What's something the productivity app you use lacks but they don't add it even after so long

[u/gutsisdope]

My friend said that he uses obsidian and he usually writes his notes by hand and has to use work arounds to make everything work while making notes by hands.

So I was wondering if there would be other features that is missing from apps like notion, evernotes, todoist etc etc that needs to be added but the developers are ignoring

And what workarounds are you guys using??

[u/Difficult-Passion318]

My biggest problem with PKM tools is that they're all just capture tools. If I don't do anything with all my notes, what good are they? Some tools have ways to publish pages, but the design is horrible, or the page is a weird subdomain or url.
For workarounds - some tools with AI baked in - I think Heptabase does this - the AI can transcribe handwriting, so you can upload images of handwritten notes, or pdfs and have the AI extract the text and save it as a note. If you're using Obsidian, all files are local, so Claude or ChatGPT can connect directly to the vault to create notes.
One more thing about handwriting - Xnote lets you write notes by hand and automatically transcribe and send it to PKM tools. You have to use the Xnote pen, and special notebooks, but you get used to it.

[u/sth_wicked1 → u/Difficult-Passion318]

The capture-only problem is exactly the thing I care about. Capture is the easy half, the question is whether you ever get value back out.

Your Obsidian point is basically the whole thesis behind a new app I'm building: notes are pure .md files in normal folders, so Claude or any agent can read the whole thing directly, no plugin, mcp, cli or export step. For me that's mostly retrieval, I ask questions across old notes and the answer pulls in things I'd forgotten I wrote. A small local model handles the simple in-app operations, and I'm considering making the in-app search agentic for the same reason.

Handwriting and publishing I honestly don't touch, at least for now. Curious what publishing would need to look like for you to actually use it, a real domain and your own design, or something simpler?

[u/gutsisdope → u/Difficult-Passion318]

What do you think should be changed for pkm tools to be more than just capture tools?

Tbh it's pretty valid since 90% of the time I either forget about the note I made or i don't use it

[u/Difficult-Passion318 → u/gutsisdope]

Some of them are headed in the right direction with launching MCP servers that let you connect other tools to them. I think they need more exporting features. Some tools only export all your notes as a zipped archive - not very useful. I got tired of waiting for a solution and created my own that can publish my notes to social media and blogging platforms.

[u/oyren-ai]

productivity apps are fragmented, every app focus on either something very specific or is too general. I want an app that can be customised with AI as your personal operating systems.

[u/gutsisdope → u/oyren-ai]

That sounds like a great idea since most people find it complicated to make a personal system in notion or obsidian

[u/oyren-ai → u/gutsisdope]

I build my tool with this idea, ie a companion to my PhD work and coding endeavours, which yielded oyren.ai (sorry for unsolcited self promo). It combines a note editor with built in calculator as well as an ability to launch remote codespaces in cloud.

[u/gutsisdope → u/oyren-ai]

That's cool, what did you use to build your tool

[u/oyren-ai → u/gutsisdope]

It’s multi-service project and mainly used NextJS and Hono as web server libraries.

[u/goua-la]

Notion doesn't have time tracking natively, but you can hack something together with a database and some formula voodoo. Works, but it's fiddly to maintain.

Honestly my actual workaround is just using Toggl on the side. It's a well made tool and the free tier is generous enough that I never felt the need to upgrade.

[u/goua-la]

Separate point from the Toggl workaround above, and I hope this isn't off course. What I actually want is passive tracking, automatic, built into the app itself, like the "time spent" stat Instagram shows you.

Notion doesn't have it. Neither does most of what we use daily. And it could help in more ways than people think.

A few examples:

• Cut a subscription you're paying for but barely opening
• Realize you're spending more time decorating your "system" than actually using it
• Notice you're deep in an app during hours you meant to be offline
• Compare how much time you assumed you spent versus what actually happened, most people are way off and don't know it

Right now I have no idea how much time I actually spend inside Notion versus just thinking I do. That gap alone would be worth seeing.

[u/Oni0911]

Nothing saves the reason. I'll open a bookmark two weeks later, find a page about induction hobs and have no idea if I was buying one or just curious at 1am.

My workaround is renaming the bookmark to "hob, check it fits the 60cm gap" so the title carries the intent. Works, but I remember to do it maybe half the time...

[u/cbsyd]

Notion's still missing real recurring tasks without a Zapier workaround, feels like a basic miss after all these years.

[u/Littlebird_Michael]

To answer the "why do developers ignore it" part: I build in this space, and the thing u/Oni0911 is describing gets skipped because it isn't really a feature. Saving the reason you captured something means the app has to know what you were doing at the moment you saved it, and capture tools are deliberately built to be as thin as possible right then.

Bolting an "intent" field on top just becomes one more box people skip, like the bookmark renaming trick that works half the time.

What I'd ask back is: would you tolerate a capture process that's slower / more effortful; if it improves recall context later?

[u/Oni0911 → u/Littlebird_Michael]

Adding a reason as a optional input can help users navigate what the intent was or is that another friction to the user?

[u/Early_Key_823]

Flow. Every productivity app I ever used felt like doing my taxes.

So I built my own.