So, I decided I really needed to get my stuff together this year, 2024. Just needed a way to, you know, keep track of things. Ideas, notes, links I forget, the usual mess. I started calling this whole effort ‘the keeper 2024’.
First, I did what everyone does. Tried all those fancy apps. You know the ones. Sleek interfaces, promising the world. Cloud sync, tags, backlinks, AI summaries… the whole nine yards. Spent weeks migrating notes, fiddling with settings. Felt productive, but wasn’t really getting anything done. It was just more stuff to manage.
I got fed up. Decided I’d just make my own simple thing. Like, really simple. Maybe just text files? Or a super basic spreadsheet? Didn’t need fancy features, just needed a place to dump thoughts and find them later. Started mapping out what exactly I needed to ‘keep’. Seemed easy enough.
But even simple text files started getting messy. Finding stuff was okay at first, but then it became a chore. Just scrolling through folders, trying to remember file names. It started feeling fragile. And it reminded me of something…
Why it ended up so basic
It reminded me of this job I had a few years back. Big company, lots of talk about ‘synergy’ and ‘digital transformation’. They bought this super expensive, all-singing, all-dancing knowledge management system. Cost a fortune. Consultants came in, gave us weeks of training. It had flowcharts, databases, integrated chat, everything.
Guess what? Nobody really used it.
It was too damn complicated. Logging in was a pain. Finding anything required knowing exactly where to click through ten submenus. People just kept using shared drives, email, even sticky notes. We spent more time in meetings about the system than actually using it to share knowledge. Management kept pushing it, acting like we were the problem for not ‘adopting’ it properly.
They had metrics and dashboards showing how much ‘engagement’ the system got, but it was all fluff. People clicking around trying to figure it out, or forced updates counted as ‘activity’. The real work, the actual knowledge sharing? Happened the old way, under the radar.
Then came the ‘restructuring’. Funny how that happens. All that money spent on the miracle system, and suddenly they needed to cut costs. My team got hit hard. I was out. They said it was about efficiency, but looking back, I think they just realized the expensive toy didn’t fix their messy processes, and they needed scapegoats.
So why am I telling you this?
Because that whole mess taught me something. Fancy tools don’t fix broken workflows or bad habits. Sometimes, the simplest thing that works is the best thing.
So, for ‘the keeper 2024’, I went back to basics. Like, really basic. A clear folder structure. Plain text files. A simple naming convention. That’s it. No cloud dependency, no complex software, nothing that needs managing itself.
It’s not flashy. It won’t win any design awards. But I actually use it. Every day. It forces me to be deliberate about what I save and how I organize it. The habit is the important part, not the software. That old job disaster? Best free lesson I ever got. Simple, reliable, and mine. That’s ‘the keeper 2024’.
