Organized thinking and my search for the right tools

I just can't seem to find the right method. I've tried physical notecards, as per Ryan Holiday and Billy Oppenheimer. I found that to be too cumbersome and frustrating, and also had problems with the messiness of it.

I tried the digital version of it through Zettelkasten. Can't fully say why it didn't stick, but somehow basic Apple Notes was easier and more flexible to maintain for me. I've also tried Evernote, Notion and Obsidian, but they're all too complicated and bulky for what I want.

Mymind is interesting, and sort of works better than the other digital tools I've tried. The visual part is an important aspect that many of the other tools don't have good solutions for. It does however go quite far on the visual side, and doesn't feel great when it comes to slightly longer form note-taking.

Other options I've considered is to build out my home page with more sections dedicated to the needs I have (section for quotes, section for short notes-to-self, health, inspiration etc), but it does feel like a bit too large of a task at the moment.

I have fairly heavily used the native Apple Notes the last year. I've always used it, but the last year I've organized and used it a bit more structured. It's really not too bad, and thats why that still is my way of taking most notes.

Maybe all of this searching is in vain, and simply using Apple Notes is the best solution after all? The problem is just that I really prefer having physical files over the "locked in" apple notes in their cloud kind of a thing.

Which takes me back to using my own web page for this, because Kirby structures this stuff exactly how I want it. A folder per entry/thought/post, with a txt file containing the text content, plus all potential assets of relevance to it. Everything neatly collected in a named folder.

They say "write to think", and I think that through writing this post, I've learned that I probably should try out a MVP note-taking system straight on my own homepage using Kirby. 🤔

Note: I forgot to mention that I also tried a commonplace book system too. That definitely worked better than notecards, but I fell back on the fact that I don't really feel it works for me to purely have written words on a paper to compile my thoughts. Too often I want to include graphics.