I’ve been through every productivity system you’ve heard of and a few you probably haven’t. I’ve built Kanbans and Zettelkastens and cycled through Evernote, Obsidian, Roam Research, Notion. During my doctoral program I ran a paper planner alongside digital tools, alongside whatever else I was trying that year.
Most of it worked. Which is what made this confusing.
I finished the dissertation. I defended. I even received an award. The system did what it was supposed to do.
What I couldn’t explain, at the time, was why maintaining it felt like carrying something heavy uphill every single day.
Every system followed the same arc. There was the setup phase, where I had more energy than I knew what to do with. Then the using phase, where things actually held together. Then the lull, where something small would break. And after that I’d drift away from it. I didn’t really name that last phase for a long time, probably because naming it would have forced me to deal with it.
The productivity world has a line it repeats over and over: the best system is the system you use. I said that to myself a lot. It sounded right.
Looking back, I think it mostly kept me from asking the next question.
A few years ago I tried Motion, an AI-driven calendar that automatically schedules your tasks into open time and reshuffles everything when your day changes. You don’t really decide when to do things. The system does, and you follow it.
Out of everything I tried, it removed the most friction.
And it still didn’t stick.
That’s when I finally started looking at myself instead of the tool.
I’ve probably had ADHD tendencies most of my adult life. They just didn’t show up in obvious ways because I’d built enough structure around myself to compensate. The systems worked, but I was the one holding them together.
What I hadn’t realized was what that was costing me. It was willpower. Every morning I had to pick the system back up and re-engage with it. That’s fine when you’re in a groove. Any system works when you’re in a groove.
The problem is what happens when you’re not.
When the momentum breaks, I don’t just lose my place. I lose the thread entirely. The system is still there, organized and waiting. But I don’t go back.
It took me longer to notice the second piece, mostly because I didn’t know it was even a variable.
I don’t have an internal monologue. Not a quiet one, not something I can tap into if I try harder. There’s no running verbal narration in the background when I think. I process through pattern recognition. Things either click or they don’t.
A lot of productivity systems assume the opposite. Covey’s framework, GTD, weekly reviews, affirmations. There’s an assumption that you can sit down and talk yourself through your priorities, your commitments, your next steps. That works if your mind operates that way. Mine doesn’t, and I spent years not knowing that was the variable.
So I was trying to run systems that depended on a kind of internal narration I don’t have.
Capture was never the issue. I’ve got a pocket notepad, one in the car, one in the shower, because ideas don’t show up on a schedule and I stopped pretending they would. Voice memos when I’m driving. Notes in meetings. That part works.
The problem is what happens next.
Every captured idea has to become something else. Is it a project? A note? A task? Something for the calendar? That translation step is where everything slows down. I didn’t have a clear way to move from raw capture to something I could act on.
So things would just sit. The notepad in the car stayed in the car.
The best system isn’t the one you stick with. It has to match how your mind actually works.
What works for me now is Claude Cowork. I can drop in text, a screenshot, a voice note, whatever I have, and it sorts it without me remembering where anything belongs. Each morning there’s a briefing built from multiple calendars, so the day shows up whole instead of in pieces I have to collect. Projects stay current without manual upkeep. The weekly review is already partially written from what actually happened, not from what I can piece together when I finally sit down Sunday night.
I’m reacting to something already there instead of generating it from scratch. When I lose the thread, I don’t have to restart. I can step back in wherever I am. The lull doesn’t collapse the whole system. It’s just a pause.
I finally asked a better question. Not which system should I use, but what my mind actually needs to function.
The planner is still on my shelf. It worked. The hybrid worked. But what it required was me as the bridge between everything, moving ideas from paper to digital, from notes to tasks, from one system to another. I was holding the whole thing together in my head. That was the load. Not the tools. The integration. And I don’t get that energy back, but I know now where it went.
At work I’ve always said I’m tool agnostic. The tool is never the point. I meant it as professional advice. It turns out I was also describing my own problem, just without knowing it yet.