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.