Okay I’m going to start this off with this post is a little all over the place, the idea for it was sparked by one of the apps I’m going to be talking about—Anybox, but it takes kind of a turn into other things like my Notion productivity system and previous systems. It’s sort of the story of my productivity system journey.

Doing More Is Not Always Better

If you follow me on Mastodon, then you know that I’ve been working on converting my productivity system from a ton of different apps and consolidating them into Notion. Previously I was using Obsidian, Trello, Things, Anybox, Apple Notes, and a ton of other stuff. Now I’m on Notion, Notion Calendar, I will be using Notion Mail as soon as it’s available as well. With that, however, I still use Anybox and Things 3 for some very specific reasons.

Notion can do tasks, it’s decent at it, but this is one of the areas where I feel like Notion gets in its own way. I just think the app is too ‘heavy’ for something like tasks. For me that should be much less involved than what Notion’s page system offers. There’s just a whole lot going on there and I don’t like it. So I stick to Things, which is organized in a way I prefer for things that don’t need to be tracked as thoroughly as I do in Notion. For example, this blog post is being written in Notion. It’s part of a database of blog posts for The Digital Renaissance (soon to be a single database for both my work here and on AllThingsTech) and I can track things like the tags, excerpt, status, and associated notes all throughout Notion. The task to actually write the post, however, is in Things. All I really need to know there is that I want to do it today and it’s part of The Digital Renaissance. I don’t need all sorts of crazy tracking and stuff there and if I throw it into Notion, I’m going to start trying to do too much and it will get clunky.

The other place where I don’t use Notion (and didn’t use Obsidian) is with bookmarks. I’m an Arc user and the way that bookmarks and tabs are handled there is a little different than most browsers, so I find that using a bespoke bookmark management app is actually super useful. Notion has this functionality through the Notion Web Clipper, but I just find that it does too much. Notion pulls in the whole of the page content, stores it in a database, you can assign all sorts of tags and things and it’s really powerful, but that’s too much for me. What I want is a link. I just want a link. Anybox allows me to store these links in folders. I can drag and drop them anywhere in there, and I can even assign SFSymbols and colors to each folder. Overall it’s a great organizational system. It’s not available outside of the Apple ecosystem, but I enjoy the functionality so much that I’m willing to deal with that (and pay for the app).

Anybox can be used for much more than just saving links, it can even manage your reading list and the like, but I don’t really use it for that. The reason I’m okay with this extra functionality is that it sits alongside the functionality I want. It doesn’t get in my way when I’m trying to use the app the way I want. I find that Notion and Obsidian Web Clipper don’t have that same benefit. I find that the unnecessary content hampers my ability to do what I want. It’s certainly more powerful than Anybox’s approach, but it’s not what I want or need.

Finding the Right Balance of Features

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how I use different productivity apps from Obsidian, to Notion, to Reminders, to Arc. For a while in College I would flip between using Notion & Arc or Safari & Apple Notes. I kept struggling with this very balance: features to frustration. I’ve been using Arc since before it was on Windows, or even on mobile. I was one of the first to be able to try out Arc Mobile Companion and still used it while Arc Search was being built. I found that there were a lot of things I was doing, but it wasn’t necessarily conducive to using Notion. I would spend too much time playing around with it. I actually built a really powerful system in Notion for my last semester of college, and I would have enjoyed using that the whole time, but I can’t go back in time.

Once I graduated college I wasn’t doing much outside of writing for AllThingsTech, so I didn’t really find that I needed to use anything more than Notes and Reminders. Then I grew tired of using a completely separate app for writing the Markdown for the actual blog posts and I pivoted to Obsidian. Over time I started working on Routines and Just. Weather. and then eventually The Digital Renaissance as well. Once I had all of this going—2 blogs, 4 websites, and 2 apps—it was all too much to effectively manage between the hodgepodge of different apps I was using to manage different aspects of the projects. Status was in Trello, notes were in Notes and then Obsidian, and then the posts were also in Obsidian, tasks and ideas were handled in Reminders, but then I also had some ideas in Obsidian as well and it all became a mess. That’s when the overhead of Notion—the hyper-flexibility of the app—became more of a benefit than a drawback and I made the plunge back into Notion. While I think I was right for not using Notion during different times in my life, there certainly would have been times this was a lot easier.

