Should I just abandon my digital "Second Brain" for pen and paper?
So a few years ago I read Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte and absolutely loved it, so I recreated the whole system in Obsidian. I loved it at first, especially when it was all new. It really fit my personality because I’ve always been someone who hoards way too much information.
Before, I always felt like information just sat there doing nothing, so having a system that went from creating an idea to actually expressing it felt amazing, but yeah, that didn't last long lol. After a while, and moving the system across like 4 different apps, I realized I always got stuck on the very first step: just capturing the info. After that, I never actually processed those notes.
Organizing everything started feeling like a total waste of time and honestly way too much maintenance, so for like a year or two the system just sat there abandoned.
A few days ago I decided to try and bring it back. I thought about incorporating AI to handle all the organization so I could avoid the hassle, but I ran into a dilemma... I feel like using AI for this kinda corrupts what was originally my idea.
So right now I'm seriously considering abandoning the whole digital system for a while, switching to just pen and paper, and seeing what happens. The only thing making me doubt is this constant feeling that if it’s not digital, the info is getting lost because I can’t search it quickly. Though if I think about it right now, it’s been years since I actively searched for an old note I saved anyway. What I’d actually love to do is just open a random note and see what I wrote back then.
Anyone else got tired of the maintenance and successfully moved to pen and paper? How did it go? How do you deal with the feeling of "losing info" or not having a quick search bar when using a physical system?
Should I just ditch digital completely or is there a middle ground that requires almost zero maintenance?