It was October 18, 2022. A Tuesday. I remember the date because it was the day I almost lost a $3,200 freelance contract because I was too busy “optimizing” my workflow. I was sitting in a coffee shop in downtown Chicago, the kind with $7 lattes and stools that hurt your back, and I spent exactly four hours and twelve minutes—I tracked it—migrating my task list from Todoist to a custom-built Obsidian vault. I wasn’t writing the report that was due at 5:00 PM. I was color-coding my tags. I was setting up a “Zettelkasten” system for notes I hadn’t even taken yet. I felt incredibly busy. I felt like a god of efficiency. In reality, I was just terrified of the blank Word document waiting for me.
We need to stop pretending that building these systems is work. It isn’t. It’s a hobby. It’s digital scrapbooking for people who want to feel important. We’ve been sold this idea that if we just find the right tool—the right combination of plugins, databases, and automated workflows—the work will somehow do itself. It’s a lie. The more complex your system is, the more places you have to hide from the actual, painful effort of thinking and creating.
The Tuesday I spent four hours choosing a font
That day in Chicago was a wake-up call, but it wasn’t the first time. I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on subscriptions. I’ve bought the $100 “Life OS” templates from YouTubers who look like they’ve never had a stressful day in their lives. What I realized—actually, let me put it differently—what I finally admitted to myself is that the system was the distraction. I was using the setup phase to avoid the execution phase. It’s a specific kind of mental trap where your brain registers “organizing” as “progress.”
I once tracked my output for three weeks straight during a particularly heavy project. I used a simple stopwatch. I found that I spent 14 hours across those 21 days just “tinkering” with my system—moving tasks around, changing the layout of my dashboard, and testing new integrations. I spent only 4 hours doing deep, focused work. That is a 14:4 ratio of nonsense to substance. It’s embarrassing. If I had just used a yellow legal pad and a Bic pen, I would have finished the project two weeks early. But the legal pad doesn’t give you a dopamine hit when you click a checkbox that triggers a confetti animation. The legal pad just sits there, staring at you, demanding that you actually write something.
The more complex your system is, the more places you have to hide from the actual, painful effort of thinking and creating.
System-building is just “Productive Procrastination”
This is the part nobody wants to hear. If you are spending more than 15 minutes a day managing your productivity system, the system is failing you. I know people who spend their entire Sunday “planning” their week in Notion. They’ve got databases linked to other databases. They’ve got progress bars that update in real-time. They’ve got a “Second Brain” that is more organized than their actual brain. But then Monday hits, and they’re paralyzed. Why? Because the system has become a digital dollhouse. It’s a miniature, perfect version of a life they aren’t actually living.
I might be wrong about this, but I think the rise of these complex tools has actually made us less capable of handling boredom. Real work is boring. It’s sitting in a chair and forcing your brain to solve a problem. It’s messy. It’s frustrating. Productivity apps are designed to be the opposite of that. They are smooth, aesthetic, and rewarding. They provide a friction-less experience that makes you feel like you’re winning, even when you’re just moving digital piles of dirt from one side of the screen to the other.
Anyway, I digress. The point is that we’ve fetishized the tool over the output. We talk about “workflows” like they’re the product. They’re not. Nobody cares how you organized your research if the final paper is garbage. Nobody cares if you used a Kanban board to manage your chores if your house is still a mess.
Why I’ve come to loathe Notion (and I know you’ll hate me for this)
I refuse to use Notion anymore. I know, I know—it’s the darling of the internet. Everyone and their mother has a “Notion setup” video. But I genuinely think it is the single greatest engine for procrastination ever invented. It’s too flexible. It’s a sandbox where you can spend an entire afternoon building a beautiful dashboard and accomplish absolutely nothing of value. It’s a tool for people who like the idea of being productive more than the reality of it. I’ve seen people spend hours trying to get a formula to work just so they can track their water intake. Just drink the water. You don’t need a database for it.
I actively tell my friends to avoid it if they actually have deadlines to meet. It’s slow. The mobile app is a disaster. The block-based editing makes me want to pull my hair out. I’ve bought the same $15 physical Moleskine notebook four times now because it doesn’t have a “template gallery” to distract me. I don’t care if Notion has AI integration or whatever the latest buzzword is. It’s a bloated mess that encourages you to play office instead of doing business.
Total waste of time.
I used to think the system was the solution. I was completely wrong.
I used to be the guy who would argue about the merits of “Getting Things Done” (GTD) versus “Time Blocking.” I thought if I just found the perfect philosophy, I would finally stop being lazy. But the truth is, I wasn’t lazy—I was just scared of failing. And the system was my shield. If I didn’t finish the work, I could blame the system. “Oh, I just need to tweak my tagging structure,” I’d tell myself. It was a way to avoid the ego-bruising reality that maybe I just wasn’t very good at the task yet.
Here is a list of things that actually matter more than your productivity app:
- Actually starting the task before you feel “ready.”
- Turning off your phone and putting it in another room.
- Accepting that the first draft will be terrible.
- Knowing exactly what one thing you need to do next.
- Sleeping more than six hours.
That’s it. You don’t need a $20/month subscription to a “knowledge management” tool to do any of those things. In fact, most of those things are harder to do when you have a complex system constantly pinging you with reminders and notifications. Your to-do list shouldn’t be a treadmill that powers nothing; it should be a simple list of things you are actually going to do today.
The boring truth about actually finishing things
I’ve simplified everything now. I use a plain text file on my desktop called “TODAY.txt.” It has three bullets. If I finish them, I’m done. If I don’t, they move to tomorrow. There are no tags. There are no folders. There is no “Second Brain.” My first brain is doing just fine now that I’ve stopped cluttering it with meta-data about my own life.
I still get the urge to go look at new apps. I see a cool screenshot of a minimalist calendar on Twitter and I feel that familiar itch to go sign up and spend a weekend “setting it up.” But then I remember that Tuesday in Chicago. I remember the panic of trying to write a 2,000-word report in forty minutes because I spent the morning playing with Obsidian. I never want to feel that way again. The system isn’t the work. The work is the work.
Is my current way of working perfect? Probably not. I definitely forget things sometimes. I don’t have a beautiful archive of every thought I’ve had since 2019. But I’m actually finishing things. I’m hitting my deadlines. I’m present with my family because I’m not constantly thinking about how to “capture” our dinner conversation into a database.
Maybe the reason you can’t get started isn’t that you lack the right system. Maybe it’s because you’re using the system to hide from the fact that the work is just hard. And no app in the world can change that.
Go close your tabs and do the one thing you’re avoiding. You know which one it is.