Notes Apps Are Where Ideas Go to Die. And That’s Good. Insurance for Your Mind.⁠↗

By letting go, you’ve cleared up space for new quests. No more dozens of tabs open forever; you saved them, then let them go back into the ether. No perpetual thinking on an idea; you wrote it down, let your second brain remember for you.

That’s the true value of notebooks, notes apps, bookmarking tools, and everything else built to help us remember. They’re insurance for ideas. They let us forget.

That’s why notes and bookmark apps are so valuable to us. Their promise of a storehouse for all our fleeting whims looks like the salvation we so desperately need. Absolution from procrastination at the altar of getting things done.

This next app will be the one true way. We had the philosophy all wrong before. Arrows, perhaps, are better than checklists. Folders and hierarchies versus wikis and backlinks. The sages saw technological enlightenment at the end of the revolution; we simply haven’t attained perfection yet.

Evernote to OneNote, Moleskins to Field Notes, Roam to Obsidian. We blame the tools, the techniques. Surely they’re to blame. A new app will be better.

We did the most important work when we wrote the ideas down. “I’m not writing it down to remember it later,” declares every Fields Notes notebook, “I’m writing it down to remember it now.” The action of writing is what counts, what imprints important ideas in our brain. The note itself is a permission slip to let things go.