51–60 of 228 posts
The only thing that's ever worked is a piece of paper and a pen. Never really look back more than a week. Not sophisticated, but it moves me forward.
So here's what's worked for me over the years - I collect interesting links/pages/stuff by emailing myself notes about them. I never actually _do_ anything with these notes, but from time to time I open the "Notes To Self" folder and skim through them. Anything that seems worthless I delete, anything that seems obvious I delete, the rest just sit there. And that's more useful than you'd think - by reviewing them semi…
- Workflowy is great for taking notes in meetings, allowing ad-hoc moving things around. It’s also great for reference material (what was that long command SQL query I use). But yes it’s also a graveyard.
- AirTable worked somewhat to keep moving projects forward, without growing unbounded. But only when there is a workflow. That looks like: dump tasks into rows, then create the steps as views of those tasks with different filters. So tasks essentially move systematically from uncategorized, no time estimate, no schedule, to getting tagged with all of that, and then I can narrow it down to see just what’s on the agenda for today’s date. I also have it show the sum of estimated time per date, because I inevitably end up scheduling 30 hours of tasks for a day, so that helps keep me honest on what’s achievable. I did the same thing in Workflowy with custom JavaScript but AirTable seemed more effective for this. Tasks also get linked to project buckets, and I basically then just try to keep every bucket moving forward (don’t let any active bucket get starved).
- I could throw all of this into an LLM and have it tell me what I should be working on, remind me about what I’m forgetting, and so on. But I’m basically not interested, because I’d have to give it additional context that would be beyond what I’m interested or allowed to share. Like, I’ll ask a generic question for advice to an LLM but if an LLM is going to remind me to ”call Robert about Project Mayhem, then it needs to know about Robert and Project Mayhem.
The key is using it to solve problems you actually have, rather than problems you want to have.
I was losing track of people's contact details --> I made an addressbook in obsidian.
I wanted to track my exercise to find out how much I was running each week --> make graphs
And so on. Your obsidian should get a bit messy before you try to impose order on it. Use it to solve a problem badly (Just writing down how far I run in a daily diary note) then improve (Writing a query to turn all of those notes into a graph).
Personally I don't use any AI with my knowledge base. Good searching tools and a little bit of organization are the most useful thing for me.
Personally, I think keeping lots of notes/links is a kind of digital hoarding. Just like real hoarding, it's an emotional problem not an organizational problem. If you can work out what emotional need hoarding links is fulfilling for you then you're on the way to working out how to get that emotional need fulfilled by something else.
To some extent I wish there was a bookmarking / note keeping service with snapshots and context based (local LLM?) search solving this. My main problem with bookmarks / notes that I forget about them. I don't need a bookmark keeping service, I need one which would bring them forward when I look for something, based on context too. Something like which also makes a plain text searchable snapshot of the page.
I had been hoarding links/notes to movies/tv shows for some time, saved to a plain text file. Often by sharing links from other apps (ie. Reddit or Letterboxd), paired with hashtags, using an iOS app I built. Finally extracted the data for these hashtags and fed it to an LLM to organize. I'm happy with the result https://xenodium.com/film-tv-bookmarks-chaos-resolved
At some point, organisation can become a form of procrastination. Building a second brain is not Doing The Thing.[0] A note is not an intention. It commits to memory, not to action. I really don't care about having a whole searchable, tagged database; I hardly ever look at those notes again. At work I have topic-based Markdown notes. Sometimes I collect information about a topic for a few weeks or months, and eventua…
I even got to a point where I made an "anti-memory system" - a MCP tool that just calls a model without context from the full conversation or past conversations, to get a fresh perspective. And I instruct the host model to reveal only partially the information we discussed, explaining that creativity is sparked when LLMs get to see not too much, not too little - like a sexy dress.
If you answered Q1–Q3 above, that already helps a ton. I also made a 3-min survey to aggregate patterns. I’ll share a summary of results and invite early testers if there’s real demand: https://concerns.vercel.app
1.On-demand recall & retrieval is the core pain: people capture a lot but can’t reliably resurface the right note/link at the right time; they want stronger search (fuzzy/semantic), snapshots/context, and “pull-based” recall when needed.
2.Privacy/local-first is a hard requirement for many: “no cloud, no third-party access,” ideally open-source and self-hostable; any AI must run fully on-device to be trusted.
3.Low-friction matters more than perfect organization: users prefer systems that don’t force structure or add maintenance overhead—messy-first, iterate only when a real problem appears.
4.Avoid interruption by default: many dislike proactive “AI suggestions”; they want controlled resurfacing (opt-in prompts), not constant nudges.
5.Different goals coexist: for many, notes are for memory/inspiration/reference (not turning into tasks), while others want action workflows—tools should respect both modes.
6.Cost and scalability must be predictable: long-term indexing (years of notes/history) can get expensive; pricing needs to be transparent and not “per task,” and context signals across tools are often noisy/unreliable.