Obsidian prompts beat open-ended reflection every time: median review time across 6 weeks was 14 minutes, fastest was 9, slowest was 22 (and that week genuinely deserved 22).
I ran the GTD-adjacent version faithfully for six weeks — 90 minutes, full capture sweep, energy audit, the works. Then less faithfully for two months. Then I stopped entirely and didn't notice for three weeks. That last part is the failure mode nobody writes about. The format wasn't wrong; it was sized for a version of my week that rarely existed.
The fix wasn't a better framework. It was shorter, closed questions. My Obsidian template has seven prompts, none of them open-ended: what shipped, what didn't, what I avoided and why, one thing to drop, one thing to protect. One-to-three sentence answer ceiling per prompt, hard stop. Open questions like "how was your week?" generate rumination. Closed questions generate decisions. That distinction is doing almost all the work.
The Notion version I ran before this taught me something useful about tool selection too. I built rollups — tasks closed this week, open tasks by project, inbox count, stalled for 7+ days — and they worked exactly as designed. What Notion couldn't do was get out of its own way during actual reflection. Every time I tried to think through what went wrong, I'd end up reorganizing a database instead. Forty minutes later, new linked database, zero review completed. The same flexibility that makes Notion a good data layer makes it a bad "close the loop and move on" environment. Obsidian's plain-file simplicity is the right call for the thinking layer — and completely wrong for the data layer. Neither tool alone is the honest answer.
