[zuno]

I agree with chapium, and my thanks to him for penning down his observations into words. I would add that there comes a point when these systems and their maintenance overwhelm my limited abilities (I know because I have tried org-mode, and OneNote). I often keep defaulting to pen/paper, but carrying around sheafs (now boxes) of papers is no fun.

And I agree with pc86's thoughts on 'decent organization system' and "always open". I am working on getting better at it with pen/paper.

[stnmtn]

I can empathize with you and the OP. The only one I've got to stick is literally just a text file that I always have open in VIM. I have a keybinding to open up the terminal window so it's always right there.

I have a couple of macros set up to put in the current date, and a different color for bullet points that are "done" or not completed yet

This is the only one that works for me, and I've tried Org-mode, evernote, onenote, joplin, notion, etc. It's a combination of no-friction to open (I literally just press alt+~) and opinionless. If I want to paste something in there, I don't have to fiddle with a UI to get it how I want, because the formatting doesn't matter at all.