On Organizing My Thoughts and Research

29 Dec 2025 • Personal

I am a messy person. Always have been. My desk is chaos, my browser has 80+ tabs, and for years my digital notes were scattered across tools I’d forget I even used.

This post is about how I finally stopped fighting that and found something that works. Not a productivity guru revelation — just what happened when I stopped tool-hopping and got honest about what I actually need.

The Graveyard of Tools

Obsidian was seductive. Local-first, markdown, that beautiful graph view showing connections between notes. I spent hours configuring plugins, building templates, designing the perfect folder structure. The actual writing? Less so. And syncing between devices was annoying enough that I just… stopped opening it on my phone.

Notion seemed like the answer. Databases! Templates! Everything in one place! Except I’d open it to jot down an idea and immediately get paralyzed: which database does this go in? Should I create a new page or add to an existing one? What properties should this have? By the time I’d decided, the thought was gone. My Notion became a graveyard of empty pages with ambitious titles.

Docmost I tried for a bit as a self-hosted alternative. It’s fine. But switching tools again made me realize the tool was never the problem.

The problem was that I had no actual system. I was collecting apps like they’d magically organize my brain.

PARA, or: Finally Having a System

I’d heard about PARA (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives) before but dismissed it as another productivity fad. Then I actually read Tiago Forte’s explanation and felt like an idiot for not trying it sooner.

The idea is dead simple: - Projects have deadlines and outcomes. My PhD research projects, a paper submission, setting up a new server. - Areas are ongoing responsibilities. Teaching, health, finances. No end date. - Resources are things I find interesting and might use someday. Papers on topics I’m curious about, tutorials I want to reference. - Archives is where finished projects and stale resources go to rest.

That’s it. Four folders. The insight that clicked for me: when something comes in, I don’t ask “what is this about?” — I ask “what is this for?” A paper about reinforcement learning might go in Projects (if I’m actively using it), Resources (if it’s just interesting), or Archives (if it was for a finished project).

This sounds trivial. It kind of is. But having a clear answer to “where does this go?” eliminated 90% of my friction.

Landing on Outline

I’m now running Outline self-hosted and it’s become my single source of truth.

Why Outline specifically? Honestly, it could have been something else. What mattered was picking one tool and sticking with it. But Outline has some things I like: the editor is fast and stays out of my way, search actually finds things, and sharing a doc when I need to is trivial.

I have four top-level collections matching PARA. That’s the whole setup. No elaborate tagging system, no complex hierarchies, no daily note templates. Just write, put it in the right bucket, move on.

The Comparison Nobody Asked For

Since I’ve actually used all of these, here’s how they compare on things I care about:

The last row is the only one that matters, really.

What I Actually Learned

I wasted probably two years cycling through tools thinking the next one would fix my disorganization. The fix was having four folders and a rule for what goes where.

The meta-lesson: if you’re a messy person, you need a system simple enough that messy-you will actually follow it. Elaborate setups are for people who enjoy maintaining elaborate setups. I am not that person.

Now when I have a thought, I know where it goes. The tool doesn’t matter. The system does.

Have any feedback?

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