I was drowning in my own notes
For about two years, I lived inside Obsidian. Daily notes, fleeting thoughts, meeting takeaways, half-formed ideas at 2am, voice memos I'd transcribe by hand. My vault had over 3,000 notes.
And I remembered almost none of it.
Every morning I'd open my laptop and stare at yesterday's daily note, trying to reconstruct where I was. The vault was full — full of captures that were never synthesized, tasks that were never carried forward, ideas that died in a folder called _inbox. I was doing the work of a knowledge worker but getting none of the compounding returns. Notes went in. Nothing came out.
What made it worse: I knew I was supposed to do the synthesis. Review your notes. Write a morning brief. Connect the dots. But after a full day of work, the last thing I wanted to do was sit down and play editor. So I didn't. And the vault stayed a graveyard.
