[dalai]

They are not, at least not necessarily. It depends on what you want to do and whether the tool helps in any way to achieve this.

Back when I was doing my PhD, I had lots of PDFs and I had a workflow to mark interesting parts and export them to org-mode with backlinks to the PDF and the citation information. That was already enough for me, although I could imagine I could have used orgmode or another tool for improving the organizing, expanding and reusing of the information.

Nowadays, I mostly care about noting down decisions and action items, primarily in the context of meetings. None of these tools give me an advantage. OneNote on the other hand, despite its shortcomings, integrates with other tools we are using at work and allows sharing with colleagues, which at least is marginally better than a plain text file. Most of the stuff I note down are not relevant within a year, so I don't care about the format, the linking and so on, as long as I can find what I need.

I've tried some techniques or tools after reading HN posts like this one in the past, but I've now accepted that this is not for me. I've decided less note-taking is better and that the medium is not important.