I think about this meme a lot:

I never realized it, but I’ve spent years trying to organize my thoughts. Since I was 15, there’s only been one truly reliable way: pen and paper. Ultra-ADHD, realizing it now, but somehow it worked. The notebook was always close, and just writing something down was enough.

There’s something about the tactile feel — the immediacy, the fact that it’s always nearby. Over time, the notebook becomes a running log of thoughts, and every ten or thirty pages, I copy over a to-do list by hand.

That’s the part that always bothered me — carrying those long-term, global tasks through every page. Even though the pages in between break them down further, you still have to thumb back, face everything that’s been bothering you.

But the alternatives? Worse.

I wanted to trust them. E-ink tablets, note-taking apps… Notion, Obsidian — no chance. I can’t handle systems that need 100 plugins just to feel “personal.” I don’t want to spend hours building knowledge graphs or perfect tagging systems. It always leads to the same place:

1. You keep it in your head anyway.
2. You forget to model something and worry about it.
3. You spend more time maintaining the system than thinking.
4. You realize you’re optimizing your anxiety.

What kind of society do we live in where remembering or lest alone organizing your meanderings becomes a job? So I tried to find something simpler — something between chaotic doodles and “life OS.”

My pick was Joplin. Open source, simple, Markdown-based, no AI, no dopamine growth hacks. Just notes. It’s great — until it was not. Because every note-taking tool eventually leads you to the same place: the hierarchy.

At first, the same excitement. You organize, categorize, label. Everything in its tree structure, or neatly tagged. Then you start wondering: how do I organize the tags? What’s the best “semantic” naming scheme that won’t keep me awake at night? You think, “It should be year first, then category, then note: 2XXX / CATEGORY / NOTE — that’ll sort beautifully!”

But it never does.

You either end up with:
- A bush — too many leaves, too messy to navigate.
- A dead tree — no leaves at all, just empty branches.

And you start dreading opening it. The categories remind you of the person you were when you planned all this — the one who thought planning was progress. You face the difference between the person who organizes and the one who actually does.

So here’s my take — maybe it helps you too:

1. Keep a running log. Use pen and paper. Any tech you add — even the smart ink tablets — will sneak structure back in. Let it go. I recently bought the iA Writer notebook, not because it’s pretty, or sponsored (it’s not), but because it reminded me of the stack of unwritten notebooks in my drawer. I missed that.

2. Handle only the recurring themes. The things that show up again and again every ten pages — the ones you’re afraid to forget. That’s the only discipline needed. Look back over your past attempts to “organize.” Forget migrating notes across folders or years. Just find the patterns that stuck. Give them one entry.

And make the structure flat.

If you must, allow one extra level:

Log:
/20NN-01
/20NN-02
etc.

Append only to those.

Because everything else digital eventually collapses under its own weight. It always starts as progress — sorting, tagging, naming things into existence — until the system starts reflecting your anxiety back at you.

You open it and meet your old self: the one who believed the right app could hold a restless mind still.

It can’t.

So what actually works: keep a running log. On paper, with a pen, in whatever color you feel like. No rules, no tags. Just write and move forward. You’ll come back to what matters — you always do.

And if we’re honest, it’s always more fun flipping through old notebooks than scrolling through the ghost of some abandoned markdown folder.