Notes apps are where ideas go to die. And that’s good.⁠↗

Sherlock Holmes, in BBC’s rendition, builds a fabled mind palace, an imaginary castle in which to stash his clues and concepts for later recall. Mere mortals with our average powers of recollection turn instead to notes and bookmarking apps, with their promises to be our “second brain” and help us “remember everything.” And they do, for a time. You think of something, write it down, and feel free. Find something else, bookmark it, and close the tab without worry. If you need that discovery again, it’s only a few taps away. The placebo effect—or, at least, the new app effect—is real.

That’s the true value of notebooks, notes apps, bookmarking tools, and everything else built to help us remember. They’re insurance for ideas. They let us forget.

So we hoard. Try to remember it all with misplaced loss aversion, only to strain under the weight of a million open mental tabs and erode our ability to remember the important things. We need to forget, but we first must feel safe forgetting. That’s why notes and bookmark apps are so valuable to us. Their promise of a storehouse for all our fleeting whims looks like the salvation we so desperately need. Absolution from procrastination at the altar of getting things done.

So we try again. This next app will be the one true way. We had the philosophy all wrong before. Arrows, perhaps, are better than checklists. Folders and hierarchies versus wikis and backlinks. The sages saw technological enlightenment at the end of the revolution; we simply haven’t attained perfection yet. Evernote to OneNote, Moleskins to Field Notes, Roam to Obsidian. We blame the tools, the techniques. Surely they’re to blame. A new app will be better.