The Notes I Stopped Taking
Four years of notes apps taught me to capture less. Here's the stack I actually use now — and why I think most of us are building note graveyards, not second brains.
Quick disclosure: this post contains an affiliate link to Wispr Flow. If you sign up through it, I may receive a small credit at no extra cost to you. I'd recommend Wispr either way — it's the single biggest change to how I capture ideas, and the affiliate is just a nice-to-have.
TL;DR I’ve spent four years bouncing between notes apps. The honest result: a graveyard of folders I never re-opened. This year I changed approach — capture less, trust memory more, use the simplest tool. My whole stack now is voice-to-text into plain markdown files. That’s it.
I’ve been using notes apps for about four years now, and somewhere along the way, I quietly stopped using them the way I started.
In the beginning, I captured everything. Every meeting got a note. Every fleeting thought went into an inbox. Every book I planned to read, every blog I wanted to revisit, every atomic essay idea, every quote that struck me — all of it landed somewhere. Apple Notes, then Notion, then Tana, then Obsidian, then back again. Each new app promised to be the one that would finally make sense of the pile.
The pile only got bigger.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe: most of us are not building second brains. We’re building note graveyards. Folders we never re-open. Daily notes that get more daily and less noted. Reading lists that grow faster than we read. Meeting notes whose half-life is shorter than the meeting itself. The capture is easy; the return on capture is almost zero.
So this year I changed my approach. I stopped trying to capture everything. I take far fewer meeting notes now — just the decisions and the next actions, and only when they actually need to be written down. I let most fleeting thoughts pass. If a thought is important, it comes back. If it doesn’t come back, it probably wasn’t.
What surprised me is how much lighter this feels — and how little I’ve lost.
The apps keep moving
The other thing that’s shifted is the apps themselves. The tools I fell in love with have all started chasing the same thing.
Tana, which I used as a flexible outliner and notes app, has steadily repositioned itself around AI meeting assistance. Amie, which I adopted because it was the cleanest, most opinionated calendar and planner I’d seen, is increasingly an AI meeting-notes product.
Every productivity tool seems to be on the same conveyor belt: start as a focused notes or planning tool, add an AI meeting layer, slowly become a meeting-summary app with a calendar attached.
I don’t blame them — there’s clearly money in meeting AI. But the apps that helped me think are now mostly helping me document. That’s a different job.
The Tiago Forte tweet
Which brings me to a tweet I keep thinking about. Tiago Forte — the person who literally wrote the book on Building a Second Brain — recently asked the internet:
“Can anyone recommend a dead simple, easy to use notetaking app based on markdown files? Obsidian is far too complicated for me. I’m looking for Apple Notes, but with markdown storage.”
Read that again. The person behind the most influential personal-knowledge-management framework of the last decade is asking for “Apple Notes but with markdown.”
If he is over the graphs, the queries, and the plugin marketplace — the rest of us can probably stop pretending we need them either.
We’ve been sold the idea that notes should be a system. Tags. Backlinks. Daily notes. PARA. Maps of content. The system was supposed to make our thinking compound. For most people it just made the act of taking a note more expensive — and the act of returning to one even more so.
What notes are actually for
The point of a note is to be useful again. That’s it.
If the friction to write it is high, you don’t write it. If the friction to find it is high, you don’t return to it. Every feature that doesn’t reduce one of those two frictions is, for most people, a tax.
Apple Notes is popular for a reason. It opens fast. You type. It saves. You search. It’s not romantic, but it gets used. Compare that to the apps we admire — the ones with the beautiful graphs and the carefully nested hierarchies — which we open less and less, and mostly on Sunday afternoons when we feel guilty about the backlog.
My current setup (the actual stack)
After four years of trying everything, I’ve collapsed my stack down to two things.
1. Wispr Flow — for capture
I don’t open a notes app to capture an idea anymore. I just speak.
Wispr turns voice into clean text wherever my cursor happens to be — Slack, email, browser, code editor, anywhere. The bar for “writing a thought down” has dropped to almost zero.
The interesting side effect: voice is itself an importance filter. When I have to type a thought, I capture indiscriminately. When I have to actually say a thought out loud, I only bother with the ones that feel worth saying.
The app I was looking for, it turns out, wasn’t a better notes app. It was a faster way in.
2. Obsidian — but only as a folder of .md files
The second is Obsidian, but stripped back to what it actually is: a folder of plain markdown files.
No plugins.
No graph view.
No tagging system.
No daily notes template.
I open a .md file on my PC, or the same file in the browser when I’m away from my machine, and I write. The format outlives the app. If Obsidian goes the way of Tana or Amie tomorrow, my notes don’t go with it.
That’s the whole system. Voice in. Markdown out. Less app, more thinking.
Where I’ve landed
So here’s the place I’ve reached, four years in:
Capture less. Trust your memory more. Use the simplest tool that lets you write a thought down and find it later. Be suspicious of any app that wants to do more than that — especially if its newest feature is an AI that listens to your meetings.
The best notes app I have right now is the one I forget I’m using.
That, I think, is the whole bar.
Over to you
I’m curious — what does your notes stack look like in 2026? Have you also been quietly capturing less? Or is your second brain still going strong?
Drop a comment below — I read all of them, and I’m collecting recommendations for a follow-up post on what people are actually using (not what they say they should be).
If this resonated, the easiest way to support the writing is to share it with one person whose notes app is suspiciously named “Inbox.”
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As always, thank you for reading. Means a lot that you’re here.
Keep going.
— Kaushik / SystemsAndFlow
Tiago Forte’s original tweet is here on X.