Fernando Borretti gets real on the likely-useless time sink that is the perfectionist “tools-for-thought” space:

People have this aspirational idea of building a vast, oppressively colossal, deeply interlinked knowledge graph to the point that it almost mirrors every discrete concept and memory in their brain. And I get the appeal of maximalism. But they’re counting on the wrong side of the ledger. Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt. Every link doubly so. The more you have, the more in the red you are. Every node that has utility—an interesting excerpt from a book, a pithy quote, a poem, a fiction fragment, a few sentences that are the seed of a future essay, a list of links that are the launching-off point of a project—is drowned in an ocean of banality. Most of our thoughts appear and pass away instantly, for good reason.

As an aspiring tools-for-thought user, who keeps his own notes in a “PKM”, this piece rings true (and painful). The reality of personal wikis, totalizing note-taking apps, and people with their fully hyperlinked massive graphs of notes is that most of this is for naught. It largely ends up being nothing more than a playground for creating big structures of information that don’t solve a problem.

I’ve spent tons of time fiddling with notes in Roam, Obsidian, Logseq, and every productivity tool under the sun, even while being very aware of the fact that _tools don’t make you productive_on their own. Yet still, most of what this post describes is the honest reality: we can excuse our way to spending huge amounts of time trying to build a castle of an immaculate hyperlinked memex, but really Apple Notes, a calendar app, and a checklist tracker will solve the problem just fine.