Why I Stopped Trusting Productivity Apps with My Real Thinking

The ritual goes like this. You find a new tool — through a recommendation or a demo video that makes the interface look like it was designed specifically for you. You spend a weekend migrating everything over. You build the folder structure, configure the templates, import the old notes. For a few weeks, the system feels alive. Then it doesn't. Gradually, you open it less. Then you stop opening it at all. Then you discover the next tool.

I've done this cycle at least seven times. Evernote. Notion. Obsidian. Bear. Roam. A few others I've already forgotten. Each migration took a weekend I won't get back.

The migration as ritual

What's odd about this pattern is how purposeful it feels each time. This isn't passive drift — it's an active decision. You're reorganizing. You're consolidating. You're building a system. The work of setting up a new tool is so engaging that it can easily fill the time you should have spent doing the thinking the tool was supposed to support.

Casey Newton wrote about this in 2023, in a piece for Platformer called "Why note-taking apps don't make us smarter." His argument was blunt: capturing information isn't thinking. The apps "might aid us in saving and recalling information, but when it comes to thinking, they get in the way more often." Thinking happens in long stretches of staring into space, then writing a bit, then staring again. The note app is sitting open next to Slack and email and seventeen other browser tabs, quietly losing.

He had a point. But I think the problem is subtler than distraction.

Capture as the end state

The default mental model for note-taking apps is a filing cabinet. You take notes. You file them. Later, you retrieve them. This model treats information capture as the goal — as if getting things into the system is the work.

But most of the notes I've ever taken weren't waiting to be found later. They were waiting to be forgotten. A meeting summary from 2021. A set of action items from a project that ended. A half-formed idea that never developed into anything. The filing cabinet model assumes all of this is worth preserving in equal measure. It isn't.

Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist who published 70 books and 400 scholarly articles before dying in 1998, built his body of work around a paper-based card index of 90,000 notes. His Zettelkasten wasn't designed for retrieval in any straightforward sense. Every new card had to be linked to existing ones, which meant each new idea forced him to re-engage with old ones. The friction was the point. The system was organized around developing connections rather than filing things away.

Most note apps do the opposite. They make capture frictionless and retrieval optional. The result is a warehouse of information you technically "have" but rarely use. The system looks full. The thinking looks done. Neither is true.

The useful stuff wasn't in the notes

When I look back at what actually proved valuable in my various knowledge management attempts, it was never the notes themselves. It was the small set of information that stayed relevant across time: a preference about how I like to work, a fact about someone I know that matters when I talk to them again, a decision I made with a reason attached to it. The structured stuff. The stuff with context baked in.

A note from a meeting is a snapshot. A preference — "I work better before lunch; don't schedule anything cognitively demanding after 2pm" — is a fact that keeps being true next month. A task with a clear owner and a deadline is different from a note about a task. These aren't the same kind of thing, and treating them the same way is part of why the filing cabinet model breaks down.

The notes I wrote were information. The preferences, the person details, the decisions with rationale — those were knowledge. They lived in different places, required different maintenance, and aged at completely different rates. I had been throwing them all into the same pile and wondering why the pile felt useless.

What the cycle is actually telling you

I don't think most people who migrate between note apps are looking for better features. I think they're responding to a real signal: the current system isn't helping them think, and they're hoping a new one will.

The signal is right. The diagnosis is wrong.

Better folder structures don't fix the problem. Bidirectional links don't fix it. Templates don't fix it. The issue is that "notes" is too broad a category. It collapses things that need different treatment into a single bucket — and the bucket fills up, becomes unsearchable, and gets abandoned.

What would actually help is treating structured knowledge differently from captured text from the start. Not a note about a preference. A preference record, typed and queryable. Not a note about a person. A person entry, linked to the things they're connected to, updated when something changes. Not a dump of meeting notes. A document, yes — but with tasks extracted, decisions flagged, and context attached in a form that an AI or your future self can actually use.

The alternative is the familiar cycle. Find the next tool. Spend the weekend migrating. Notice six months later that you've stopped opening it. Start again.

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Asgeir Albretsen is the founder of Harbor.