stop organizing your notes. seriously. it's killing your productivity.
stop organizing your notes. seriously. it's killing your productivity.
i spent years trying to build the perfect note-taking system. folders, tags, color codes, the whole thing. and every single time, i'd spend more time organizing than actually capturing useful thoughts. sound familiar?
about six months ago i completely flipped my approach and honestly it changed how i work with information day to day. the idea is dead simple: capture first, organize later. or sometimes, don't organize at all.
here's what i mean. throughout the day, thoughts hit you at random moments. you're in a meeting, walking, cooking, reading something, whatever. the old me would think "okay where does this go, which folder, what tag" and by the time i figured that out, half the thought was gone. or worse, i just wouldn't capture it because the friction was too high.
now i just dump everything into one single inbox. voice memos, quick text notes, screenshots, random sentences that don't even make sense yet. zero structure. zero categorization in the moment. the only rule is: capture it within 10 seconds of thinking it or it's gone forever.
then once a week, usually sunday morning with coffee, i sit down and go through the inbox. this is where ai actually helps me. i feed my messy notes into an llm and ask it to find patterns, group related ideas, and surface things i might have forgotten about. it's surprisingly good at connecting dots between a random tuesday voice memo and something i typed on thursday.
what i found is that about 60% of what i capture is garbage. and that's fine. the other 40% contains stuff i absolutely would have lost. project ideas, solutions to problems i was stuck on, connections between concepts that only make sense in hindsight.
the key insight for me was this: the cost of capturing garbage is near zero. the cost of losing a good idea is potentially huge. so why was i putting up barriers (folders, tags, organization) at the exact moment i should have been reducing friction?
a few things i learned along the way:
voice notes are underrated. i capture way more context when i just talk for 30 seconds vs typing a few words. and with transcription being basically free now, there's no reason not to.
don't review daily. i tried that and it just became another chore. weekly works. you also get this nice effect where ideas have time to "marinate" and you see them with fresh eyes.
the weekly review is where the actual thinking happens. capturing is mechanical, reviewing is intellectual. separating these two modes made both of them better.
ymmv obviously, but if you're someone who has tried notion templates, zettelkasten, para method, building a second brain, etc. and none of it stuck. maybe the problem isn't that you haven't found the right system. maybe the problem is that you're trying to organize at the wrong time.
the messy inbox approach won't look pretty on you tube. nobody's making aesthetic videos about a chaotic pile of voice memos. but it actually works, which is more than i can say for my previous 15 attempts at the perfect system.
curious if anyone else has landed on something similar or if i'm the only one who gave up on organization and accidentally got more organized because of it.