The Promise That Got Me
About eighteen months ago, I watched a video by Tiago Forte that made me feel like I’d been walking around with my eyes half-closed. The premise was simple but seductive: what if you could externalize all your thoughts, ideas, and random observations into a system so well-organized that you’d never lose a useful idea again? What if your notes could actually work for you instead of just sitting there like digital dust? I bought his book, watched the course materials, and decided that this year would be different. This year, I would finally build a second brain.
The Building a Second Brain official methodology centers on something called PARA: Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives. Every note you capture belongs in one of these buckets, creating a neat, hierarchical garden where information grows in orderly rows. I set it up with religious fervor. I created templates. I color-coded everything. I even made a spreadsheet to track which notes belonged where. I was going to be the person who finally cracked the code on information management.
The First Three Months Were Glorious
There’s something almost meditative about setting up a new organizational system. Every article I read got captured. Every half-formed thought got timestamped and tagged. I was vigilant. I was methodical. I was insufferable to talk to at parties because I kept mentioning my new system. My notes app looked like something a person who had their life together would use. It felt like the digital equivalent of Marie Kondo folding clothes: everything had a place, everything sparked joy.
Then I looked at the actual numbers. According to Notion’s 2025 State of Productivity Report, people who implement formal note-taking systems spend an average of 4.1 hours every single week just maintaining those systems. I initially thought this was someone else’s problem. Not me. I’d be efficient. I’d keep it lean.
I was wrong, obviously.
The System Started Eating Itself
By month four, I noticed something uncomfortable. I had created so many organizational layers that I couldn’t remember where I’d put things. Was that insight about decision-making in my “Areas” folder or buried in “Resources”? Did I file that article about narrative structure under “Writing” or “General Learning”? I found myself searching for notes I’d already written instead of actually writing new things.
The deeper problem was that my system had fragmented across multiple apps. I was using Notion for structured notes, Obsidian for more exploratory thinking (Obsidian crossed 1 million paid subscribers in late 2024, which tells you something about how many people are chasing this same dragon), my notes app for quick captures, and three other tools for different purposes. The average knowledge worker now switches between 9.4 different apps per day. I was personally contributing to that statistic while believing I was optimizing my life.
This is where I need to be honest about something nobody talks about when they sell you on these systems. There’s a shame component to admitting your productivity stack isn’t working. You feel like you’ve failed at something as basic as organizing your own thoughts. So you don’t admit it. Instead, you buy a new course or a premium subscription or switch to a different app. You tell yourself the system works, you’re just not implementing it correctly. You are the problem, not the method.
What the Research Actually Says
Then I found a 2024 study from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management that made me stop and actually think about what I was doing. They found that when people take digital notes without deliberate review sessions, they retain less than 10 percent of the captured information after thirty days. Ten percent. All those beautifully organized notes? The vast majority were becoming write-only memories. I was creating the illusion of knowledge management while actually just moving information around like digital cargo.
That’s when something shifted. I realized I’d been operating under a false assumption: that capturing information was the hard part, and once it was captured and organized, the work was done. But capturing is the easy part. Anyone can save a link. Retention and application are the hard parts, and no amount of folder structure was going to magically make me review my notes or actually use them.
What Actually Changed
So here’s the embarrassing truth. I simplified almost everything. I went from five apps to two. I deleted entire folders because I was never going to revisit them anyway. I stopped trying to capture everything and started asking myself a harder question before saving anything: will I actually need this, and if so, when and why? The answer was usually no.
The bigger shift was committing to actual review. One hour every Sunday instead of that theoretical 4.1 hours spread across the week in fragmented maintenance sessions. I go through my notes, process what’s actually useful, delete what isn’t. It feels less productive in the moment. It isn’t. Retention matters more than capture.
Do I still use the PARA framework? Sort of. But loosely. Perfect organizational systems are often the enemy of actually doing the work those systems are supposed to support. The best system is the one you’ll actually use, which is usually simpler than you think.
I’m curious whether you’ve gone down this same rabbit hole. Have you built an elaborate note-taking system that now feels like it owns you instead of helps you? What made you finally step back, or haven’t you yet? There’s something liberating about admitting you were wrong about something, and I’d genuinely like to hear what your breaking point was, if you’ve had one.