u/Corsairi

I'll start by caveating that I am extremely new to productivity systems. Well... I should say new to giving productivity systems serious thought/consideration for what I want/need.

I'll also state that I have a swiss cheese magpie brain. Easily distracted by a new bit of info that takes me down rabbit holes, making me forget previous points until they inevitably crop up later and the cycle repeats.

I'm trying to get back to my roots of research, insights and analysis, which means reading, dissecting, annotating journals/books/articles and tying seemingly disparate threads of information together to form a hypothesis that I can investigate.

Tech (and my environmental conscience of refusing to print hundreds of pages of paper) has come a long way in the last 12 years I've been out of academia, and I am a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of options out there.

Essentially, I'm looking for a productivity and knowledge management system that will let me just hold everything in one place. By this I mean, books, articles, even videos that I can highlight/annotate/write on.

It would be great if I can link my notes to particular sections of pdfs/timestamps in videos so I can subconsciously document my train of thought as to how certain parts relate to one another given the way my mind bounces back and forth between topics.

If I can do this on an iPad with an apple pencil, but still access this library(?) on Android/pc then that'd be the cherry on top!

I thought I'd found a winner with Obsidian, but I really really want to protect against AI scraping, so looked at either integrating with proton drive or using obsidian sync.

The problem is that connecting Obsidian to PD on iOS is seemingly not particularly easy and obsidian sync's limitations on file and vault sizes pose a problem as I want to be storing engineering, economics, and policy textbooks, hour long video lectures, etc...

I'm just lost at this point. I'm not looking for someone to just hand me an answer, but given how new I am to PKMS, is there a workflow or well-known solution/system I'm not aware of? I'm not married to any particular app/tool/system so am happy to adjust.

Thanks if you read through the above mad ramble. And appreciate any thoughts any of you may have on my predicament.

Or a mega thread at least, please I beg of you. I know some genuinely have built something that helps them and want to share it, but I cannot recall the last time this sub appeared in my feed without "Try this App", "I built an app", blah blah blah.

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It feels predatory. I genuinely don't feel like I see much advice that isn't just "I struggled with X so built an app, try it out!" Which then just feels insincere.

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And so much of it is AI slop 😭.

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I don't need another freaking app. I want to hear genuine human experiences of a quirky method that inexplicably works really well for you in managing a symptom of your ADHD that isn't some veiled attempt to make money.

Apologies for the flair I didn't know what to put this under.

Ok so not quite infinite, but I just had to share this with people that might appreciate it (I'm a newbie gardener so no one else is interested), but I was browsing the web trying to price up wood chip for my borders for next year so I could save up.

Disclaimer: I'm going to use fake numbers here to try to not give it away and ruin it.

And I stumbled on an error where the in page quantity selector priced one 50L bag as say £5, 10x 50L bags as £48, and 100x bags as £5.

Having 0 impulse control and thinking it would be a pretty funny thing to do I purchased the obvious error with full expectations that they'd refund me and cancel the order when they realised.

Except... I just received the dispatch notification and the tracking details are with a pallet delivery company.

Working it out I've saved ~£1337! And brought forward my gardening plan by a year!

The cherry on top? Free delivery.

On a separate matter, does anyone know what to do with excess wood chip?

EDIT1: RIP my inbox. But just to respond to all the requests here, I won't be sharing the link unless I know who's getting impacted (small UK business is a deal-breaker), and whether they send me a single bag on a pallet or not 😂

Also u/socksoncocksonsocks (lmao that username!) mentioned ChipDrop being an option people could use. Do check them out!