It really makes a night and day difference when you are taking notes for studying, research, designing or other kinds of focussed mental activity that require t

It really makes a night and day difference when you are taking notes for studying, research, designing or other kinds of focussed mental activity that require things like pulling information together, resurfacing past insights, (re)evaluating ideas, (re)contextualizing findings, seeing/drawing the overall picture, etc. Modern note-taking tools help our brains with their limited capacity to manage greater complexity, discover obscure connections and, of course, safely forget to free working memory for other things. However, if you just write down some ideas from time to time that are not really related to each other or stash resources like interesting weblinks without making an effort to organize and connect them in meaningful ways, fancy new apps and features won’t really provide much value beyond just using a plain old notebook. Overthinking really seems to be an issue with users of networked notebook apps and it can waste a lot of time and money. We should stop building elaborate systems or focussing on complicated workflows unless we really have a strong motivation, such as deep, long-term research and study. Serving this motivation will then be the actual focus of our efforts, not the tools or workflows themselves. It can be fun to explore “tools for thought” on their own, but they will not magically change our lifes if they cannot solve a problem that is meaningful to us.