I’d like to build on @Joe Trellick’ thread above and know these two things about your favorite app or system to organize yourself: (a) What is the one thing you love the most and can’t live without? (b) What’s the one feature you miss so dearly that it keeps you looking for alternatives? (Can be something you saw somewhere else, or something you haven’t seen and just dream up.)

I write my own stuff ... which I know is stupid and a waste of my time. But the number one thing I love about what I have is that I know I'm not dependent on a company that might disappear or turn evil or get me to vote for some dodgy cause in the next election. I want control over my software. The one thing I really hate about my software is that I don't currently have a good synchronization story between my desktop and mobile. I used BTSync and SyncThing previously, but they've broken as Android has got more fussy about different apps sharing files. I want something P2P that isn't dependent on a cloud. And isn't trying to lock me in to someone else's protocols or proprietary system

Ultimately I’m looking for some combination of good enough usability that adding notes and annotations from phone or desktop feels relatively frictionless, combined with a plain enough data format that I can believe that what I’m doing will still be decipherable in another 20 years. Apple Notes and things like MarginNote are very powerful and usable, but being based on SQLite and iCloud make data portability more complicated. Notebooks is a little jankier but right now I trust raw files (including metadata in parallel plist files) to be easier to decipher in the future. These concerns are no longer theoretical for me; I’ve recently been able to recover messages and attachments from 15 years ago because I had dumped them to plain text files