Eight Bullet Journals
Every eighteen months, someone ships a new system.
GTD. Zettelkasten. PARA. Building a Second Brain. LYT. Digital gardens. AI OS. LLM wikis. The names change. The promises don’t. Organize your thinking and you’ll think better. Build the right system and your ideas will compound. The graph view will reveal connections you never knew existed.
The second brain keeps growing. The work doesn’t.
Nobody admits to building Rube Goldberg machines and finishing nothing.
The backup nobody thinks about
I’ve been building these contraptions since high school. Binders. File folders. Color-coded tabs. The David Allen era. The Hamster Revolution. All of them promising that if I just got the system right, everything else would follow.
You don’t back up computer systems to back them up. You back them up to restore them. Nobody thinks about backups until they need a restore – and that’s when it either paid off or it didn’t.
Notes work the same way. You’re not taking notes to take notes. You’re taking them to restore thinking – to get back to a synthesis, a connection, an old idea that wants to meet a new one. The question isn’t “how do I file this?” It’s “how do I find this when I need it?”
I had an office in Burnside in the early 2000s. IT department, but paper found its way everywhere – invoices, flyers, meeting notes, the occasional printed email. At some point I stopped trying to file it and started sweeping stacks together, putting a sticky note with the date on top, and pushing them aside.
If I didn’t look at a stack within a month, it was garbage. I’d throw it out without opening it.
That’s the system working. Most of it was garbage. The sticky-note approach didn’t just manage the mess – it revealed which pile was worth keeping and which was worth a trip to the blue bin. The insight was right there in the gesture. I just didn’t name it for another fifteen years.
The link nobody maintains
I have eight bullet journals on my shelf. Different schemas, different spreads, different promises I made to myself about how this one would be the one. None of them made it past a month. Every new one felt like waking up to I’ve Got You Babe on the radio.
The bullet journal system has a mechanism called migration – at the end of each week or month, you review incomplete items and move what’s still worth keeping forward. But migration is the same work as maintaining semantic links by hand: you’re manually moving thinking forward across time. It requires a standing appointment with the system that the system can’t keep for you.
I just won’t do it. Didn’t. Know this about myself now.
The David Allen era was the same. GTD has a weekly review – two hours on a Friday to process everything, close open loops, set the next week. The people who actually do this are the people writing books about it. The rest of us think about doing it while doing literally anything else.
I’m profoundly lazy. Not “too busy” lazy – “if it requires ongoing manual curation to function, it was never going to work” lazy. That’s not a character flaw. It’s a diagnostic. Systems I won’t maintain don’t work for me. The question isn’t whether I have enough discipline. It’s whether the overhead is justified by the output.
The latest test case for me: the LLM wiki wave. Everyone started building personal knowledge graphs as memory systems for large language models. I set up my corpus – 139 research and essay files – and tried to implement it. Within a few days, the whole thing collapsed under its own maintenance requirement. To make the links meaningful, I’d have to have the AI generate them for me.
Which is hollow. A link I didn’t make, for me, doesn’t mean anything.
I just ignore the whole linking-your-thinking bullshit now.
What earns its keep
This is a case study of one. My brain, my work, my constraints. Treat it as a lens, not a prescription.
Apple Calendar. Reality. Time constraints and commitments, nothing else. No ideas, no planning, no feelings live here. If there’s no block, it isn’t real yet.
Apple Reminders. Execution gate. Siri capture gets things out of my head fast. But everything that lands here must be done, deferred, promoted, or deleted. Decision pressure, not a warehouse. The ephemerality is the point.
Apple Notes. Rejected. Permanence without obligation. Ideas go in, nothing forces them out. Good way to build an idea graveyard with a clean icon.
Daily note. The junk drawer that knows what it is. Voice dictation, freeform, no structure expected, no maintenance required. The difference between this and Apple Notes is that I don’t pretend a daily note is permanent. It’s today’s capture. Tomorrow it’s archaeology.
Weekly sensemaking. The actual lever. Not tasks – patterns. Where did time go versus where did value actually come from? Thirty minutes on a Monday morning. Actually happens. The only review that changes behavior the following week.
Tagging. A folder can hold one thing. A tag touches everything. Invoice for a hard drive: hard drives folder? Invoices folder? 2005 folder? The invoice can only live in one place – you have to remember which category you were in when you filed it, not what the thing was. Search does the linking. You don’t need to draw the map – describe the territory consistently, and the map makes itself.
My tagging system reflects scope, stance, and domain. Simple enough I don’t notice them.
What didn’t make the cut: Obsidian graph views. PARA hierarchies. LLM wikis. Digital gardens. All required ongoing maintenance that was never going to happen, or produced outputs that served the system rather than the work. The things you own end up owning you.
The exit strategy for everything that doesn’t make the cut: publish it or delete it. There’s no honorable third option.
A few rules I keep coming back to:
- If it’s not feeding an artifact, it’s procrastination.
- Your system should be boring.
Who this is wrong for
Makers need less memory infrastructure – but I mean archival memory – the permanent notes, the evergreen links, the second brain. Not operational memory. Calendar, Reminders, daily note – those are all memory. Just a different kind. The kind that earns its keep by forcing decisions, not accumulating material.
Some people need the archive. Researchers whose synthesis IS the product. Historians working from thousands of sources. Consultants building expertise across multiple domains over years. Academics whose published work depends directly on the connections in their notes. For those people, the overhead starts to make sense.
I know people who swear by these systems – the slip-box crowd, the Second Brain crowd. I believe them. I’ve never run one, and I’m not going to. The people making it work have something I don’t: either long, uninterrupted blocks where the system can earn its overhead, or ten active projects drawing from shared knowledge. The influencer content makes it sound universal. It probably isn’t.
When you ship something, do you ship the synthesis – the connections, the framework, the research itself? Or do you ship the thing the synthesis made possible? One type of work needs the archive. The other needs the workbench. Most people exist somewhere in between and have to figure out which bottleneck is theirs.
If you’ve abandoned a PKM system, it wasn’t a discipline problem. You were using a remembering system when your problem was a making problem – or your brain collides badly with maintenance-heavy workflows. For ADHD specifically, complex systems with ongoing curation requirements don’t fail because of laziness. They fail because maintenance sessions hit boredom thresholds and time blindness before they produce anything. The guilt that follows is a system design problem, not a character problem.
Accumulated notes do not equal published work. That’s the only metric worth checking.
The rivers
Email is a river. Teams is the same river, faster.
Both are temporal, chronological, barely searchable – partly because the tools are built for transmission, not retrieval, and partly because nobody writes a good subject line. You wade in, grab what’s relevant right meow, and get out. If something’s important, it comes back. Sometimes that bites.
Cal Newport would fix the rivers. Systematic workflows. Scheduled office hours. Tiered reachability protocols. He’s not wrong – it’s a real solution to a real problem. But his answer requires organizational redesign authority most of us don’t have. Most of us are working inside rivers we inherited, in institutions moving at their own speed. The individual answer isn’t “redesign the river.” It’s protect your attention where you can, and stop expecting your note-taking system to solve a coordination problem it wasn’t built for.
No system I’ve built solves email and Teams. That’s where the floor is.
Can you name your last ten shipped things?
If yes, your system works. Or you don’t need one.
If no, your system is the problem. Not your discipline.
The internet remembers. Your job is to make new things exist.
