I’ve spent the better part of a decade optimizing my productivity systems. I’ve tested Notion databases with so many different views to count and customized Obsidian for a client until it looked like a spaceship control panel. And somewhere in all that optimization, I realized I’d built myself a prison made of features. The revelation came on a Tuesday afternoon when I spent twenty minutes trying to remember which custom property in Notion I’d used to track project urgency. Was it “Priority” or “Importance”? Did I use numbers or emojis?