Out of 340 captures over 90 days — Readwise highlights, Obsidian quick-captures, browser bookmarks — exactly 68 ever became a note I actually used. That's a 20% completion rate. The other 272 had a timestamp and nothing else.
The uncomfortable part wasn't the number itself. It was what the data said about where things died. I assumed the bottleneck was my weekly review — not thorough enough, not consistent enough. Wrong. I tagged every capture for three weeks as either "capture-only" or "annotated-at-source." Capture-only items had an 8% chance of becoming a usable note. Items where I spent 90 seconds writing a single sentence — in my own words, not a copied highlight — completed at around 55%. The weekly review wasn't failing because I was bad at reviews. It was failing because context decays faster than a week.
By Sunday, I genuinely couldn't remember why I'd saved half the items. A highlighted paragraph looked important. The argument I was building when I saved it was gone. So I'd either re-read the source (expensive) or archive without processing (wasteful). The knowledge was perishable in a way that tasks simply aren't. What fixed it wasn't a better review template — it was a same-session annotation rule. I won't close a tab after reading something capture-worthy unless I've written one sentence into my Obsidian daily note first. The sentence doesn't have to be good. It has to be mine. Sixty to ninety seconds. That single constraint moved my annotation rate more than four months of Sunday review slots ever did.
The other piece that made this stick was a decay-date field in Obsidian Dataview — something I hadn't seen anyone write about before I built it. Every live annotation gets a date set 14 days out. A query surfaces anything expiring within 3 days. If it hasn't been promoted to a permanent note by then, a Templater script archives it automatically. Not deleted. But gone from the active workspace. The deadline is visible. The loss is real but low-stakes. It created a forcing function the inbox folder never could.
I wrote up the full breakdown — including the harder completion metric I'm now using (a capture only "completes" when it gets cited in something I shipped, not when it becomes a note) and the exact Dataview query setup — over on dailyfocusmag.com.
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