New Year, New PKM, New (second) Brain
Full disclosure: I am an app developer. My hope is you’ll be blown away by this article, discover my app, and give it a shot. Whether you decide to try to my app or not, I think the information has value. If you don’t like my app, I highly recommend checking out the incredible Bear app as an alternative. It’s a huge inspiration and influence of mine.
Getting the perfect “fresh start” state of mind for the new year
I don’t know about you but by year’s end, mentally, I’m a mess. To get everything done for the holidays, I put off way too much stuff. And, 2026 came at me fast.
To get into the right mentality for the year ahead, to really hit the New Year with all the optimisim and ambition it deserves, I need a mental reset to clear away the mental cruft and baggage of the past year.
I don’t want to keep doing what I’ve been doing. Keep chugging along with the same half-busted system I’m only half using. I want to use the dawn of a New Year as a fresh start. A chance to level up. Integrate lessons learned from 2025 into 2026 to make it my best year ever.
But, it can be difficult to find that “motivated and inspired” mindset without clarity on where your life currently stands and where you want to go. Finding that clarity can be tricky.
In Zen Buddhism there is a concept called “Beginner’s Mind,” which is basically intentionally cultivating the mindset of someone that is experiencing something for the first time. You try to approach something as if it is completely fresh and new to you so you begin with a perfectly open, receptive, and clear mind.
Whether we’re meditating or cutting 2x4s, we develop mental cruft and autopilot modes that can impede us from viewing things — our meditation, our next cut, or our life itself — through a truly unbiased lens.
What’s really tricky is, since we view reality through the lens, it’s invisible to us. We aren’t even aware of how our lens distorts what we see. It’s extraordinarily challenging to actually get into that fresh, pristine mental state after you’ve already been familiarized with something.
One thing I’ve noticed, as I jump from productivity app to productivity app, is what I call “the clean slate” phase. It happens after you decide to invest in a completely new productivity solution and rebuild your personal productivity solution from scratch.
Whether you’re migrating from Apple Notes to Obsidian or Google Keep to Bear and back again, this isn’t just a sloppy export > import where you bring forward your existing mess. This is committing to rebuilding your PKM system up from its foundations.
When you do that, you’ve committed to re-thinking your life from the ground up. The new tool that’s going to skyrocket your productivity is just the catalyst, the reason, the canvas, but now you’re doing something amazing: you’re thinking about your life in a way you probably don’t do very often.
New PKM, new you
When you adopt a new PKM or project management solution or todo list tool, you’re forced to think about your life from a higher level with really insightfuly questions like:
- Do I want to keep my work and personal life separate?
- Should my side projects be considered work or personal or something else?
- How should I group my life into buckets? What would those buckets be?
- How should I order my projects? By priority? Due date?
- What are my goals and how will I keep them top of mind?
- And so on.
Your mind will just naturally flow through a fascinating series of self-inquiry questions that help you organize your life into a structure that makes sense to you. Without even conciously trying, you’ll find that you get honest about abandoned projects that should get archived, mental clutter gets cleared, your life comes into focus, and you feel like you’re ready to do anything.
You’ve finally done it. You’ve designed the ultimate productivity system. The one. It was you. And now you’re all set to be the world’s most productive person.
And the hard part begins
Unfortunately, you’ve burned through the “new tool” dopamine and your next hit means actually getting something done. No problem, you’ve still got all the motivation and momentum from using the ultimate productivity system that you created.
But, how do you keep your new system organized over time? How do you keep your Inbox from filling up? How do you keep yourself using the system you’ve designed?
There is all sorts of friction involved with actually utilizing and maintaining a system. Trust me, I’ve tried everything from GTD, to PARA, to Zettlekasten. I’ve created and abandoned dozens of custom systems that borrow from hither and yonder creating eccletic soups of productivity ideas that would make Allen and Forte horrified.
In order for a personal productivity system to work it needs:
1. Fresh input
A productivity system needs to be kept in sync with your life which means a constant stream of new data. As meetings are held, projects evolve, as things inevitably, frequently change, your productivity solution needs to be updated or it becomes out of sync with your life.
When it becomes too far out of sync, friction develops, and the system is in danger of becoming more of a hindance than a help. And this is the end of the lifecycle for far too many briliant, inspired, and hope-filled PKMs.
To prevent productivity system collapse you need…
2. Ongoing maintainance
Like a garden, your PKM or todo tool of choice needs watering (relevant data) and tending (updates as needed). It needs TLC. Nurturing. Time.
To be useful, it needs to know what the fuck is going on in your life.
And, there’s no magic. Not yet. I’m working on it, but, for now, I don’t know of a PKM or project/task tool that has nailed self-organization. I’ve got some interesting ideas I’m testing, but nothing even ready for beta at this point. There may come a time when that happens automatically, but for now we’re forced to do a lot of this manually. However, the future is very, very bright and recent advances in AI have made this much easier than it has been in the past and promise to make this even easier as this tech undoubtedly marches forward at breakneck pace.
There’s actually a lot of interesting discussion on reddit around the idea of the chore of maintainance itself actually being a very useful, even a necessary, part of an effective productivity system. I don’t disagree, I have opinions, and I think I know how to implement AI assistance in a way that it gives you all the benefits of “manual maintainance” while also preventing the system from collapsing on itself. But, that’s in the near future.
This idea of keeping your system up to date is why, right now, I’m so focused on “Quick Capture” aka “Easy Input” aka “Get things out of your head and saved somewhere so you can relax.”
It’s why two of the first major features I developed for Ally are a web clipper, so you can save information easily and reference it later, and a voice transcriber that easily accessible from the notch on macOS, from the Action button on iOS, from keyboard shortcut, etc. Some people prefer to type and that’s why having a snappy Markdown editor was table stakes and included as part of the MVP.
The idea is that no matter where you are or what you’re doing, it’s easy to get information out of your head and into Ally.
Which is also why I think it’s critical that a productivity tool…
3. Get the fuck out of your way
It should be flexible enough that you can make your own perfect eclectic productivity soup and it should also give you the freedom to set up a textbook GTD system, if that is what you choose. It should be aethetically pleasing and minimalistic so that you can focus on your work.
After that, it should disappear. It should just be you and the page. The words. It should force you into productivity by limiting your options to fiddle with it.
My time as a product marketer have taught me about the importance of minimalism for productivity. It’s especially helpful for anyone with ADHD, but this applies to anyone and everyone.
This means there should be no garrish UI elements to distract your eye. UI elements are by nature made easy to find. Which means they’re made to be visually prominent. Which means they’re made to draw your eye. Chances are the toolbar of buttons is a means to an end, not your actual work, and it’d be nice if it just wasn’t there when you didn’t need it.
Ideally, it should have full-screen mode so you can really zero in your attention when needed.
It should be customizable enough that it feels comfortable to you.
Once everything is exactly the way you want it, it should just be you, your notes, your todo list, and a cursor. It should never get in your way and ideally it should disappear into the background so it’s just you and whatever you’re working on at that moment.
If this sounds good to you…
Introducing your Ally for this year…
If a snappy Markdown editor with an embedded local LLM and minimalistic UI sound like the perfect foundation for your 2026 second brain please give it a shot!
In the process of “starting over” with a new PKM you’ll inevitably take yourself through a thorough life review, analysis, and organization process that clears away all the dust giving you clarity and motivation as you head into 2026!