You Don't Need Everything in One Place

There's this urge that I – and based on the subreddits I visit, a lot of people that are into productivity tools – have, of wanting to find a perfect system where all of your notes and data are in one place.

That makes you look for tools that do everything. I long thought that my perfect notes app could also hold all of my tasks and contacts and meeting info.

That's not true. This starts the fact that there's not one tool that does all of those things well. But it doesn't end there: there's also different contexts in which you access information.

A practical example of that is how I use Drafts and Obsidian. I started out using Drafts mainly as a quick input mechanism for notes that will end up in Obsidian. It's perfect for that - so much quicker to enter something into Drafts on my phone than to put things into Obsidian.

But I realised that advantage doesn't so much come from how Drafts is set up, but more that I treat it as an unorganised space. Quick thoughts, quotes, links, shopping lists - all of those things are in Drafts.

Some of those might make it into Obsidian when they turn into something more: an exhaustive list, a full blog post. But a lot of those notes in Drafts never will turn into that, and never should go into Obsidian.

I don't need everything in one place, it's much better to have things in different places for different contexts, and giving up on the 'all in one place' mentality creates a lot more mental space.