The Collector’s Fallacy: Why notetaking goes nowhere
I built the perfect PKM system—then realised it was the problem
I have 3,871 notes, 30,555 files in my inbox to be processed.
I was digging through my archives and realised I’ve hoarded thousands of files.
We live in an era of unlimited information—there are books, courses, newsletters, and YouTube deep dives. Everyone’s building a second brain. But how many of us are actually using it?
I’ve always had a collector’s instinct. That's why I was so drawn to building a PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) system. I spent hours reading articles and watching videos to capture “insights” in my notes.
Yet in the end, I made the same mistake that most people make. I consume and collect much, much more than I use.
Information Nausea
Accessing information is easier than ever—reading, watching, listening. And at first, it feels good, like you’re getting smarter by just consuming.
But one day, you start to feel nauseous.
The stream of information doesn’t stop. It pours into your brain and fills it to the brim. You’re bloated and bottlenecked.
Even if you pour it into your PKM system, you’ll find it only gets buried. Lost in oblivion as digital debris.
Your notes sit there, safe and secure, but they don’t go anywhere. Even if you summarise and synthesise them, when it comes time to explain it to someone else, what comes out is only half-digested bits that you can regurgitate.
You feel it rising up, but you tell yourself that you must keep going. More knowledge can’t hurt, right? It’s so easy to acquire anyway and it’ll be useful someday. Maybe there’s still that one hidden secret out there—the thing that finally makes the difference to your project.
So you say: Serve me up another top 5 tips.
The Collector's fallacy
When you collect information, there's a tingle in your brain that you've done some good. Like squirrelling nuts away for the winter. You feel like you've preserved something, so it’ll be ready for you when you finally start that project. Without thinking, you unconsciously believe saving information means you’ve learned it. That once it’s stored, it’s yours.
There’s truth to this. A good PKM system can help you aggregate sparse notes, connect ideas, spot patterns, and surface past insights when you need them.
But most of the time? Collecting information just feels useful. More useful than it actually is. It gives you the illusion of understanding and instead, you end up trading clarity for the comfort of “doing something productive”. Slowly, but surely your digital world becomes cluttered with notes you never revisit.
Most of it just sits there—untouched.
And if you’re anything like me, it weighs on you.
So how did we end up here? There are three traps that lead us in:
1. Potentiality trap
You love the potential of some idea or insight, how useful it could be someday—but potential only becomes a burden when it piles up unused.
Possession becomes a proxy for progress.
You might think more information means more inputs to form stronger opinions or better decisions, right? Well… not really. More notes often just mean more noise to sort through.
Collecting “potential ideas” ends up being a form of false productivity. The idea that if you just collect enough inputs, you’ll finally be ready to decide, to act. It rarely works that way.
If you’ve found something that works—use it, try it, stick with it and refine it. You don’t need another answer to the same problem every week.
Instead, filter what you consume with the lens of practicality. What am I actually using right now? It helps you focus and avoid information bias.
…But what if everything feels useful?
2. Curiosity Trap
I fall into this one all the time.
You tell yourself you’re just being curious. “Everything is interesting. I don’t want to miss anything.” But that’s how information FOMO sneaks in.
Curiosity is powerful—it pulls you into new ideas and keeps learning exciting. But it also tricks you into thinking everything might be useful.
The problem is, the stream of information never stops. Every day brings a new trend, a new framework, a new hot take. An endless succession of events and insights collapsed down to a single timeline. It’s tempting to capture everything, just in case you decide to explore that topic in the future, but it’s likely you won’t.
Instead, focus on higher-signal content. Choose books over articles with “5 ideas you must know”. Trending content is reactive and disposable. Books, by contrast, demand more care—they’re better written, better researched, so they naturally offer enduring ideas that can live permanently in your knowledge. They give you principles and frameworks that help you actually make sense of things.
Yes, it takes more focused attention—but remember: the goal isn’t hours spent collecting ideas. It’s making something with them. In the end, garbage in, garbage out.
Finally, it’s best to narrow down the scope of your curiosity. What are the big questions you’re exploring right now? Choose depth over breadth. Let your current questions shape what you seek—and filter out the rest.
3. Shelfware Trap
Building a PKM system feels productive. You spend hours designing a system to organise your notes, capture ideas, cross-link insights. It looks impressive. It feels like progress. But really? It can be high-effort procrastination.
The more complex your system, the more effort it takes to maintain. Eventually, your time goes into tweaking and tinkering instead of thinking. Managing instead of making.
I learned this the hard way. In the end, I tore it all down and started again. Now, it’s messy and full of unfinished notes, but I move faster than ever and produce more.
Because in the end, the only system that matters is the one that helps you make.
Create more than you consume
Learning feels safe. Doing feels risky. But here’s the simplest rule of thumb: create more than you consume.
Most people have a creation output of zero, and that’s totally fine.
But you have to start to move from collector to creator in order to avoid the collector’s fallacy. Don’t measure progress by how much you’ve consumed or saved—measure it by what you’ve made. Creation, action, synthesis. That’s what counts.
When you start creating, even from zero, you realise just how much of what you collected wasn’t that useful after all. It wasn’t framed around the right question. It didn’t serve your direction. Creation sharpens your filter. You collect better because you know what you need.
Here are a few ways to shift the balance:
Start by making anything: if you read a note, write down your thoughts. Record a short voice memo. Even five minutes of reflection counts as meaningful creation.
Skip the saving: with smaller questions, save fewer notes and synthesise on the go. Do I really need to save 5 articles about which shoes to buy and highlight them? Or could I just drop thoughts into single note called Shoe research and summarise the decision at the end.
Collect to curate: curation is a great first step—it requires taste, thinking, and opinion without all the legwork. Others can benefit from it too. An easy example is shipping a weekly newsletter, “Here’s what I found this week,” with a few personal reflections on why you resonated with each piece.
Share thoughts: a short article, a tweet, a conversation with a friend. Sharing and publishing ideas into the ether helps you clarify ideas and see if they’re worth investigating.
Do a Project: this is where commitment happens. That’s when your notes become an essay, a podcast, or a business idea. Your knowledge now has purpose. A dedicated project helps you see the world through a focused lens.
Since I started this shift, I’ve deleted more than half of my old files—without hesitation. I spend many more hours each day creating things. When I start a new project, I do a quick search in my archive. If a note isn’t useful, I delete it. Right then and there. And 99% of the time? I don’t miss it.
Because once you start creating, you finally see what matters.