Heading into March 2025, my workflow is pretty well locked in and “flowing.” After a rather tumultuous end of 2024 in which I swung back and forth between Reflect Notes and Evernote, as of the first of January, I have stayed focused in Evernote.
Anyone who enjoys working with apps and seeing new apps emerge can identify with the temptation to switch. The problem is that this temptation creates a lot of mental friction and fragmentation.
Instead of a Single Source of Truth, your notes are sprayed across several apps, and as those notes begin to fade into the past, you lose track of “where did I put that.” We remember taking the note or working on a specific project, but six months, a year or two later, it has become a needle in the haystack.
This creates fragmentation, which is frustrating. Over time, countless hours are wasted searching for the information needed in the moment.
The solution of this is to have a Single Source of Truth, one location where you keep important information and notes. This gains tremendous value over time.
In my case, for example, I have used Evernote since 2008. As I write this, I have 30,992 notes in Evernote. Many of these notes are of little value to me now. Do I need my utilities billing statement from March 2010? No. But within these notes I also have valuable information, and with Evernote’s search capabilities, I can typically find it within a couple of minutes. Until 2020.
In 2020 a couple of influences merged to create friction in my note system.
- The emergence of Roam Research.
- The rapid multiplication of “productivity influencers.”
Let’s look at these two disruptors in my workflow.
The Emergence of Roam Research
In 2020, Roam Research became the “It” application. Roam introduced networked notes and revolutionized how people process knowledge. This was also the era when Sönke Ahrens’ book, “How To Smart Notes” first gained a lot of traction.
Seemingly overnight, everyone in the productivity space was talking about Roam Research and “Zettelkasten.” It was the beginning of a renaissance in personal productivity.
Over the next couple of years, Tiago Forte would publish his book, “Building A Second Brain,” and online courses quickly emerged offering to teach users how to use Roam Research and Build A Second Brain…for a price. Initially in the $200 to $300 range, the price of these online courses quickly soared to hundreds and then thousands of dollars.
The Rise of the Productivity Influencers
Roam Research, however, was only the “it” application for a short time. By the end of the year, most of the influencers publicly protested against the opinionated and often harsh social media presence of Roam’s founder and abandoned the app in protest. This rise and fall of Roam Research was documented well by Dan Shipper in this article.
One aspect of the Roam Renaissance that did not go away was the rapid growth and expansion of the Productivity Influencers.
Mostly on YouTube, these new creators found a lucrative model of creating content for YouTube, building a newsletter subscription list, sending regular eNewsletters, and then selling products to their list. In some cases this might be a book, but in most cases the product to sell was an Online Course. As the audience of the influencer grew, the cost of their courses rose exponentially.
There’s a problem with this model, however: in order to sustain the level of income you are enjoying from your online courses, you need to either create new courses on different topics, or figure out how to switch to a subscription-based model.
I experienced both of these “adjustments” to the productivity space.
Wait! There’s More! Now This Is the Greatest Note-taking App
The first “adjustment” was switching apps every year. There is only so much content one can create surrounding an app like Roam Research, Logseq, or Obsidian, the three giants of note-taking in the 2020-2023 window of time. Moreover, some apps, Obsidian, for example, proved to be much more adept at developing their app than others, like Logseq, which, I believe, is still in beta after years of development.
Influencers pushed a lot of people to Logseq from Roam Research at first because it most closely resembled the features of Roam. As Logseq stalled in its development, and users started reporting loss of data in the Logseq forums, Obsidian became the tool of choice. Obsidian was the new “It” application for notes.
Fortunately for creators, Obsidian is also a pretty complicated application to use and has a steep learning curve. Most of the key features are found in plugins that are complicated to use or come and go as the sole developer gains and then loses interest.
To take advantage of the “super plugins” that really make Obsidian a powerful app, like Dataview, for example, you need to learn to code. This is not easy for someone who has no experience with development.
In my opinion, this witches brew of rapid development of notes apps, growing complexity of apps like Obsidian and Tana, and a growing influencer community motivated to make money, created a toxic environment.
The influencers were highly skilled at “selling” the features of an app like Obsidian because to learn to use an app required help and they had just the course for you to help learn the app.
Over time, users had to follow the personal interests of the influencer.
This year Roam Research is “an amazing app that will revolutionize your knowledge management.”
The next year Obsidian is “an amazing app that will revolutionize your knowledge management.”
The year after that Tana is “an amazing app that will revolutionize your knowledge management.”
With each of these changes there was often a new online course or community to accompany the influencers conviction that this app is the latest greatest app. When it started to become clear that many influencers were simply following the money rather than using an app because it is “the best,” there was a moment of clarity for many note-takers.
The video that crystalized this clarity for many was Sam Malta’s “Stop Procrastinating With Note-Taking Apps Like Obsidian, Roam, Logseq.”
Forget Online Courses: Now It’s the Community That Matters
The second “adjustment” involved switching from an online course to an online community. After all, you can only sell your course one time, but a community offers an ongoing subscription model. So, after spending several hundred or even several thousands of dollars for the online course, creators started sending out emails that went something like this:
Dear “Student,”
Remember the course “How To Use XYZ App to Build Your Second Brain” that we sold you two years ago for $1,500 and promised you life-long access to this course and all future enhancements to the course? Well, that’s coming to an end. We are now transitioning to an Online Community that will provide much more value (to me). Because you paid so much money for life-time access to our Online Course, we are granting you unlimited access to our Online Community for six months. After this, you will need to pay $900 a year to maintain your access to the community. You will still retain access to the Online Course, but we will not update it any more.
Thank you.
To be honest, some communities have proven to be a worthwhile investment. The creator continues to put out good content and is expanding his/her focus to include other topics related to productivity and knowledge management.
Others, however, clearly grew board with the topic and have handed off the management to others and they pop in once in a while to let you know they are there and to encourage you to continue to pay your subscription.
Let Your Knowledge Tree Grow
The lesson I have learned over this journey is to let your knowledge tree grow. In order for a tree to begin producing fruit, it needs to put down roots and over time the tree grows strong and vibrant.
This is a key lesson we learn from Niklas Luhmann’s system: over time he kept putting seeds of knowledge into his “Zettelkasten,” connecting the dots, and then harvesting the fruit of his growing knowledge base. This would never have gained any value if he switched up his system every few months.
Imagine planting a tree and then digging it up every few months and moving it to a new place. This tree would never put down roots and would probably die.
This is what we do when we switch notes apps every few months. Instead of a Single Source Of Truth that grows and flourishes over time, we have shallow, fragmented patches of weeds that live for a short time and then die.
Resist the temptation. Stay focused on a single note app and let it grow deep and begin to produce fruit. Nurture it. Feed it. Prune it. Enjoy the fruit.
ChrisEller.org | Connect the dots. 