Linking notes enables note-taking to become a full-time hobby. It’s effortless to waste hours in Notion, Obsidian, Vimwiki, etc. creating MOCs, unused links, nice little home pages, and creating and recreating structures and systems.
I switched to a directory of unlinked, tagged notes and I’ve yet to have an issue just searching for a specific note. I spend a fraction of the time I used to thinking about notes at all.
Everyone has different needs and things that work for them, but some of these productivity gurus have 100,000s atomic notes, each note being like a single quote from a book, and you realize that taking and organizing notes is the only thing they do.
I was elated when obsidian came out, because it brought to reality exactly what I thought I had wanted for a few years prior - ability to link, especially graphically, all of my notes.
But I quickly realised what you described - it's a futile effort to maintain such a thing, and that the only people who do it are absolute slaves to the systems they've created.
Worse, they surely don't really generate truly unique insights from it all because the insights don't really come from addition and interconnection, but instead from subtraction and refinement. The cultivation of wisdom, in other words - which is the opposite of accumulation. I've seen various versions of this chart and I think it summarizes the situation well - though I'd go further and be culling the noise from it all. https://magniapartners.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Magnia...
I still use obisidan, as it's just great software. And mybnotes could absolutely benefit from better structure and discipline in filing them - I do almost none of what I mentioned above. Though, perhaps I'm just mentally doing the culling and just focusing on what actually matters. Full text search usually finds me what I need quickly enough.
I switched to a directory of unlinked, tagged notes and I’ve yet to have an issue just searching for a specific note. I spend a fraction of the time I used to thinking about notes at all.
Everyone has different needs and things that work for them, but some of these productivity gurus have 100,000s atomic notes, each note being like a single quote from a book, and you realize that taking and organizing notes is the only thing they do.