What use is a garden full of weed, if it is not pruned with care? Nobody wants to browse someone else's second brain that is full of farts. Each species of plant that is added to the garden should be carefully curated to complement the ecosystem. When Notion first came out, I treated it as a memory dump - anything that crossed my mind, or interacted with that day, was simply saved for *future reference*. A lot of time was spent over-engineering the tool with complex databases, infinite nesting, rather than using the tool for a practical purpose. Obsidian's philosophy changed the way I viewed these tools - if you could keep refactoring and distilling notes on certain topics, updating and refining along the way, you can arrive at insights instead of a static PKMS copy paste dump. Write notes that you yourself would want to read. I learn to deal with limited resources (time and energy), and I cannot stress enough how important clear and concise data documentation is - for your own sanity. Your future self will thank you if you put in the effort to maintain sanitary, legible documentation. I try to simplify and be less opiniated on my toolstack - keep it to a minimum, only focus on what is practical, instead of flashy or fancy tech. A lot of this reflection and removal happened after I read [this](https://stephango.com/remove) writing - it inspired me to remove all the unnecessarily complex parts of my stack. *Complexity isn't necessary* - don't use or write tech for tech's sake. Here are some principles that I follow: - No more than 2 layers deep of nesting e.g folder structure, documentation links