Capture vs note-taking: am i the only struggling with this?
I’ve been trying a lot of PKM tools (Obsidian, Notion, etc.), and they’re great once things are organized.
But most of what I actually need to capture day-to-day is much smaller and faster:
- quick thoughts
- links I don’t want to lose
- random snippets
- stuff I don’t have time to organize
And this is where everything starts to feel… slow.
Capturing should be instant, almost no friction.
But most tools immediately push you into structure: folders, tags, decisions…
So either I don’t capture at all, or I dump things and never find them again.
Lately I’ve been trying to separate the two:
- one layer just for capture (fast, no thinking)
- another for organizing later
Curious how others here handle this.
Do you separate capture from knowledge building? Or use one tool for everything?
Well, obsidian is nice but really heavy. However, since it just uses markdown files, you can quickly put notes into the vault with any editor. So you can just have a folder like "unsorted" that you populate with your daily stuff using some lightweight editor of your choice. Then you feel the time is come to sort all the crap or once a month you can use obsidian to move the stuff into the right places and do all the tags and so on.
Yeah I tried something similar for a while.
Like having a sort of “inbox” folder and just dumping everything there… it works, but for me it kinda breaks when I’m on mobile or moving around.
Also I noticed that if I don’t process that folder regularly, it just becomes another black hole 😅
I think my main issue is not even organizing… it’s actually capturing things in the moment without losing context or momentum.
Curious if you ever feel that too or if your workflow stays manageable over time.
Yes, all the time. Same with downloads folder. I tried to convince myself start a "cleanup sunday", to use the last weekend of the month to do this kind of sorting work. The motivation was a cron job that wiped the folder on the 1th of the month. That worked well for a while, but then I got lazy. And I actually realized, that all the wiped things were not important at all and I am good without them. The really important things I do care, I do as they come.
Yeah I’ve been there 😅 At some point I realized that if something survives only if I manually “clean it up”, it probably won’t survive at all. The interesting part for me is that capturing is easy… but revisiting is the real bottleneck. So lately I’ve been trying to just keep everything in a sort of “raw stream” and only interact with it when I actually need something. Still experimenting, but it feels way less stressful than forcing a system.
This is key for me too. There's a balance between verbosity and brevity. For me I choose both depending on the need. Verbosity in an electronic tool (even just a notes document) and for brevity I use an paper notepad (steno book). When you need speed to get a piece of an idea down, you don't want to wait for an app to load or a task switcher to pull up your app. Those few seconds could mean losing the few words you actually need to be able to recall it later. For me pen and paper in those instance is king.
However, copying a full URL or block of text, those are for the electronic solution where a copy/paste does that all at once.
Yeah this resonates a lot. That “few seconds” thing is real… if it’s not instant, I just don’t capture it, or I lose the original thought. I also noticed that paper works great for thoughts, but it kinda breaks when it’s links or anything digital… then you end up splitting your system anyway. I guess that’s where I struggle the most, having something that’s as fast as pen and paper, but still works with digital stuff. Not sure if that’s even possible tbh.
I've seen some methods attempting to bridge this gap with something like Rocketbooks that use a dry-erase writing method with a follow-on scanning/and organizing to a digital tool. That method doesn't work for me for a number of reasons. The extra scanning and tagging step is way too much overhead for me. Another shortcoming with this approach is because part of my mental organization system is the "when" it was recorded. I can flip back pages in the notebooks knowing approximately how long ago the note should have been taken to then find the relative note.
Yeah that’s exactly the kind of thing that always breaks it for me too. As soon as you add scanning, tagging, or any extra step… it’s no longer “capture”, it’s already processing. And at that point I just don’t do it. The “when” part is interesting btw, I do something similar mentally… like I remember when I saw something more than where I stored it. I actually started experimenting with a super minimal “capture layer” just to avoid all that friction… basically dumping everything first and thinking later. Still figuring it out though.
Yep, I'm the same. So if you have a slider control of the "when" of the data you are looking at, then you can put yourself back in that moment with context to what you captured. For me its number of pages back. Even then those notes could be as few as a single word or two, but that is enough for a mental landmark where the rest of that idea is in my head.
That “slider” idea is actually really interesting. I think that’s exactly what’s missing in most tools… they treat notes as static, but in reality a lot of them are tied to a moment. Like sometimes I don’t even need the full content, just a small trigger is enough to bring everything back. That’s also why I started thinking more in terms of a “timeline of captures” rather than structured notes… still pretty rough, but it feels closer to how memory actually works.
For obsidian, I just use weekly notes for the "unorganized, immediate notes" and later on I can decide if I want to move that info into a more organized structure.
I'm sure most notetaking apps can support that workflow.
Yeah weekly notes are a nice middle ground. I tried something similar for a bit, and it definitely helps reducing the friction at capture time. But I noticed that over time those notes tend to become kind of dense… like everything ends up mixed together and it’s harder to go back to a specific thing. Maybe it’s just me, but after a while it still felt like I was doing some form of “light organization” upfront. Curious if that ever becomes an issue for you or if it stays manageable.
Joplin's reasonably-good, except for the too fucking many clicks to accomplish things UX ( give me 2 buttons: View & Edit, so there's 1-less click-to-get-through.. I'm willing to bet $5 that the dev for Joplin is in kapha-metabolism, with its establishment-and-ritual psychology tendencies )..
I agree with you on the 2-contexts/modes problem, & how none of the infrastructure we've got works optimally for real-life needs..
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Yeah that “too many clicks” thing is exactly what kills it for me. Like if I have to think even a little about where to put something or which mode I’m in, I just don’t capture it at all. The 2-context thing feels real… capture vs actually working with the stuff later. I’ve been trying something closer to a “single flow” where capture is basically instant and everything else happens after… still figuring it out, but it already feels way more natural.