Guides
Practical guides.
Short articles on memory, notes, AI tools, and how to avoid the productivity-culture trap. No fluff, no upsell mid-paragraph.
7 min · 2026-06-02
How to remember everything (without becoming a productivity person)
There's a productivity-culture answer to 'how do I remember everything?' that goes: Notion, tags, daily reviews, weekly reviews, GTD, second brain. By the end you have a system that takes more time to maintain than the things you wanted to remember in the first place. This guide is the opposite take.
6 min · 2026-06-02
The best note app for ADHD (and why most fail)
ADHD brains capture fast and forget fast. The bottleneck is never "can I write it down?" — it's "will I come back to it before it's irrelevant?" Most note apps fail on the second question. Here's what to look for, and what works.
5 min · 2026-06-02
The best AI voice notes app in 2026 (what to look for)
Any app can transcribe. The good ones extract meaning, surface what matters, and stop being voice apps the moment you stop talking. Here's the short list.
6 min · 2026-06-02
How to build a second brain without the work (or: the lazy person's guide)
The Second Brain movement promises external memory. In practice, you spend more time maintaining the system than benefiting from it. Here's the value without the work.
8 min · 2026-06-07
Zettelkasten in 2026: why most people get it wrong
Niklas Luhmann wrote 70 books and 400 papers in 30 years. He attributed this to his Zettelkasten — a paper-card system of 90,000 atomic notes linked by reference numbers. When productivity culture rediscovered the method in 2020, it became a cult: Obsidian, Roam, Logseq, all promising to replicate Luhmann's output. Five years later, most users have a graph view they never open, and a folder of unfinished notes. This guide explains what Zettelkasten actually was, why translating it 1:1 to apps fails, and what to do instead.
7 min · 2026-06-07
Personal Knowledge Management without the burnout
Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) was meant to make you smarter. For many, it became a fourth full-time job: read article, highlight in Readwise, sync to Notion, tag with PARA, link to existing notes, review weekly. By Sunday afternoon you've spent three hours managing knowledge you never used. This guide is for people who want the benefit (memory you can rely on) without the system (a process that requires its own process).
6 min · 2026-06-07
AI memory apps : what they actually do (and why notes apps aren't AI memory)
Every notes app in 2026 advertises AI. Notion AI, Evernote AI, Apple Notes AI in iOS 18. The user assumption is: "now my notes app remembers for me." The reality: an AI button glued to a notes app is not an AI memory layer. The difference is structural. This guide explains what AI memory apps actually do that notes apps don't, and why the distinction matters for what you trust to remember your life.
6 min · 2026-06-07
Atomic notes are great until they aren't : a practical critique
Atomic notes — "one idea per note" — became gospel in PKM communities after Building a Second Brain popularised them. The promise: small composable units you can recombine into new thoughts. The reality, for most users: 200 fragments that no longer form a coherent thought. This guide is a practical critique of atomic notes — what they're good for, where they fail, and what the calmer alternative looks like.
7 min · 2026-06-07
Second Brain is overrated : a calm critique of the most-quoted PKM book
Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain (2022) sold a million copies and made PARA (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive) the default mental model for personal knowledge work. The book is good. It's also responsible for a particular failure mode: users who maintain elaborate Second Brain systems and never produce more — or remember more — than they did before. This guide is a calm critique of why that happens, and what to keep from the method while dropping what doesn't pay off.