We love to polish our systems. Tag, colour-code, and tweak them until they gleam. But somewhere along the way, the shine starts to feel like progress. The container steals the spotlight from the content.
Whether you call it a PKM, a PARA setup, a Bullet Journal, or a digital garden, the danger is the same: the system starts to feel like the work.
I’ve been there. I’ve spent hours reorganizing tags, curating RSS feeds, or pruning my documents and notes without actually doing anything meaningful. It’s what Cal Newport calls pseudo productivity, the comforting illusion that moving things around is the same as moving forward.
The truth is simple: your system should be a workbench, not a museum. A place to work things out, not a shrine to perfect order.
Zora and ZORA
For me, that workbench is something I call ZORA: my single Obsidian vault for all my creative and strategic work. Inside ZORA lives Zora, the persona I use when working with ChatGPT or Copilot as a thinking partner.
I’m not pretending the AI is a person. But giving it a name and a slightly wry personality makes the conversation flow better. The name comes from Star Trek: Discovery, where the ship’s computer develops an emergent, sentient personality. That story resonated with me. It’s a reminder that tools can become more than the sum of their parts when they help you think in ways you couldn’t alone.
ZORA is the workbench. Zora is the partner at my elbow, asking questions, poking holes, and spotting patterns I might miss.
Note: The specific tools don’t matter. Ya gotta do you.
The Problem With Hoarding
I used to hoard articles in Pocket and feeds in Inoreader, telling myself I’d get to them “someday.” I wouldn’t. They piled up, quietly turning into psychic weight. Eventually, I switched to Feeeed, which forces me to be more intentional. It’s less about “save everything” and more about “read and act now, or let it go.”
When your system becomes a warehouse, progress gets buried under the piles.
I’m now doing the same with my YouTube “Watch Later” list. If I haven’t watched it by now, it’s probably not worth keeping. And if it is important, it will cross my path again when I’m ready for it.
The Reframe: Four Modes of Recall
If your system is a workbench, the point of storage isn’t to hoard. It’s to make it easy to pull forward what matters, when it matters. Here’s how I think about it:
Discovery: The thrill of finding something new. Or rediscovering something forgotten in a fresh context. Not every discovery is precious, but the spark matters.
Connection: Linking ideas in unexpected ways. This is where the workbench shines; when one rough sketch connects to another and sparks something new.
Creation: Turning ideas into tangible output. Notes are raw material, not the final product. The workbench is where raw material becomes work that ships.
Exchange: Sharing ideas with others, even outright scheming, is where one plus one can equal three. This is where the magic compounds.
Letting Go
Letting go is hard. But if something is just sitting there collecting dust, stop for a beat. Why are you holding on to an abandoned draft, an old meeting note, or a folder of “someday” links?
You’re not protecting it. You’re protecting your guilt about it.
If it’s important and meaningful, it will come back when it’s most resonant.
Otherwise, let it the fuck go.
Deleting old email that isn’t “keeping your receipts” is one of the easiest ways to start. Same with clearing abandoned projects you’ll never finish. Not every brain fart needs to be documented for posterity.
The Point
Your system isn’t the work.
Keep your workbench clear enough to move in, stocked enough to work in, and alive enough that you want to come back tomorrow.
Everything else is clutter.
