Too many tabs open

I have been building this since June, and it runs my days now.

Executives, project managers, anyone running several things at once, and a lot of people with ADHD all carry the same load. And what goes wrong is almost never that you cannot do the work. You can do the work. What happens is that too many processes are running in your head at the same time, and some of them quietly fall apart. Not the hard ones. Whichever ones happened to be in the background when something else needed the foreground.

Then it feeds itself, which is the part people miss. The dropped thing keeps costing you attention after it is dropped, because now you are also carrying the fact that you dropped it.

I am both halves of that description. I have been leading teams for about seven years, and I have had an ADHD diagnosis since I was six.

Which gives the one sentence the rest of this page rests on. It is not that you never wrote it down. It is that you forget it exists.

You know this one. The note is there, in a perfectly good app, with perfectly good search. You wrote it, or somebody sent it, and you read it at the time. And you will not open it again, because nothing is going to remind you that it is there, and nobody goes looking for something they have forgotten having.

It is sharper with ADHD, which is my version of it, but it is not an ADHD thing. Enough open tabs will do it to anybody. Which is why almost every decision in here comes out of that one sentence: not better capture, not better search, but something that brings it back to you.

The weakest link

“A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.”

The proverb, which traces back to Thomas Reid in 1786.

We have all tried.

We tried the bullet journal. We tried the Notion template somebody swore by. We tried morning pages, and the weekly review, and whatever framework was going around that year. Most of us tried several of them, and most of them failed.

They did not fail because the method was wrong. Some of them are genuinely good. Others are enormously complicated. Either way they fail for the same reason, because every single one of them quietly assumes the same thing, and the thing it assumes is not true: that we would keep it up.

We are the weakest link. Not the system. Us.

And almost none of those frameworks are built for that. Every one of them assumes the version of you that keeps it up.

I worked out my own deficiencies a long time ago, so I started building around them instead of against them: systems designed for me being the weakest link. A small and slightly ridiculous example: I barely own a drawer or a cupboard door. Almost everything I own is visible, on purpose, because if I cannot see it I forget it exists.

“I forget” is going to come up a lot on this page.

Those systems worked at work. I am good at documenting, which is why remote work suits me and why none of this has ever stopped me doing my job: when something slipped I built a system, and the system held. Write the decisions down somewhere other people can find them. Solved.

It is also why I think I am quite good at my job. I can see a thing from a distance, manage it, and notice what is missing from it, because I built a system around it instead of trying to hold it in my head. At one job I tidied up one process, not even a big one, and was told I was one of the most organised people they had ever met. They clearly have not met me. This is a person capable of losing a plate of food she has just cooked. In the toilet. And then spending thirty minutes looking for it around her own house.

In my own life I was failing miserably. And since I have been managing teams, the things that got dropped were all mine: other personal projects I actually want to pursue, and sometimes relationships.

None of which means I threw those frameworks away. I kept pieces of most of them, edited down to whatever survived contact with me.

The bullet journal is the clearest one. I used it for years, and the failure point was never the notation, it was whether I kept it current. So the notation stayed. The task markers in this system are its markers, migration included. What changed is that keeping them current is no longer my job.

Notion taught me the same lesson at a larger scale, and it is the trap most people building in it fall into: an overkill of templates, heavy databases, elaborate structure, all of it needing admin. Maintaining the system becomes its own open tab. So it fell into oblivion, the way those things always do. What I kept from Notion was none of the structure. It was wanting somewhere I could open and browse.

Which gives the actual design rule, and it sounds obvious only after you have wasted four years learning it: anything that needs maintaining becomes another tab, and another tab is the problem, not the solution.

That is the system half of it. The other half is about me, and it inverts the proverb. The lesson everybody draws from that chain is: find the weakest link and strengthen it. Applied to me, that means try harder. Be more disciplined. Build more structure so the structure holds me to it.

I did exactly that for years, and it failed every time, which was not for lack of effort. A weak link is a capacity, and a capacity does not grow because you keep asking it for more.

So the answer was never a stronger me. Every framework I had tried assumed the version of me that keeps it up. This one had to assume the version that does not, and still work: it can need my thinking, my decisions and my life, and it cannot need my upkeep or my memory.

Do not strengthen the weakest link. Take the load off it.

I seriously considered hiring one assistant four times over the past few years. I tried a couple of things. I even built a program for it, and it failed, because it never covered the parts I actually needed covered.

The blocker was context. To make a person useful I would have to build a second system whose only job was feeding them mine, and the hard part is not the private bits, it is that there is too much of it and it is too detailed. Then if that person leaves, I do it again, from scratch, for the next one. The information I hold is already the bottleneck, and pouring it into one human head makes it worse rather than better, because now it is a risk as well.

It needed to be sticky. Context that accumulates, stays, and does not walk out of the door.

So the Second Brain was born

Evernote a long time ago. Notion for years. My own note systems throughout.

They were good at holding thoughts that were already formed. They did nothing for the noise in between, which is exactly where the dropped tabs live. I connected the Notion MCP and did some of it with AI, and it was still too complex, full of small holes I never once used. I stopped using Notion about six months ago, completely, and started building this.

So instead of making it more complicated, I simplified. For a while that meant going completely headless: the AI layer and nothing else, no interface at all. Plenty of people build it exactly like that and stop there. The layer I had already started bolting onto Notion came with me, and it was fantastic. It is still the part that changed what was possible.

