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 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.