I have recently followed the productivity landscape. If you’ve read many posts about apps like Notion, Obsidian and NotebookLM? Most of these apps are posed as magic pill (most posts) to increase your productivity, giving you the feeling that you’re missing out on some tricks for success. But I hate to break it up to you they’re not, so for you this is probably a productivity trap and that’s what we do with the .
The ‘Geeky Procrastination’ Diagnosis
Trying to read up on tips and hacks for my productivity as a chronic lazy person, I try hard at reading too much. And of course, when the productivity coaches suggest stuff I want to try them out. These Second Brain, Knowledge Base tools were a long time ago that I had heard about and it was giving me ‘FoMO’ severe.
I just got the time to look at these apps recently. I swear that I tried so hard to integrate them into my workflow but didn’t know how they actually helped my work. Here’s the thing – these are amazing pieces of software that do what they say, but there are specific use cases for each of them. If your work is not under those use cases, these apps become a form of sophisticated procrastination.
That’s what, it makes you geeky when you’re putting those dashboards in place and hitting mini dopamine along the way. At the end of it all you might realize that I’ve never really done anything and possibly wrote a ‘Second Brain’ which you will never actually use.
When describing the reasons for not using these tools (and probably you), I should tell you scenarios where they’d actually be useful because, to be fair, the apps themselves are not misleading in what they say they do.
Notion
First, I read Notion and wanted to know how it works and what it can do for me. What I learned is that it’s more like an AI-powered project management app? I like to manage projects with a team of contributors you want them on the same page, and it’s good for me to track project notes/take knowledge base features.
Also, it’s a very helpful tool for students to keep notes in one place and build up knowledge as they age through manual or using the built-in AI features. A tool like Notion makes a lot of sense in this age of digital education, as you don’t always get physical books and notes anymore. There are a number of productivity-boosting hacks up its sleeve for these use cases, and Notion has one or more tricks to boost the effectiveness of it.
Obsidian
Most of the things that Notion does, Obsidian does but it is less about the project management side and more concerned with building up a broad knowledge base. graphs and canvases, you can link your notes to each other so that the mess of your journaling is ‘accessible data’ for access. Certainly one of the best note-taking apps out there is it’s actually one that takes notes.
In my opinion, Obsidian is a general target audience of students, story writers and any deep thinker in terms of the genre. It can handle complex notes and make them manageable by combining them into a visually less intimidating Second Brain of sorts.
NotebookLM
Google has blocked NotebookLM as a new kid on the block, rather than the other two. But in all honesty, it doesn’t have a lot of feature overlap with Notion and Obsidian – it’s just one part of its own niche.
It’s an amazing tool to learn new stuff and consume knowledge in a variety of ways using NotebookLM. This is the name for Language Model (the LM), essentially meaning that instead of LLMs such as Gemini or ChatGPT to search information from all over the web, you feed it with specific material; so in its answers only those references are used.
A state-of-the art way to learn how to create a podcast is another killer NotebookLM feature, which is one of the most innovative features that can be added to my iPod’s library. Rather than ask questions about the material you feed it, you use the tool to create a podcast of two people discussing the topics in your source data that you can listen to at any given time. This is how you can learn new things, without having to read a word. It’s pretty cool to ?
Why Using a Simple Note-taking App Works for Me
So while they are useful in their own ways, okay, these apps do not really help any of my workflows. I work for s, they give me a wiki of all their rules that I can read and refer to at any time. When I’m writing a language that is pretty easy to understand, it’s usually written by my peers in – because they know exactly what if someone new at our field would have to start learning.
They also use project management tools such as Trello, Asana or ClickUp for these companies. Hence, for a freelancer like me I don’t have to worry about the knowledge base and project management of Notion and Obsidian. There are times I have to take personal notes and write a private task management solution.
That’s where simple tools like Google Keep and the Google Tasks come in, well, that’d be a good way for to get it. This is a more linear solution than creating an equivalent of knowledge base and project management, which the companies that I work for are covered by premium apps.
The only tool that really helps me would be NotebookLM if I’m working on a project where I have to learn new stuff or through bulky technical documentation. But I’d certainly use it in such cases, but that’s what with . If my First Brain would clearly be enough to… Why does it take the use of Second Brain when I mean that?
Increasing Productivity Doesn’t Always Need Complex Setups
I have largely explained the true meaning of these tools to an extent.’ The , who has been in his position since 2000, said ‘I know that it is not for me or what they are used for. But the point of sharing this whole thing with you isn’t to berate these tools – as you have seen, they’re pretty useful solutions to specific problems (not my problem and maybe not yours either). But adding more steps to your workflow just to follow some trend isn’t the answer to fixing your productivity. In many cases, as in life itself, simplicity is more than complexity.
I think that the productivity maestros have dominated my mind, and so I try to fix something that wasn’t really broken. But I ended up wasting so much time looking up and trying to learn these tools, which I didn’t really need at the end. It is, that the use cases of these apps should be clearly mentioned to their users so they know when it’s going to help them. But the companies that make these tools don’t really advertise them as magic productivity pills – it’s the content creators who sell them like snake oil, claims miracles and create FOMO among their audience.
Thanks for reading I Built a ‘Second Brain’ in Notion and Obsidian: It Was a Productivity Trap
