I tried to love ‘second brain’ apps. Here’s why I abandoned them — and what I’m using instead

When I dove into the world of productivity apps, “second brain” apps like Notion and Obsidian were promoted as a sort of Holy Grail. With their comprehensive features, you could create a personal knowledge management system for all your thoughts, tasks, and ideas. Rather than being spread out across different apps and notes, you would have a single, searchable source that you could use.

And yet, they didn’t make me more productive. I switched between Notion, Obsidian, Tana, Anytype, NotebookLM (now Gemini Notebook), Logseq, and a variety of other apps — only to find my productivity waning.

Don’t get me wrong, second brain apps can be helpful for sorting information, and plenty of people have benefited from them. But to get them working the way you want, they take significant time to set up. You need to adapt to their workflows and features, or find ways to get around their limitations.

Starting Notion documents from scratch can leave you overwhelmed in a sea of unfamiliar features. Templates help you get around this, but your dashboard can quickly get cluttered with elements you don’t truly understand. When I was using it, the app also lacked an offline mode, which made it frustrating to use on mobile.

Meanwhile, Obsidian also offers you a blank canvas to get started with. But if you’re not familiar with Markdown, then just writing up your notes already presents some friction. Plugins can help you get around certain limitations, but community add-ons are often abandoned, meaning bugs might never get fixed. I found myself returning to and leaving the software multiple times, unable to adapt to its rigid structure. A new plugin would be promoted as a way to add flexibility, only for it to not quite live up to the hype.

I also tried using Gemini Notebook as a second brain app for certain tasks, since I’d seen people able to adapt it for this purpose. While it was great for learning about certain topics or generating explainers for others, it never quite worked as a productivity app for me.

I tried a variety of other apps, but they all had one common problem: setting them up felt like a second job. Days went into each tool, and while I might enjoy a document I created for some time, the apps ultimately didn’t fit well into my own workflow. I felt like I was sinking time into something that would ultimately fall away.

Every time I tried to adapt my workflow to these apps, it felt like I was trying to fit a square peg into a circular hole. The process was frustrating and time-consuming, and the friction ultimately made me abandon these tools.

This could be down to a few factors. Living with ADHD and autism, I struggle with memory, task-switching, and changes to my routine. When it comes to making notes, I need to jot down something quickly, with minimal friction, or the thought might float away. RIP to all those novel ideas I had over the years, but didn’t write down.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that between opening an app and switching a tab, I might forget what I was doing. So a note being buried under a large hierarchical list might as well be at the bottom of the ocean. When a feature is buried under countless menus or button taps, I get lost and frustrated. And even when I’ve learned how to do something in an app, I may forget the process and have to look it up repeatedly.

But I’ve also seen other people talk about how steep the learning curve is for many productivity tools. After all, there’s a reason they have tutorial videos and wikis dedicated to specific elements of the software.

These tools also often have limitations that make them a chore to use. Gemini Notebook’s Android app has long been a source of disappointment for users, and viewing your sources in your notebook is less than ideal. Obsidian only offers cross-device syncing if you pay for Obsidian Sync. You can use workarounds to sync your notes, but these often lead to version conflicts. Meanwhile, Notion’s offline mode requires you to set a toggle for individual documents, which undermines its convenience.

So if second brain apps don’t work for me, what does? It turns out that finding smaller, purpose-built apps with fewer features helped me be more productive. I also found new ways to use apps I had already tried to get them to work better for me.

When it came to Gemini Notebook, I stopped trying to use it as a productivity hub. Rather, I just use it to help me get to grips with certain topics quickly. For example, it serves as a reference for caring for my garden and managing kidney disease in cats. In this way, it helps me because the generated summaries, slides, and other resources provide quick refreshers on different topics.

For my notes, I found a middle ground. Google Keep was too simple, but Notion and Obsidian were too complex. Instead, I fell in love with Notesnook because of the balance of features and free cross-platform syncing. Its ability to work offline has also saved me in a few situations when I needed to work on a plane. I can attach documents and images to notes, which helps me keep track of my medication changes and article drafts. And its UI is simple enough for when I just need to write down a few words without getting distracted.

I also split up my reminders across different apps to help me with my task paralysis. Overwhelming UIs and multiple pings made me freeze up when using second brain apps. Or I missed these reminders completely. But eventually, I found a system that worked better for me — I kept my most important tasks in TickTick and set up chore reminders in Donetick. As a result, I actually get more done.

If you’re finding that second brain apps aren’t working for you either, it might be time to switch things up. If learning curves are your primary hurdle, changing to something simpler could help you the way it helped me. Sometimes, a few purpose-built tools work better than an all-in-one suite. In terms of free productivity apps, Notesnook and TickTick remain some of my top recommendations.