Ask HN: What starts to break down as your notes grow?

Posted by vajafafa 8 hours ago

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Hi HN,

For people who keep a lot of notes over time: what actually gets harder once your note collection grows?

I’m not really asking which tool is best. I’m more interested in the failure modes.

For example: • capture is easy, but organizing later becomes heavy • search works, but reusing information in context is awkward • one note ends up belonging to multiple places • structure helps at first, then becomes overhead

If you’ve used tools like Obsidian, Notion, Logseq, Apple Notes, or plain Markdown for a while, what started to feel limiting for you?

Comments

Comment by londonanon 7 hours ago

Over time, my limitation has always been the tool.I now make notes exclusively in plain text or Markdown with some light folder organisation in the same place. Then, when I need to find something but can't remember where, I `grep`. It has never failed me once.

Comment by vajafafa 4 hours ago

What does your workflow look like these days in practice? Are you using any app on top of it, or mostly just plain text / Markdown files, folders, and grep?