The best note-taking app is a $10 sprinkler

Think about the last time you thought deeply. Not a clever thought — a deep one. The kind you had to stay with for a while.

Now think about the last time you did that consistently. Day after day, week after week.

What were you using?

Hold onto that. I want to tell you about my neighbor’s sprinkler.

It’s a $10 plastic thing. Spins in circles, sprays a small patch, tips over if you look at it wrong. I bought a $30 Husky oscillating sprinkler. Heavy duty, wide arc, built like the Hulk.

His grass is greener.

Not a little greener. Greener in a way I notice from my own driveway, which is a humbling place to notice something.

The reason isn’t the sprinkler. It’s that he drags his out every evening. He has to move it three or four times to cover the yard, because that’s what a $10 sprinkler makes you do.

The grass is greener where you water it. That’s the whole thing.

The best yards in my neighborhood aren’t self-sustaining. They’re constantly tended. Watered. Trimmed. Adjusted. Not because something is wrong… but because that’s what it takes to keep something alive. Growth doesn’t graduate. —

Growth doesn’t graduate. His yard is never finished. It doesn’t get to be finished. He didn’t solve it with a better sprinkler — he just never stopped going outside.

Here’s where I’d normally tell you the tool doesn’t matter.

But that isn’t quite true. The tool does matter. It just matters for exactly one reason: whether you’ll actually pick it up.

A $10 sprinkler that gets used beats a $30 sprinkler in the garage every single summer. Notion isn’t a bad tool — it’s a remarkable one. But if the honest accounting is that you spend more evenings watching videos about the newest Notion features than you spend thinking inside of it, it isn’t watering anything. The features were never the problem. The distance between you and the water is the problem.

That’s most of the reason I built Ember.

I took out everything I didn’t use. What’s left is maybe 20% of what a serious productivity app offers, and that 20% is the part I return to daily without fail. No relational databases. No tag taxonomy I’d have to maintain like a second job. Ember can’t compete with Notion. It isn’t trying to. People use Notion to think and people use Ember to think — the difference is that one of them makes me want to open it on a Tuesday morning when I’m tired.

The honest response to all this, for someone like me, isn’t to write a manifesto. It is to build something small, and then to use it, and then to invite a few other people to use it, and to see what happens. Not a revolution. A tree. — Sascha

A tree. Not a platform, not a category, not a movement. Something small enough to tend and slow enough to notice.

So — back to the question.

The last time you thought deeply and consistently, what were you using?

If the answer is a tool you abandoned for something more capable, go back to it. If the answer is a paper notebook and a pen you liked the feel of, go buy that pen again. If you don’t have an answer yet, pick the simplest thing within arm’s reach and use it badly for two weeks.

Don’t upgrade the sprinkler.

Go outside and water something.

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