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?

  • oldanyOPEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • partial_accumenEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • oldanyOPEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        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.

        • partial_accumenEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          The “when” part is interesting btw, I do something similar mentally… like I remember when I saw something more than where I stored it.

          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.

          • oldanyOPEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            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.