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Blew $60 on a fancy journaling app and it was the worst purchase I made all year

I saw everyone raving about this note taking app that promised to organize all my scattered thoughts into one perfect system. It looked beautiful in the videos, all clean lines and smooth syncing between devices. Dropped $60 on the yearly subscription without even thinking twice. Three weeks in and I realized I was spending more time moving stuff around in the app than actually writing anything. The templates were too rigid, the tags never worked right, and I kept losing drafts because the autosave glitched out. Ended up going back to a plain text file on my laptop that I've had since 2018. Has anyone else thrown money at one of these fancy systems only to crawl back to something simpler?
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3 Comments
sage_moore37
Stop overthinking it and just use a basic notes app. Simple always wins.
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alicemurphy
Exactly, I've been through the whole trying-to-be-fancy with apps phase and it just creates more problems than it solves. A plain text file or basic notes app gets the job done without any of the frustration. You end up actually writing stuff down instead of fighting with features you don't need.
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martin.riley
martin.riley19d agoTop Commenter
My Cortana backup from 2020 cost me $30 and it still syncs across my Windows machines without a single hiccup... sometimes paying for something that actually works is worth the money. You probably just picked the wrong app. There are good ones out there that don't fight you every step of the way, you just need to find the one that matches how you naturally work. I spent two years jumping between free apps before I finally bought something decent and it cut my organization time in half. The problem wasn't paying for a system, it was buying one that tried to fit you into its box instead of the other way around.
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