Unnecessary optimisation

2nd June 2025

As part of the Great Readening¹ I was thinking about how I was going to store all my notes. I log my reading and keep notes in Notion currently (along with my entire life). But I thought my current system was not in-depth enough.

So I went on a bit of a rampage for two days. I downloaded Obsidian. I made four new Notion setups. I looked at wikis. I watched Zettelkasten videos... And ended up precisely where I started.

There was this idea I needed to optimise everything. Two-way relations that automatically populate. Every single concept indexed. All that. The sleek, shiny system. But I couldn't find the thing that worked and probably that's because I, and this project, are fundamentally unsuited to a sleek and shiny system.

In fact, not having an optimised system is going to be better for me. If I'm doing it manually I'm thinking about it more. If I have to move between pages to link them that's going to connect in a way an automatically populating database isn't. Force me to take a bit more time over it.

While I did say previously I'd like to do a lot of this out in the open that does not extend to publishing my notes on the books I read. I might collate some for the blog. But if it was going to be fully online it would be different. I'd second guess what I was supposed to care about and neglect what I did. What interests me almost certainly won't interest you.

I'm pretty impressed I stopped where I did and realised I was overcomplicating things. Oftentimes I'm so stuck thinking what is the optimum way of doing something I run the risk of not doing it at all.

I've finally gotten rid of the upvote button. Also, I'd like to make this section smaller... but how.