Since I sell methodologies on YouTube, I often meet people who follow them only superficially. I had quietly hoped that even if the Zettelkasten is hard to follow, everyone would at least adopt PARA successfully. Here's an anecdote from a while back.
I had a coffee chat with one of my subscribers, a kind person who watches my videos closely. We showed each other how we use Obsidian and had a meaningful conversation about productivity. (Mostly it was about marketability.) They said they had watched my PARA video, but it didn't seem to suit them, so they dropped it fairly quickly. So I asked whether they had adopted another framework, like Nick Milo's ACE, and it turned out they hadn't.
They weren't using any existing framework and were building their own method, tailored to themselves. That struck me as odd. People say productivity is a field with no single right answer, but choosing not to use a framework is the same as deciding to build one yourself. It may sound like a leap, but to me it feels like saying you're going to become Tiago Forte or Sönke Ahrens. I cover the importance of having a framework in another piece. Frameworks — Falsifiability and Natural Selection
It seems we now live in a world overflowing with methodologies and knowledge, yet it has become hard to understand any of them deeply and turn them into steady action. I suspect it's because information is so abundant that it has lost its value, and we no longer feel how precious it is. Information is easy to come by, so people use it casually, and when results don't show up quickly, they throw it away. Then they look for another method, only to discard that one just as fast. After digging through so many methodologies this way, they start wanting to make their own. Not by modifying an existing methodology, but by coming up with a new method that overturns its foundations. In truth, it's often less a matter of making something than of using whatever is comfortable. I've also seen many people reject established methods without really looking into them.
A methodology is a kind of religion. Just as it's said that those who believe will enter heaven, you have to trust a methodology to succeed with it. And that trust rests on understanding the methodology's principles, effects, and purpose.
The reason you need to trust a methodology is that every methodology has a period of flailing around before you become proficient. You have to endure a stretch where you feel no effect and everything is awkward. And when you fall into a section where no one can tell you the solution, you have to recall the effects, principles, and purpose, and work out the know-how yourself to get out. It's like driving. A driving school can't teach you every possible case. In the end, you have to log more driving hours, run into all kinds of situations yourself, and deal with them.
In productivity methodologies, a typical example of such a stretch is PARA's Area vs. Resource classification, and in the Zettelkasten, it seems to be the process of gathering notes and eventually writing an article from them. But without trust grounded in understanding, people hit this stretch, conclude "PARA is hard to sort things into" or "the Zettelkasten doesn't help me write," and give up.
If you skip methodologies that someone has researched and use whatever feels comfortable, under the claim that "there's no right answer! The best method is different for everyone!", you probably won't improve much. I always look at methods built from scratch through tinted glasses, as opposed to ones made by finding and fixing the problems of an existing method. A system built around what's comfortable is unlikely to have a purpose or principles behind it, and it probably hasn't been criticized enough to be improved. It's just a method that's comfortable for that person. In swimming terms, it's like never having formally learned a stroke and simply paddling like a dog. You'll stay afloat and adapt quickly, but that's probably not the best you can do. When others are offering to teach you good strokes, there's no need to insist on the dog paddle. You need to stand on the shoulders of giants.