Oh man this really hits home as someone who did a lot of this searching for a "perfect" system. At some point it really hit me, I think a lot of people are subconsciously believing that the note system will do the thinking for you, and it's really very bad at that. The good news is, that's what you -- the human -- are for.

Literally all the computer can do is periodically remind you of something, and all you can do is try to pick how/when it can re-tell you things you already know. Anything after that is you using your human brain to make the real connections.

(Yes, discovering this has made me wildly skeptical of AI to the point that I generally don't believe in it anymore, i.e. I'm 99.999% certain we will never see anything remotely close to a "singularity.")