Breaking Away from Tool Tinkering: A Simple Approach to Managing Information

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

In recent times, there’s been an incredible abundance of note-taking and information management apps. Nearly every day, a new “wonder tool” appears on the market. However, in practice, many of us get so caught up in trying every new tool that we lose sight of our real goal: efficiently organizing and accessing information when we need it. In this post, I’ll talk about how to avoid unnecessary complexity in your personal knowledge management (PKM) system and focus on a few tools that genuinely make a difference.

Why Does Simplicity Matter When Choosing Tools?

• Focus Drain: Having too many apps can lead you to spend more time dealing with the tools themselves rather than the information you’re trying to manage.
• Reliability: Wherever you store your notes and thoughts, it needs to be accessible and stable. Frequent crashes or synchronization errors will undermine your trust in the system.
• Data Control: The notes and ideas you record today might still be valuable years from now. Choosing the right format and ensuring your data isn’t locked into a single platform are crucial.
• Maintenance Load: Every additional app you adopt is another piece of software to update, integrate, troubleshoot, and potentially conflict with something else. This extra maintenance can become overwhelming.

Ultimately, the purpose of PKM is to organize knowledge so you can find and use it efficiently. Any feature or tool that complicates this goal is worth reconsidering.

The Phases of Information Management

1. Discovery: Finding and coming across valuable resources (e.g., RSS feeds, social media).
2. Curation: Selecting which content you’ll actually read or delve into.
3. Consumption & Capture: Making notes of key insights while reading, watching, or listening.
4. Distillation & Organization: Integrating what you’ve collected into your primary system so it becomes truly usable.
5. Deepening: Reflecting on and connecting ideas, drawing more in-depth conclusions.
6. Creation: Using your gathered knowledge to produce new content, whether that’s writing, presentations, or projects.
7. Sharing: Distributing your insights to help others grow or learn.

You can use different tools at each stage, but it’s helpful to keep the overall number minimal. A well-chosen “thinking tool” (or central knowledge base) can cover many of these functions. The key is to reduce friction and avoid the burden of juggling too many applications.

Three Core Components

A Central Thinking Tool: This is the “home base” for all your notes and ideas. An app like Obsidian, which uses plain text (Markdown) and gives you full ownership of your data, is a good example. What matters most is having a system where your notes remain accessible in the long run and are not dependent on a single tool’s survival.

A Quick Capture Method: Ideas can strike at any time, so you need a low-friction way to capture them on the spot. It might be a note-taking app on your phone, emailing yourself, or a simple text file. The crucial part is ensuring these notes easily flow into your central knowledge base later.

A Backup Strategy: Hardware failures and software glitches can (and do) happen. Create both local and cloud backups to secure your data. You can also use version control tools like Git, but even a simple automatic backup plan is a solid start.

What I Pay Attention to When Choosing Tools

Data Control and Privacy

• Where is your data stored?
• How easily can you export it?
• Do you have offline access if needed?
• Can you still access your notes if the service shuts down?

Friction Points

• Is it quick and easy to capture ideas?
• Does the tool run smoothly and offline if necessary?
• Does it integrate well with your workflow?

Any friction you encounter — extra clicks, slow loading times — can discourage you from capturing or organizing your information. Sometimes, the fix is a different tool, but more often it’s a matter of simplifying your workflow or adjusting your habits.

Sustainability

• Cost (both money and time)
• Learning curve
• Ease of maintenance
• Seamless integrations

A complex or expensive tool might seem appealing at first but could become burdensome over time. It’s often better to have a simpler solution that consistently works, rather than a feature-heavy one that demands constant attention.

What to Avoid

• Tool Overload: Adding every new app that might be “useful one day” can lead to chaos.
• Feature Obsession: Many features can be tempting, but they might exceed your real needs.
• Trying to Perfect Everything Up Front: Continuously retooling before you’ve established a basic workflow can lead to endless adjustments and little real work.
• Chasing Trends: A tool’s popularity doesn’t guarantee it will fit your personal workflow.

One Last Reminder

A PKM system truly proves its value when you find yourself using it consistently. If a tool constantly makes you pause and think, “Hmm, should I jot this down here or in that other app?” it may be time to reassess. Friction points can signal the need for simplification — or on occasion, a new tool. However, always ask yourself, “Do I really need this?” before you jump into yet another new solution.

Starting with a few core tools and only adding new ones when a genuine need arises will help you escape the “constant tinkering” trap. After all, the goal of managing knowledge is to focus on the knowledge itself, not the tools that hold it.