Note-taking systems, Obsidian-style ones especially, are the most useless thing in the world. Not even useless. Actively distracting from real work and real learning. A session of chatting with Claude, learning something while coding and iterating, plus Apple Notes, gets me 100x more than any Obsidian-style note-taking session.

Journaling is also broken, especially the methods that push you into over-planning tasks and things to do. To be completely fair, I've found this method useful only for one thing: tracking how much time I was spending on tasks during the day vs. how much I was predicting to spend on them. Basically a useful reality check on timing.

But other than this, I believe the paradigm of planning tasks for the future is broken. What works way better for me is what I call on-the-spot intention. This is somewhat inspired by the concept of "implementation intentions" from Atomic Habits by James Clear. The concept is basic but powerful: make something concrete instead of vague by stating it using the formula I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION]. You can do it on paper, out loud, or both. The point is that instead of relying on motivation-memory you start implementing intentions inside your real-world context. Example: instead of saying "I need to start going to the gym and train properly," you say or write: "I will pick up the gym bag and go to the gym on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 6 PM right after work."

This seems almost too simple to be effective, but it is. It forces you to stop treating intentions as vague future plans, the kind you know you want or need to do but have no real clue how to start. Instead, it makes you contextualize them, give them a place in your real-world routine. This is often not sufficient on its own, but it's a good starting point.

My version is even simpler. Whenever I feel the urge to take a note about something I want to do, instead of putting it into a journal or a note app, I force myself to write down the smallest, most concrete, actionable steps that can start it. Steps I can do in that moment. Not in the future, not as a planned TODO, but right now, period. I give my mind no space to fantasize about the intention; I force it to take action on the spot. I found this to be life-changing, and unsurprisingly so given the infinite list of notes and ideas I had written down over the years compared to the ones I actually acted upon even once.

As humans, we're inclined to fantasize about the possible outcomes of a specific action we'd like to take. Motivation starts from there. When someone is overweight or underweight and decides he wants to start eating properly and going to the gym, he doesn't fantasize about starving and spitting blood and sweat under the dumbbells. He starts imagining the reward: the physique he could build, the social respect and acceptance he could finally gain.

This isn't just my hypothesis. It's roughly how the dopaminergic reward system actually works. To put it in simple non-medical terms: what we call motivation, the intrinsic drive to act, comes from a cue triggering a release of dopamine, the reward life-blood of humans.

Contrary to what many people think (and this is a widespread misconception), dopamine isn't really released only when you get the reward. It mostly spikes on the prediction of the reward, on the cue that signals the reward is coming. This is called reward prediction error: dopamine fires on the gap between what your brain expected and what it got, and once a cue reliably predicts a reward, the spike shifts from the reward itself to the cue. We don't get the spike after we get the thing; we get it when our brain registers that the thing is on its way.

Why do you think gambling is so addictive? Gamblers basically keep losing over and over, so why would they keep going if the THING is never achieved? The anticipation of a possible win every time the roulette or the slot machine spins is what pushes them to keep pressing the button. The moment before the outcome is the addictive one, not the outcome itself.

You might have seen this meme before:

This is funny because it's accurate to what gamblers actually feel. The idea of the reward possibly being just ONE bet away is what spikes the dopamine and keeps them playing, regardless of the outcome. It's also the same reason they keep playing even after a win. The bigger reward might be just a few spins away.

Historically, this mechanism is exactly what allowed us to survive and evolve as a species. Dopamine is what pushes humans to act, even on simple survival behaviors. Animal studies show that suppressing dopamine release causes subjects to stop acting even on fundamental survival behaviors like eating and drinking. The food is right there, they still "like" it when force-fed, but they have no motivational drive to go get it. Without dopamine, you're virtually unable to do the things needed to keep yourself alive.

How does this tie back? If what feels pleasurable and rewarding is not the accomplishment of the goal but the anticipation of achieving it, our brains learn that fantasizing about an outcome is more rewarding than actually doing the hard things needed to reach it. If we keep imagining the things we want to accomplish (projects, achievements) and we keep writing them down without acting on them, two things happen:

  1. By not acting immediately, we waste the dopamine spike. We're taking the drug without going to the party.
  2. As we keep writing things down but never actually doing them, our brain learns the pattern: to get the pleasure I don't actually need to do the thing; the important part is carefully planning it while fantasizing about the outcome.

You can't fight your biology. If you keep giving your brain pleasure without doing what you actually want to do, you're teaching it that the next dopamine spike can be obtained without effort or cognitive demand. It's just around the corner, at the next journaling or note-taking session.

This is why my "on-the-spot intention" technique works so well for me. I force myself to stop fantasizing about the outcome and get thrown back into the present moment, pushed to act quickly, now. The dopamine spike is much smaller. My brain learns there's not much to gain in the planning moment. The bigger hit comes from the action itself, not from imagining it. Every micro-step is a smaller, more contained dose, and by acting immediately, my brain learns that to get the next one, the action in between has to happen first.