The age of the optimized self has finally caught on, and now every thought must be captured, catalogued, cross-referenced — preferably in an app with a $120/year premium tier. The promise? Control. The reality, however, is close to a digital panopticon where we voluntarily volunteer as both the prisoner and the warden.
This evidently isn’t productivity. It’s performance art for no audcience, a ritualized self-surveillance disguised as efficiency. And like all rituals, it thrives on mythology: the myth that more tools mean more control, that more customization equals clarity, that life can be reduced to a series of perfectly tagged tasks. But what if the most radical act is, counter-intuitively, not participating?
The first time I opened Notion, I saw not an app but the ghost of a 19th-century factory foreman grinning at me from behind a mahogany desk, his pocket watch chain glinting as he gestured toward the rows and rows of empty databases waiting to be filled with the minutiae of my crumbling attention span. This is clearly a joke — except this is how they get you. Not with features, but with the vertigo of possibility, as when a cathedral’s vaulted ceilings don’t just inspire awe but whisper one could be much more than this. Instead of stained glass, however, it’s a $12/month subscription and instead of God, it’s some guy in San Francisco who thinks the solution to existential dread is a slightly better kanban board.
We’ve taken the Victorian obsession with specialized implements — the silver crumb sweepers, the calling card trays, the hatpin holders shaped like swans — and digitized them into an endless parade of apps that promise to fix us, if only we’d organize ourselves just so. Look at the current state of things: grown adults arguing about whether Bear or Obsidian is better for “thought capture”, as if ideas needed the perfect net. As if David Lynch storyboarded Eraserhead in Roam Research. As if Joan Didion kept a perfeectly tagged database of her index cards. The truth is uglier and simpler: every minute spent tweaking the task manager’s color scheme is a minute not spent doing the thing the task manager exists to remind you to do.
Somewhere along the way, the map was confused for the territory. Somewhere along the way, the idea that the right system would finally make us the right kind of person, rose. But the secret they don’t tell you in those YouTube videos where someone with a very expensive microphone explains his “life-changing” Notion setup is: the perfect productivity system doesn’t exist. Or rather, it does, and it’s staring at you from your dock this whole time. The “Notes App” doesn’t care about your dreams, nor does Reminders judge you for failing. Calendar shows you squares of time and lets you decide whether to fill them or leave them blank. They’re not glamorous, don’t have cult followings, don’t “spark joy”. They just work, quietly, like the plumbing in a well-built house.
I know what you’re thinking — that this is some minimalist fantasy, that life is more complicated than a single folder can handle. Fine. But ask yourself: when was the last time you actually needed more than that? When was the last time a nested tag system saved you from yourself instead of just giving you one more place to hide from all the work? The answer is written in the graveyard of abandoned apps on your hard drive, each one a monument to the fantasy that, this time, the tool would finally make you the kind of person who doesn’t need tools.
So here’s my proposal: let’s stop pretending. Let’s embrace the glorious, ugly mess of it all. Let your reminders pile up like unopened mail. Let your notes app become a digital junk drawer. Let your calendar have blank spaces where the guilt should be. The goal was never organization — it was always the work itself, the stupid, stubborn act of making something despite the chaos. The Victorians had their engraved snail forks, and we have AI-powered to-do lists. Some obsessions never die; they just get a dark mode toggle and a Medium post about it.
The perfect productivity system is the one you forget you’re using. The perfect productivity system is no system at all. The perfect productivity system is a typewriter that doesn’t even have a backspace key. The perfect productivity system is writing in the Notes app at 3 AM because the idea wouldn’t wait. The perfect productivity system is realizing, finally, that you were never the problem — just the poor bastard who believed the solution could be bought for $9.99 a month.
We’ve been conditioned to worship at the altar of optimization, to treat our lives as if they were poorly written code in need of constant refactoring. The modern productivity gospel preaches that with enough apps, enough systems, enough meticulously color-coded calendars, we might finally achieve that mythical state of perfect efficiency. But here’s the dirty little secret they don’t tell you in those sleek onboarding screens: the more you optimize, the more you disappear.
Consider the inbox zero diehard, proudly displaying their bleak email client like a hunter mounting a trophy head. What they don’t show you are the three other inboxes they’ve quietly abandoned, the Slack channels muted, the WhatsApp groups left on read. We’ve created a culture where the appearance of control matters more than actual work, where the performance of productivity has replaced productivity itself. It’s not enough to do the work anymore — there must be demonstration, through a complex system of digital breadcrumbs, that The Work is Being Done Correctly.
There’s an alternative to this madness and it’s hiding in every home: a chaotic junk drawer. It doesn’t apologize for its mess, nor does it have to; it doesn’t promise to fix your life, nor does it have to. It simply exists as a testament to the beautiful, inefficient reality of being human. Why not let your notes app become a digital junk drawer, where half-formed ideas, shopping lists and random quotes all coexist without taxonomy? Leave blank spaces in your calendar like negative space in a painting: emptiness isn’t a flaw, but a necessary element of design.
Oh, and this isn’t about minimalism, which has become just another optimization strategy to perform purity while secretly maintaining three backup systems, but about something far more radical: friction. As I’ve mentioned in this previous post, in removing all friction, we create environments where nothing sticks. There is a reason why the most creative people often work with physical tools — why writers still fetishize notebooks and why architects sketch on trace paper, for instance. Regardless or what these professions say, those mediums resist. They have grain. They force us to confront the work rather than the tool.
So here’s my challenge: delete one productivity app today. Not to replace it later — just remove it. Put your grocery list in Calendar. Write your novel in Reminders. Allow yourself to be messy, but not strategically messy, not organized chaos: genuinely, unapologetically messy. Because after all, the goal isn’t to find a better system, but to remember that we are not systems that require optimization. It’s more than expected to write things down and forget it later on.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go reorganize my bookmarks.
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