"Alright then, Kit," I hear you sputter. "You've established that PKMSes are inherently flawed, but I don't see you offering any alternatives; after all, you can't deny that we need some way to store data!"
You're absolutely right. We do need to store data, and I myself constantly pour random garbage into my Google Keep, even if I'll never revisit it. It's even noted in my Xitter bio:
The thing is, though, that for any given chunk of data you store, P(action) declines rapidly, and the relevance of any given portion of it (especially "slippery" data that doesn't stick in your head) also declines rapidly. Thus, I contend that the real leverage item here is a cache. Specifically, we want a cache with automatic expiration.
The trick here is that the same mechanism that ensures a backlog of unprocessed notes doesn't build up also incentivizes you to take action on the things you do want to do, lest they expire into cold storage (not deletion, which would introduce too much stress).
More concretely:
You begin with some decay period (define this based on your own habits over how long it takes for a backburnered item to stick to the pan; for me it'd probably be a week or so)
Each new entry begins to decay after submission
Every time an entry is edited, the decay period resets (Claude suggested scaling decay, such that each time you edit an item after initially submitting it the time to decay after reset extends; I like this approach)
An entry that has fully decayed disappears from the main view and enters cold storage; it still exists, but requires effort to navigate to
Net result: your inbox automatically clears when the stuff you toss into it doesn't actually matter, but the items you do care about (by revealed preference) are retained for as long as you care about them.
This is fairly easily implementable as a PWA, trivial as a command line program, and is natively supported by paper (a notebook does this structurally; as you fill pages, the entries further back become more difficult to reach but the new entries are easily accessible the entire time). It's not fancy, and not as easily riceable as an Obsidian vault or whatever custom agentic knowledgebase you blew your token budget on this week, but it's probably a better way to operate if you want to be effective.
Although if you just like fucking around with PKMSes as a hobby, then take Artemis Everfree's advice.