Unbundling Tools for Thought

These are two extremes, there's a major gulf in the middle, and this is something that doesn't lend itself to min-maxing. The content creators have convoluted setups that take more time to use than they're useful for because they're selling their content. My setup is simple, and after solving the major problems I had with overly simplistic systems (bullet journals, evernote, markdown files, etc.) like difficult retrieval, lack of portability, etc. over the years, I got into Roam (very early 2020?).

I went hard on organizing and templating things, and eventually found it to be more overhead than it was worth. I starting paring back since then, and moved on to Obsidian (still useful for evergreen-style notes) and Tana (more for planning and organizing projects). With a very simple organization, I'm more able to quickly store and retrieve information, and I've come to a pretty happy medium. It's not perfect, but it's saved me enough time to make the investment useful for me.

But maybe you don't have a personal use for note-taking. For someone like me, with ADHD and a horrifically bad short-term memory, note-taking saves me tons of time, daily. There's just the (not easy!) matter of prioritizing what you're storing, minimizing the overhead that comes with storage and retrieval, and minimizing the steps to retrieval.