But fwiw, what works for me is to have notes everywhere. I take notes in a journal, ephemeral notepad, emails, texts to myself, apple notes, and orgmode. I just want to have lots of accessibility.
Nowadays I gave up on all the Notion/Evernote/orgmode/whatever-tool-someone-is-peddling with systems of systems, tagging, etc. to organise oneself.
I realised after getting a bit older that pen and paper is the system that works for me, just a nice notebook, without pressure to use it for everything, no rigid system but a system that organically evolved for myself; keep it accessible wherever I'm that I might need to take notes, and it just flows while being easy to use for myself.
I think that looking for the perfect amazing organisational system is just another form of procrastination. I'm very happy for the people who manage to have found a very neat system for themselves, searchable, available on every device, etc., but it's not for me.
For me…
- One trusted place for all the notes (something that the stuff everywhere model lacks… things get lost or end up being hard to find)
- Portable, avoiding lock-in. The assumption is the usefulness of the notes will outlive any closed platform.
- Multiplatform, with sync. To make it easy to have that one trusted place, and it always be accessible.
- Modern features… can’t sketch too well in markdown and embedding stuff is tedious and doesn’t seem like it will scale well over time without tooling. But tooling brings back the lock-in issue.
And probably some other stuff. The perfect system doesn’t really exist. Compromises need to be made. Each person makes different concessions, while many of us jump from tool to tool, system to system, hoping to have it all, but ultimately living with constant pain and disappointment.
I’ve given up. I’m use Obsidian and work and the Apple stuff at home. If/when I need to migrate off Apple, I’ll deal with it then. Switching every few months sucks.
Neurotic people thinking that they are going to organize their existence on this earth.