I've taken a lot of notes and done a lot of "scratchpad thinking" over the last 20 years, something I started in college but really got into in grad school. I'v

I've taken a lot of notes and done a lot of "scratchpad thinking" over the last 20 years, something I started in college but really got into in grad school. I've tried Evernote, OneNote, Obsidian. I've tried little journal apps on my phone. I wrote my own little "microblog" in Django to make it easy to collect and annotate links, quotes, snippets, and images from around the internet. And what I always keep coming back to is plain text files and folders of saved images and files, as well as paper. For text files, I always have one generic TODO.md file that uses the `[ ]` todo and `[X]` done notation, and a couple of more generic text files like "work.md" or "solace.md" for more free form writing. There are also folders and text files for specific topics, like quotes, poems, etc. It's very important to have a scratchpad that you can just open up and start typing without thinking about how to categorize it, because you might lose the precious thread of the thought while debating which category to use, and you can always shelve it later if it's worth keeping. Zero friction to start typing is crucial. On paper, I use a simple loose leaf and folder system. I used to use bound journals, but since 80% of what I write down is thrown away, loose leaf works better. Have a pile of about 10-20 pages. You fill up a page, and if it's destined for the circular file, dog-ear it; otherwise give it a title and date and move it to the bottom of the pile. When you run out of blank pages, go through and either discard or file each page in an appropriate manila folder. This works better than index cards (which are too small to contain a complete thought) or journals (where it's too hard to discard pages.) Lots of people use ring or disc bound journals for that, but I find that fiddly and not any easier to work with than loose-leaf, probably because I just keep everything at my desk and don't have to carry it around anywhere. Paper has a massive advantage when it comes to diagrams, design thinking, and mathematical equations. I love LaTeX, and use MathJax on my personal site quite heavily, but its so much slower and less fluent than just writing equations on paper. I've tried tablets, and am really good at using draw.io (now app.diagrams.net) but when you're thinking freeform you want flexibility and fluency above all else and never want to be fighting a UI, which takes you out of the flow state. Ideas are fragile things, especially when newborn; any distraction is an unacceptable risk. I used to use a custom Tesseract pipeline to OCR the pages I wanted to be searchable, but lately I've just been using ChatGPT, which seems to do just fine with my handwriting. As OCR got better over the years, I actually moved more towards paper, because what's the downside? So, getting back to the point of the article: PKM tools are stuck in the unenviable position of competing with both paper and ordinary text files, and for me they just don't offer enough advantages.