Structure killed every note system I ever tried

I have ADHD. I didn’t know that until my late 30s, but looking back it explains a lot.

The thing that’s hardest for me isn’t paying attention. It’s that the moment I have to stop and make a decision about something that isn’t the actual work, I start losing the thread. Filing a note in the right folder. Picking a tag. Deciding if this goes in Projects or Areas or Resources. That moment of overhead is where every system I’ve ever tried has broken down on me.

I’ve tried a lot of systems. Evernote, Notion, Obsidian, Logseq, Roam, Mem.ai, TiddlyWiki, Joplin, Standard Notes, Simplenote, Capacities, Notesnook, Twos, and others I’m probably forgetting. The ones that lasted longest were always the lowest friction ones. Open the app and just write, no decisions required. Logseq stuck the longest because of the daily journal. Open it, today’s date is already there, start typing. That worked for me.

But even Logseq had a problem: too many options to tinker with. I’d end up spending an afternoon building out a plugin configuration instead of actually using the thing. That’s the other side of having this kind of brain. Give me something to customize and I will absolutely disappear into it.

At some point I was deep in a project and I had nowhere to put things. Research I was collecting. Notes on what I’d built and what I still needed to build. Tasks I couldn’t keep in my head. I needed somewhere to write that worked like my brain. Capture it now, don’t make me think about where it goes, find it later. Nothing I had was doing that without friction.

So I built something.

At first it was just a place to write. Daily notes, research notes, all plain Markdown files. No folders to think about, no structure to maintain. Then I needed tasks and I was jumping between my notes and Todoist and TickTick constantly, so I added a task system, inspired by todo.txt, which I’d used years ago and liked for its simplicity. One text file, plain text, done.

Then I needed to find things. A year of daily notes, 1,300+ files, and I couldn’t remember exactly where I’d written what. I added a simple AI layer, at first just to surface what was due or what I’d worked on recently. Then one weekend I sat down and gave it a few days of focused work and it kind of took over. The AI got better at finding things, pulling up connections between notes I’d forgotten I’d made.

My partner saw me using it and asked what it was. When I explained it she said there are a lot of people who would want this.

She was probably right.

Coeus is what came out of that. It’s a desktop app for macOS, Linux, and Windows. It ended up replacing Logseq for me entirely. You talk to the AI agent: capture this, find that, what did I write about X last week. Your existing Logseq or Obsidian notes import directly. Everything stays as plain Markdown on your machine, tasks included in a plain text file alongside everything else.

The thing I kept trying to find in every other tool was something that worked with zero structural overhead. Coeus is that, because I built it to work the way my brain actually works, not the way productivity systems think brains should work.