Too Many Features

I wasn’t using Notion during this time for the same reason you wouldn’t buy a KitchenAid to make pancakes. You don’t need all that extra stuff. The KitchenAid mixers are super powerful kitchen tools and they do a lot, but they’re also expensive and heavy. If I just need a whisk, there’s no point in buying a KitchenAid because the added cost, size, etc. are all just going to make doing that one job harder. Where it begins to make sense is when you’re going to start making pancakes, maybe some bread, pasta, and the occasional sausage. Once you get to that point, the amount of effort required to maintain separate tools might no longer be worth it. At that point the added cost and complexity is worth it, since it actually ends up being less complex. Scalability is important, but there’s going to be overhead. If that overhead isn’t worth it, then the scalability can wait.

When You Do Need to Scale

If you think that at some point you’re going to need to scale, then take that into account. This is why I preached data portability on my post on AllThingsTech about building a productivity system. I didn’t take this scaling into account when I was moving everything around over the past few years and, when I finally made the decision to settle on Notion, I has carrying around a lot of ‘note debt’ from the different moves. A lot of my notes were handwritten on an iPad, those don’t convert well and were basically images of the notes and my typed notes went through a conversion process that left a lot of superfluous markdown characters everywhere, it was a mess. The problem was that I had ignored this all for so long that basically every note that I had taken over the past 5 years was a complete mess. When I moved them into Notion I decided that I would put in the work to reformat all of them into notes that actually look like english and not a garbled mess of text and markdown. Which meant that I had to transcribe all of the notes. Notion AI was super helpful for the typed text, I just told it to reformat according to the markdown and remove the extraneous characters, but the hand written text was much harder. I had to type all of that out again by hand. I had to recreate all of the illustrations in Figma, and it was a whole mess.

This whole process took about two weeks, but now that it’s done I have my entire college career in Notion, which is pretty cool. I’m not really mad that I didn’t take this into account earlier, it’s okay. I don’t even think I knew Notion existed until I got to college anyway. It took some time for me to get here, so it’s really just whatever. My high school wasn’t a very technology-forward place and all of my notes were handwritten with paper and pens. I didn’t even bring a laptop to school until senior year of high school. I kind of wish I had access to those notes now for things like Calc and Physics and the like, but I don’t. Most of them I threw out or burned (I graduated high school in 2020, it was part of the healing process) and I will never be able to preserve them like I did for my college notes.

But like I said: you don’t need to have everything figured out right away, but you should leave some wiggle room for the future. Preservation of knowledge is important (even if you can just look up the kinematics equations, or how to do U substitution) and you should always look for ways to best preserve it going into the future. For me, I believe that Notion is the best bet for right now. If that changes, I’ve gone through all of the work to convert my notes into some sort of proper formatting and I can export all of the markdown when I am ready to make that switch. I’m not making the same mistakes I did before, and I will be able to move around much easier than before.

Closing Thoughts

So that was a lot. I didn’t think I would actually ramble on that long, but I did. Congrats if you made it to the end of this post. To wrap it up: remember that you don’t have to choose the most feature-rich tools out there. There are times where that richness can actually be a hinderance to your growth. You should also keep in mind scalability when building out your productivity system. You don’t have to have an actual plan for the future, it’s one of those things that you should just have in the back of your mind. It’s really important to try and think about your actual system as little as possible so you can focus on your actual work. Don’t be spending more time playing with your productivity system than you spend being productive, that’s not good. When it does come time to scale, if you properly take that into account, it shouldn’t be too hard. If you miscalculated, don’t beat yourself up, it’s going to take some time, but you’ll get there. Just don’t let yourself get stuck. Note debt can be obnoxious, but biting the bullet and doing the migration will be well worth it.

If you have any thoughts feel free to leave a comment or reach out on Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, or email.