Digital Note Systems That Break More Than They Replace

1. Why Notion Gets Slower Every Time You Actually Use It

Notion is beautiful until you need it fast — like, team-slack-said-now fast. A few months into building an internal knowledge base with weekly standups, URLs, API tokens, SOPs… suddenly that beautiful sidebar becomes a graveyard of toggled-out databases and list views. Performance tanks. Search turns into a guessing game. Type a tag, wait three seconds. Backspace, wait again.

One Tuesday, we tried to pull a quick check from a meeting doc buried in a synced block. The synced block had been renamed. And moved. Sync had failed silently. The link still showed content — until someone edited it in another tab and it reverted. Sync status: none. No warning, no clue.

Even worse, mention a Notion page inside another synced block and you might trigger an auto-title update that breaks the search index. It resolves in the UI but search lag sticks around. This is not in any documentation I’ve found.

The trick, briefly, has been to avoid using synced blocks for anything except read-only embeds. That breaks the “centralized docs” goal, but works better for sanity. Our current workaround: link notes inside the page — don’t use synced blocks unless it’s a shared checklist or canonical changelog.

2. Using Obsidian for Remote Team Collaboration Does Not End Well

I keep trying to make Obsidian work across a distributed setup. The plugins are addictive — Kanban, DataView, Metadata Menu — but syncing via Dropbox or OneDrive always ends up corrupting something. Usually frontmatter. Sometimes entire YAML blocks just delete themselves if two folks write at once.

We hit a fun case where a teammate edited a shared daily note snippet with timestamp headers, and Obsidian sync treated it as a partial conflict — so one header overwrote the other entirely but left the same date. Looked fine until someone parsed via the Tasks plugin and nothing showed up. Hidden conflict that passed visually.

The real edge case no one warns you about: Obsidian ignores modified timestamps on files touched by external scripts unless the file focus is triggered inside the UI window. So if you auto-update notes with CLI tools, Obsidian sometimes doesn’t notice the change. DataView will still cache the old values. You won’t see it until you force a full vault sync or reopen the app.

One “aha” moment: manually firing the app.vault.modify event via the developer console after CLI injections made everything re-index properly. Actual fix: we run a 9-line script to simulate fake edits post-write, just to trigger Obsidian’s cache refresh.

3. Why Coda Breaks When Your Automation Gets Ambitious

There’s this project tracker in Coda we use to manage low-code client builds. It started simple: buttons to assign tasks, status change via select fields, auto-email once marked “Ready.” Every button worked. Colors even matched our figma mockups. Glorious.

Then someone added a Cross-doc table sync to a dashboard doc. Then someone tried to run a Zapier automation off that sync. Somewhere in there, row IDs stopped matching. Actions failed, randomly.

Turns out, when you sync a Coda table via Cross-doc, you get virtualized rows that reuse internal row IDs under certain conditions. That breaks anything expecting a consistent ID reference — including Zapier steps and formula-based buttons. It’s not documented. You can’t see if a row has a ghost parent unless you manually append the _RowID column and compare to source.

Also, if you use a Pack to trigger updates (like Slack or Gmail), and the Pack fails once, Coda marks the task as complete even if the action never happened. We had a bug where a Draft email never sent due to Gmail auth error, but the label changed anyway. No rollback. Just vibes.

4. Airtable Record Limits Snap Without Warning and Break Views

We’ve hit Airtable’s record limits more than once. What’s bad: it doesn’t tell you where or how until duplicating a view times out. One project table crossed an unknown threshold and half our interfaces stopped loading. No message, just spinning dots. The base was still accessible — but filtered views silently failed.

The bug we learned about the hard way: shared views over grouped fields can break when you filter with the formula field returning blank strings on too many records. Airtable doesn’t paginate grouping metadata correctly under high load. There’s no log — the UI just hangs.

Fix: we replaced blank string outputs with “—” fallback in formulas. That stopped the failure.

Also, Airtable automation scripts silently truncate memo fields if they exceed around 1000 characters with quotes. The limit varies based on trailing line breaks. You can validate this reliably by sending memo content to a webhook and comparing length. The UI will show full text, but the script step gets chopped.

5. Why Roam Research Loses Edits When Syncing Through Multiple Tabs

First of all, I love Roam. Bi-directional links saved my brain during a rough summer of overlapping SaaS deadlines. But it will overwrite your edits if you keep multiple windows open. Desktop app and Chrome tab? Prepare for time travel.

This still happens: edit block A in tab one, switch to another device, edit block A again. Roam eventually syncs version B over version A, then saves both — but your browser session only updates the most recent block you touched. Anything else stays stale. There’s no live reactivity like in Notion or Google Docs. It’s optimistic writing with lag.

Heavier Users Trigger More Failures

We had a system where three people rotated through updating a daily OKR log template. All used different devices. Notes were getting “split” into versions with subtly scrambled bullet nesting — like checkbox states would mismatch from day to day. One got stuck after Roam said the top bullet was deleted by someone else, then duplicated it after retry. That broke a graph query we had feeding a progress dashboard.

If you’re using Roam long-term with a team, accept that you must close all other tabs to prevent version drift. It’s just not built for concurrent editing of the same blocks.

6. Testing Tana Daily Pages with AI Plugins Breaks Everything Subtle

Tana’s AI flowbuilder thing is wild. It lets you prototype GPT flows hooked to your notes. Very cool. Very unstable.

We tried fine-tuning a daily journaling template that expands based on what projects are tagged that week. The AI builder gives passes for basic templates, but it silently fails if you nest entity references deep enough. Step nodes break without an error. The UI just greys out. That’s it.

I spent one late night watching the context viewer update partially while prompting GPT-4 to expand on a node tagged #client-debrief. It worked perfectly when written as a flat daily log, but failed when inserted three levels deep inside a weekly planner supertag. Turns out: node inheritance breaks if more than two layers of parent links pass partial text tokens exceeding ~2K characters. Not documented, but reproducible.

The fix was absurd: create a synthetic node with summaries of all nested project tags the night before, then auto-link that node to the daily. We call it the “slug mirror” and it works. For now.

7. Why Synced Calendars Inside Notion Always Break Shared Context

We tried pulling Google Calendar into Notion using a synced database from Zapier. The setup felt simple: event gets created → Zap adds a new database item with structured fields. But recurring events broke everything.

The same Google event ID would generate a new Notion entry every time it fired. Not sure if this is Zapier duplicating from the recurrence pattern or Notion webhook lag, but the result was dozens of duplicate events marked as new. One got edited manually (added a Zoom link), but that link didn’t update downstream. You don’t get any error — just fractured context.

Moreover, limitations with Notion’s API around filtering compound “OR” conditions meant calendar views inside the dashboard couldn’t reliably hide duplicates without excluding other legitimate entries. So we patched it by wrapping filter logic around a formula like:

if(date == dateWithoutTime and contains(name, "[Recurring]"), false, true)

— to hide generated event noise. It worked… until a teammate added an inline calendar view using a refiltered linked database that didn’t inherit the formula. Everything flooded again. Tabs closed. Morale collapsed.