Apple Notes

Apple Notes is where most things start. It's not a powerful tool — no backlinks, no graph view, no plugins — but the friction is low enough that I actually use it. A thought, a link, a half-formed idea: it takes two seconds to capture and I know it'll be there across all my devices within moments.

I've tried more structured note-taking systems over the years and kept returning here. The simplicity is the feature. For things that need more depth or need to be shared, I move them somewhere else. Notes handles the everything-else.