I once spent an entire summer building the perfect productivity system. It had a Notion database, a Things integration, three Zapier flows, a Roam graph, and a daily email digest that summarised what the system thought I should do that day. The system was elegant. It worked exactly as designed. It also produced the least productive summer of my adult life.
The productivity-stack industrial complex is built on a quiet lie: that the friction of organising your work is what stops you from doing it. The truth is closer to the opposite. The friction of organising your work IS the work, in the same way that the friction of sharpening a knife is part of cooking. Removing it does not make the cooking faster. It makes the knife dull.
What changed for me was the thing every productivity blog tells you not to do: I went back to a paper notebook. Not a fancy one. A cheap A5 with a hardcover. One page per day. The next day starts on a fresh page, and yesterday is gone whether I finished it or not.