"… you will always need to use multiple programs to complete projects. You may use a centralized platform like Basecamp, Asana, Jira, or Zoho, but technology is advancing too quickly on too many fronts for any one company to do every single function best."

"Rarely do journal entries link to anything except incidentally."

"In practice 95% of the use cases can be naturally unbundled into disjoint apps, and the lack of centralization and cross-app hyperlinking has no real negative effects."

"Tools for thought promise to let you centralize and hyperlink all your data."

"There’s a joke in game development that there’s two kinds of game devs: those who write engines, and those who make games."

"The people who make the engines do it for the intellectual pleasure of discovering a beautiful algebra of vectors, scenes, entities, and events; and watching a beautiful, crystalline machine in operation."

"The actual game—which is never finished, rarely started—is an afterthought. Of course you wouldn’t make a game. That would be parochial. The engine was the point. People who want to make games just download Unity and push through the horror."

"Markup: I used Markdown here and there. Then I built my own TeX-inspired markup language. Then I tried XML, with mixed results. The latest version uses a WYSIWYG editor made with ProseMirror."

"And yet I don’t use them. Why? Building them was fun, sure, but there must be utility to a personal database."

"At first I thought the problem was friction: the higher the activation energy to using a tool, the less likely you are to use it."

"Even a small amount of friction can cause me to go, oh, who cares, can’t be bothered."

"And yet I still don’t use it. Why? I’m a great deal more organized now than I was a few years ago. My filesystem is beautifully structured and everything is where it should be."

"I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no point: because everything I can do with a personal wiki I can do better with a specialized app, and the few remaining use cases are useless. Let’s break it down."

"Journalling: 86% of the nodes in my personal wiki are journal entries. Mostly there’s no reason for them to be there, they are rarely linked to by anything."

"Todo Lists: I used to write todo lists in the daily entries in my personal wiki. But this is very spartan: what about recurring tasks, due dates, reminders, etc.? Now I am a very happy user of Todoist (which has increased my productivity at least 150%) and I’m not looking back."

"Learning: if you’re studying something, you can keep your notes in a TfT."

"But the problem is never note-taking, but reviewing notes."

"It takes practice and discipline to write good spaced repetition flashcards, but once you do, the long-form prose notes are themselves redundant."

"I also find that long-form study notes are a form of procrastination."

"RemNote combines long-form prose notes and flashcards in the same interface. The result is that both look like a mess."

"Contacts: if you have a page for a person, with data about them, you can then link to them: when you mention them in journal entries for example, or in writing meeting notes. I find that this is pointless. You know who [[John Doe]] refers to. Just use Google Contacts or a spreadsheet."

"Fiction Writing: I actually started writing The Epiphany of Gliese 581 in my personal wiki, with fragments and chapters in separate pages, but I quickly moved to a git repo with Markdown files because 1) I could compile the disparate files into a single PDF or HTML file for review, and 2) using git for version control (rather than my personal wiki’s native change tracking) makes a lot more sense for writing projects."

"Process Notes: e.g. “how do I do X in Docker”. I often have cause to write notes like this and can never quite think of where to put them."

"So this is just a matter of finding somewhere to put them in the filesystem or in a note-taking app."

"Collection Management: this is an area where the software solutions are strangely very lacking."

"Organizing collections with the filesystem is difficult, because of the hierarchical nature of the filesystem"

"Any categorization is defensible, and any categorization makes it harder to browse by an alternative scheme5. I need tags, that is: I need a database."

"And there is a void in app-space, where there should be an app that subsumes Calibre and the rest, but inexplicably it doesn’t exist6. And it’s so obvious what it should be."

"It should be, essentially, an SQLite frontend with a fancy interface."

"You can put records in hierarchical folders, but you can also retrieve them with search and tags."

"The closest thing to this is a KDE app called Tellico that I’ve never heard anyone talk about using."

"When you take out everything that is better served by an app or plain old folder structure, all you’re left with is collection management. So instead of building a personal wiki I should just build a “generalized Calibre”."

"It’s never the Zettelkasten of the next Vannevar Bush, it’s always a setup with tens of plugins, a daily note three pages long that is subdivided into fifty subpages recording all the inane minutiae of life. This is a recipe for burnout."

"People have this aspirational idea of building a vast, oppressively colossal, deeply interlinked knowledge graph to the point that it almost mirrors every discrete concept and memory in their brain."

"But they’re counting on the wrong side of the ledger. Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt. Every link doubly so."

"Every node that has utility—an interesting excerpt from a book, a pithy quote, a poem, a fiction fragment, a few sentences that are the seed of a future essay, a list of links that are the launching-off point of a project—is drowned in an ocean of banality."

"There’s this pervasive idea that a tool for thought—a hypermedia database with bidirectional links—can be a universal database of “you”, and other apps can be built on top of that data, using plugins."

"Centralization of Data: everything is one central place, rather than spread out across your filesystem, Dropbox, and database rows in six different proprietary apps."

"Hyperlinking: you can link your data pervasively:"

"The main drawback is the user experience for this plugin-based app universe is always going to be inferior to the user experience for domain-specific apps. It’s very rare that an app does plugins right. It always feels janky"

"But the main drawback is: you don’t need it. The idea of having this giant graph where all your data is hyperlinked is cute, but in practice, it’s completely unnecessary. Things live in separate apps just fine."

"And if you do manage to build this vast web of links: how often is each link actually followed?"

"The final argument against this is feasibility. Tiago Forte writes:"

"The “one graph database” is an unproductive, monistic obsession."

"A final note: I find that upwards of 80% of the links in my wikis are essentially structural, they basically replicate folder structures."

"The natural conclusion of most tools for thought is a relational database with rich text as a possible column type. So that’s essentially what I built: an object-oriented graph database on top of SQLite."

"Objects are the nodes in the database: they have a globally-unique title and a set of properties, which are typed key-value pairs."

"Every object conforms to a class, which specifies what properties it has and their types. Property types can be: rich text, a link to a file, a boolean, a link to another object, or a list of links."

"Links go from one object property to another object (there’s no block references). Notion inspired a lot of this."

"Activation Energy: migrating everything from my filesystem, from Calibre, from Zotero, from my browser bookmarks, etc. is a huge process."

"UI: replacing the filesystem and most of my domain-specific apps means the wiki’s UI has to be stellar. It has to support searching, filtering, sorting, viewing collections of objects in different modes (list, table, gallery, etc., like in Notion)."

"Getting this to the UX sweet spot where things are frictionless enough to use the app productively requires a significant time investment."

"Pointlessness of Organization: my Calibre and Zotero libraries are a mess. But is that bad?"

"It is a waste of time to organize things too much."

"Uncertain Payoff: silver bullets are rare, and it’s possible that after making a titanic effort to migrate all my data and build a great UI, the result of very underwhelming."

"I sometimes use a small scratchpad to serialize my mental model of something until I understand it, and then move it to flashcards. But the crucial distinction here is: there aren’t two big stages, one where I just take prose notes, and one where I translate all the notes to flashcards. It’s like agile vs. waterfall: the notes should become flashcards as early as possible, not after you’re done taking all of the notes."