the most beautiful, tagged, backlinked, cloud-synced list of goals in the world, but they haven’t actually hit a single one of them. It’s pathetic, really. I was one of them.
I’m not saying you should delete your accounts tomorrow. But maybe just try a week without them. Buy a cheap pen and a pad of paper. Leave your phone in the other room. See what happens when you don’t have a ‘system’ to hide behind. You might find that you’re actually a lot more capable than your software wants you to believe. Or maybe you’ll realize you have nothing to say. Either way, you’ll save a lot of time on emojis.
Do we really need to remember everything? I’m starting to think that forgetting is a feature, not a bug. If it’s important, it’ll come back. If it isn’t, no database in the world is going to make it useful. I still have that Notion account, by the way. I logged in last week and saw a list of ‘Books to Read in 2021.’ I hadn’t opened it in two years. Total waste of time.
Just buy a notebook. It’s enough.