At some point, I realized I was spending more time maintaining my productivity system than doing actual work. Every task lived in Todoist. Every idea, thought, or half-baked insight went into Obsidian. Every recurring action relied on reminders or thin automation layers duct-taped onto the operating system. Each tool worked fine on its own. Together, they formed a workflow that felt fragmented, noisy, and oddly brittle, like a Rube Goldberg machine powered by mild anxiety.
So I did something modern productivity culture strongly discourages. I deleted all three and decided to see what would happen if I let Linux handle those jobs instead. No new apps. No clever replacements. Just the operating system, a few conventions, and a willingness to sit with the discomfort long enough to see whether it shut up.
Productivity apps solved problems I no longer had
How tool accumulation quietly increased friction
Todoist was the first tool I questioned, as it had quietly turned into a second inbox, filled with everything from genuinely important work to vague reminders about things I might someday want to think about. Every new task triggered a small decision spiral. Does this need a due date, project, label, or priority? None of that friction was dramatic, but it was very constant.
Obsidian introduced a different kind of drag. I loved the idea of a second brain. I loved backlinks, graphs, and tidy folder structures. What I did not love was the constant question of whether something belonged in Obsidian, Todoist, or elsewhere. Notes drifted away from the work they were meant to support, and maintaining the system became a job with suspiciously similar requirements to the actual job.
The automation layer was the quietest offender. I was using reminders and lightweight tools to paper over repetitive tasks instead of fixing them properly. Backups that depended on remembering to run them. Cleanup tasks were triggered by guilt rather than logic. Project setup steps that lived entirely in my head, which is a famously unreliable place to store procedures.
None of these tools were bad. The problem was that I had become the glue holding them together, constantly translating between systems that had no idea the others existed.
I replaced each app with something Linux already provides
Task management, notes, and automation without extra software
Replacing Todoist felt risky, which turned out to be a useful signal. I stopped tracking abstract tasks and let the file system become the source of truth. Active work now lives in clearly named project directories. Inside each one is a simple TODO.md file written in plain text. If a task matters, it exists next to the files it relates to. If it does not, it does not get tracked.
That single decision removed an entire category of overhead. No projects to curate, no priorities to micromanage, and no graveyard of tasks I kept around just to feel responsible. The work itself became the task list.
Obsidian was replaced with plain Markdown files stored directly inside project folders. Notes stopped being a parallel universe and became part of the work. Research lives next to drafts, and my meeting notes live next to deliverables. Everything is searchable with standard Linux tools like grep or ripgrep, readable in any editor, and immune to licensing changes or database corruption.
Letting go of Obsidian also meant letting go of the idea that knowledge needs constant reorganization to stay useful. In practice, proximity beats structure. Notes are more valuable when they live next to the thing they exist for.
Automation was where Linux really showed its teeth. I replaced reminders and half-measures with shell scripts, triggered by cron or systemd timers, depending on how much control and logging I wanted. Backups now run via rsync on a schedule. Cleanup scripts remove stale files automatically. Project setup scripts create folders and boilerplate without asking for attention. Nothing clever, nothing hidden, and everything in plain text, doing exactly what it says it will do.
What actually changed once the apps were gone
Fewer decisions, faster recovery, less mental overhead
The first thing I noticed was the quiet. Todoist stopped nagging me about tasks that only made sense in theory. Obsidian stopped tempting me to reorganize notes instead of finishing work. Automation stopped relying on memory or motivation.
Context switching dropped hard because work stopped scattering itself across tools. When I returned to a project after an interruption, everything was there: files, notes, and context. No mental scavenger hunt required.
Recovery became faster, too. A folder tells the truth about the state of work in a way no task manager ever does. You can see what exists, what is unfinished, and what was touched last without consulting an abstract list.
I also stopped worrying about sync issues, corrupted databases, or subscription tiers quietly pulling features out from under me. Plain text files and shell scripts do not get ambitious behind your back. They either work or they fail loudly, which is exactly what you want from tools you depend on daily. Enjoying a local approach to work made a huge difference. Nothing important vanished. What vanished was the friction I had mistaken for structure.
I built a personal knowledge base without using Notion or Obsidian
It’s one of the most flexible ways to build a personal knowledge base.
Why this only worked because it was Linux
A system designed to replace tools instead of accumulating them
This experiment works because Linux treats files, text, and automation as first-class citizens, not premium features. The system expects you to combine small tools instead of installing bigger ones. It assumes you might want to see how things work instead of trusting a cheerful abstraction.
A desktop environment like Cinnamon reinforces this by staying out of the way. It launches applications; it manages windows predictably, and it does not insist on starring in your productivity narrative. That boring reliability is what allows simple systems to stay sufficient instead of demanding compensating layers.
Trying this approach on a platform that hides the file system, discourages scripting, or treats automation as an advanced hobby would be much harder. Linux makes subtraction feel sensible instead of reckless.
What this experiment changed about how I work
The biggest shift was psychological. I stopped chasing the perfect setup and started removing friction. Instead of asking whether a tool was powerful enough, I asked whether it was necessary at all.
I have not reinstalled Todoist or Obsidian. Not out of ideology, but because I genuinely do not miss them. Linux already had what I needed underneath the layers I had piled on top.
Replacing three productivity apps did not make me superhuman. It made my work calmer, more coherent, and easier to resume. That turned out to be a far better upgrade than any new app I had tried in years.
