I Spent More Time Maintaining My Notes Than Actually Thinking
A few months ago, I caught myself doing something ridiculous. I was spending my Sunday afternoon writing a complex regex query to fix a bunch of broken tags in my note-taking vault. I hadn't written a single new idea that week. I was just doing database administration for my own brain.
If you hang around Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) circles, you probably know the trap. We buy into the promise that if we just find the right template, the perfect folder hierarchy, or the ultimate tagging system, we will finally become frictionless writing machines.
The reality is that we've turned thinking into a maintenance job.
We atomize our notes so much that they lose all their original context. We build elaborate digital gardens that require constant pruning, otherwise they collapse into an unusable mess. And worst of all, we suffer from the anxiety of the "perfect system"—the friction of deciding how and where to save a thought prevents us from saving it at all.
I got tired of it. I realized my messy, unstructured paper notebook was doing a better job at capturing my ideas than my hyper-optimized software.
So, I burned my workflow down and built Siltmark and the Commonplace Garden.
Plain Text and Opportunistic Structure
Siltmark isn't a software. You can't download it. It's just a method for writing in plain text that gets out of your way.
Instead of relying on rigid databases and metadata fields, it uses five simple ASCII "seals" (~, ?, !, &, ^) to mark doubts, questions, insights, connections, and actions directly inside the text. You don't fill out forms. You just type.
The Commonplace Garden is the architecture that houses these files. It operates on a single rule: structure should be opportunistic. You don't build folders or index pages until the sheer mass of your notes forces you to. You let the connections emerge naturally from the bottom up.
It works in Obsidian, VS Code, iA Writer, or a simple .txt editor. It's designed to outlive the tools we use today. Fifty years from now, a Siltmark file will still be perfectly readable, with zero vendor lock-in.
I wrote a short manual about how this works, both digitally and on paper. I'm releasing it today for free under a Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
I'm not trying to sell you a new productivity framework. I just want to share a way out of the maintenance trap. If you are tired of doing data entry on your own thoughts, give it a read.
[Link to the manual]