I spent six hours on a rainy Sunday in October 2019 meticulously tagging four hundred and twelve articles in Evernote. I remember the exact weather—that grey, oppressive Seattle drizzle—because I was sitting in a coffee shop on 4th Ave, feeling like a god of productivity. I had tags for ‘strategy,’ ‘marketing,’ ‘cool-design,’ and even ‘to-read-maybe.’ I felt organized. I felt smart.
Three years later, I checked that account. I hadn’t opened 98% of those notes. Not once. The ‘strategy’ tag was a graveyard of dead links and outdated PDFs. I had spent a full workday acting as a high-end digital janitor for a library I never intended to visit. It was pathetic. Truly.
The whole promise of the ‘Second Brain’ movement—Tiago Forte and the rest of them—is that we can offload our thinking to digital tools. But for most of us, it turns into this weird, obsessive hobby of moving blocks around in Notion or linking nodes in Obsidian. We spend more time managing the knowledge than actually using it to do something real. If your system requires you to spend more than ten minutes a day ‘organizing,’ you aren’t a knowledge worker. You’re just a hobbyist librarian.
Stop building a digital dollhouse you’ll never actually live in
Most people treat their note-taking apps like a digital dollhouse. They spend hours picking out the perfect wallpaper (custom icons), arranging the furniture (database views), and making sure everything looks ‘aesthetic’ for a Twitter screenshot. It’s a trap. A shiny, relational-database-flavored trap.
What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. Your brain isn’t a filing cabinet; it’s a messy, associative spark-generator. When you force it to follow a rigid manual entry process, you kill the spark. I used to think I needed a ‘perfect’ system before I could start writing my blog. I was completely wrong. I just needed a place to dump things where they wouldn’t get lost, without me having to think about where they ‘belonged.’
The goal isn’t to have a beautiful library. The goal is to have a pile of high-quality ingredients ready for when you want to cook something.
I’ve grown to genuinely loathe Notion for this specific reason. I know people will disagree, and they’ll point to their complex ‘Life OS’ templates, but Notion is too slow. It’s heavy. It’s the digital equivalent of an over-engineered kitchen where you have to move five appliances just to get to the toaster. I refuse to use it for quick capture. I actively tell my friends to avoid it if they actually want to get work done. It encourages fiddling. And fiddling is the enemy of thinking.
The ‘Zero Effort’ stack that actually works
I’ve simplified my life down to three tools that talk to each other. No manual tagging. No ‘choosing the right folder’ at the moment of capture. If it takes more than two clicks, I don’t do it.
- Readwise Reader: This is the only subscription I’ll never cancel. It’s $9.99 a month, and it’s worth every penny. Anything I want to read goes here. I highlight things. Those highlights get sucked out automatically.
- Raindrop.io: For the stuff that isn’t an article—images, tweets, random tools. I have one folder called ‘Unsorted.’ That’s it.
- Logseq (or any local markdown tool): This is where the highlights land. I don’t move them. I don’t categorize them. I just let them sit there until I search for a keyword.
I tested my ‘fiddling time’ over a three-week period last month. When I used Notion, I averaged 42 minutes a day just ‘cleaning up’ notes. With this automated stack? Less than 4 minutes. I tracked this using a simple stopwatch on my desk. The difference is staggering. That’s nearly four hours a week I got back just by giving up on the idea of a ‘perfect’ system.
The part nobody talks about: Why manual entry is a lie
We tell ourselves that manual entry helps us ‘process’ the information. We say that by re-typing a quote or manually choosing a category, we are building neural pathways. This is mostly a lie we tell ourselves to justify our procrastination. It’s ‘productive procrastination.’
I might be wrong about this, but I think the human brain is actually better at finding patterns in a messy pile than it is at navigating a perfect hierarchy. When you automate the capture, you keep the context. When you manually move a note, you often strip away the very thing that made it interesting in the first place—the environment you found it in. Anyway, I’m getting off track. The point is that your ‘second brain’ should be a net-gain for your time, not a tax on it.
I have this one extreme stance: if a tool doesn’t have a ‘Share Sheet’ integration on the iPhone that works in one tap, it’s garbage. I don’t care how powerful the desktop app is. If I’m standing in line at a taco truck and I see a cool poster, I need to be able to snap a photo and have it land in my system in three seconds. If I have to open an app, wait for it to sync, find the ‘Inbox’ page, and click ‘New Note,’ I’ve already lost the thought. Total waste of time.
The math of why you’re doing it wrong
Let’s look at the numbers, because people love to ignore the hidden costs of their ‘systems.’ If you save 10 items a day (articles, quotes, ideas) and it takes you 60 seconds to ‘process’ each one (tagging, filing, linking), that’s 10 minutes a day. Over a year, that is 60 hours. That is a full work week plus two days of overtime just… clicking buttons.
I refuse to spend a week of my life every year being a secretary for my past self.
I’ve bought the same $120 mechanical keyboard three times because I like the way the switches feel when I’m actually writing. I don’t want to waste those clicks on metadata. Metadata is for computers. Meaning is for humans. Let the computer handle the tags. Use the search bar. It’s 2024; the search algorithms in these apps are better than your memory anyway.
How to actually start (The Lazy Way)
- Uninstall the ‘heavy’ apps from your phone dock. Move Notion or Obsidian to the third screen. Put your simplest capture tool (even just Apple Notes) in the dock.
- Get a read-it-later app that syncs highlights. Don’t copy-paste quotes. If you are copy-pasting, you are failing.
- Embrace the mess. Stop trying to make your notes look like a Pinterest board. A messy note you can find in 2 seconds via search is infinitely better than a beautiful note you spent 20 minutes formatting.
I remember talking to a guy at a meetup who showed me his Obsidian graph. It looked like a glowing galaxy of interconnected dots. It was beautiful. I asked him what he’d written lately using all that data. He looked at me like I’d just kicked his dog and said, ‘I’m still building the foundation.’ That was two years ago. He’s still building the foundation. Don’t be that guy.
Is it possible that by automating everything, I’m losing some ‘deep’ connection to the material? Maybe. But I’d rather have a 10% lower retention rate and actually have the time to write three articles a week, rather than having 100% retention of a library I never have time to use. I still wonder if I’m just lazy, or if I’ve finally figured out that the ‘system’ is just a distraction from the work. Either way, my ‘Unsorted’ folder is currently sitting at 1,400 items, and I’ve never felt more productive.
Stop tagging. Start doing.