What I was missing was the foundation. The notes themselves. Somewhere I could open and read and get lost in, which Notion had given me and the headless version did not. I wanted both.

Obsidian is what brought it back, and I recommend it. But the reader is not the point, the markdown files are. Other people do this with git, or with a plain folder and whatever editor they already have open, and none of that is wrong. What matters is that the notes stay plain files on your own machine: readable in anything, private, and still yours if the tooling around them changes or disappears.

Eighty percent of the time this runs headless, with no interface at all, which is exactly how it should be. The other twenty percent I open it and browse.

Then the graph, and the links between the notes, which showed me what I had been getting wrong everywhere else. The structure I kept trying to impose with templates and databases was already there. It just had to be links.

What it has to do for me, and for you

Nine things, all of them places where I am the weakest link, and I would guess you are too. The promise is to you. The reasons are mine.

Reflect, and let you look back. I want to think, reflect, and see how I have moved, and I have a horrible memory. I started a travel blog mostly so I would be able to remember where I had been and what I was doing while I was there. So Imagine how bad my memory is…

Remember for you. Not your calendar. Your life. I forget conversations with friends. I forget details of what is happening to the people I love. It is not that I do not care, it is that my brain will not hold it. I forget to message people and I forget to ask how they are. I do not choose that. I just forget.

Catch what falls. The open tabs. The thing you said you would do, the thing you asked someone else for and never chased, the decision you are sitting on without noticing you are sitting on it.

Let you switch without carrying anything. Every project has its own place, so picking one up means opening it rather than rebuilding it in your head. I can move between them in a minute, and change what I am working on without the usual cost, precisely because I am not the one holding the detail any more. That is the many tabs problem, answered directly.

Hold your goals, and keep you honest about them. The financial ones and the rest. This is the most important one on the list and the easiest to quietly stop looking at, which is exactly why it cannot depend on you remembering to.

Hold your ideas. Every random thought about something you could do. Sometimes it is a tiny thing that would make one day better, sometimes it is an entire project. Some of mine evaporated within the hour, but that was never the main loss. The bigger one was the ideas that survived: written down, and then lying in a note I would never open again, because guess what? I Forget. Now there is a system that will bring them back once they make sense.

Hold your influences. What you want to read, what you want to watch, what you enjoyed and will want to find again, and the stray thoughts in between that are not ideas and are not tasks. This is more than a reading list, because those things are how the ideas connect back to who you are and to what you end up expressing.

Lock down what was said. At work mostly. Anything that was agreed, by anyone, that was then supposed to happen. So the difference here is what happens after. What you agreed to becomes a task on the day it matters, and what somebody else owes you becomes something that gets chased. It comes back to you, instead of waiting in a list you will never think to open.

Track things without you tracking them. I have tried habit trackers, and they fail the same way as everything else: they need me to tick a box every day. The version in here is deliberately small and it lives in the journal, with nothing extra to fill in. I mention I went to the gym, in passing, in whatever words I happened to use, and it gets written down. No tables to keep ticking, no streak to keep alive, no admin. As automatic as it can be.

And then the part none of the nine do on their own: they interconnect. An idea turns out to have come from something you read in March. A goal explains why you keep circling the same project. A conversation with a friend is the reason the idea exists at all. Kept separately, these are nine filing cabinets. What links them is the second brain itself: the processes, the skills and the commands that make it work.

And once they are linked, a second brain helps you find patterns. Not the ones you already know about: the ones you cannot see from inside your own week. What you keep circling without ever naming it. How a position of yours actually changed over two years, rather than how you remember it changing. Which loose ideas have quietly turned into one idea.

It cannot only be for people in tech

I want this available to anyone who recognises the problem, and the problem is not a technical one. Forgetting that the note exists has nothing to do with whether you can use a terminal.

So yes, there is technology behind it, and I deliberately did not overbuild it. A wizard walks you through the install and through the system itself, in about fifteen minutes, and after that you barely touch the machinery. You need a laptop. That is most of what you need.

The complexity is deliberate, but all of it sits where you never have to look: the thought processes, the schedules, the parts that run without being asked. The technology stays as simple as I could make it, and that cost me things that would have been genuinely fancy and interesting to build. Anyone who wants those can add them later. What I was not prepared to trade was the entry barrier, because somebody whose whole experience of AI is talking to ChatGPT should still get to the end of the setup.

Technology should not be the thing that decides who gets to have this.

What follows

Every choice in here is a consequence of the above rather than a preference:

• It has to work when you do not. No streaks, no upkeep, nothing that quietly breaks because you ignored it for a week.
• It brings things back to you. Every other tool stops at capture. This is the part that cannot, because capture was never where it failed.
• It costs nothing to keep running. The scheduled parts are plain scripts that cannot call a model. A system with a meter running is a system you ration, and a system you ration is one you stop trusting.
• The notes are yours, in plain markdown, outside the tool. If this disappears tomorrow you still have everything.
• Context accumulates and never has to be re-explained. That was the one thing a person could not do, however good they were.

None of this is finished, and it is not meant to be. It will keep improving with your feedback and with whatever I learn next.

A thought I have not acted on

I keep coming back to the idea of running cohorts: small groups, learning to use AI in a way that actually changes how their week goes, with this as part of it. Not a course about prompts. The part nobody teaches, which is what to hand to a machine and what to keep.

It is genuinely just a thought at this point, and it depends entirely on the time I have left over. I am writing it down here because that is what this whole system is for: an idea I would otherwise forget I had.