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

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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.