Imho its the tool and the protocol. I am currently using a paper notebook. Why? Because, while inconvenient, I can use it in any situation, with any medium. I can write down an email task I got, IM conversations, phone calls, paper articles, websites I'd want to read (although I'll email myself the link), things I want to buy. I have one place to look at, and really only one. Old stuff that is done or rejected gets marked and crossed out, remaining readable.

I've wanted to do things digitally, but nothing really encompasses more than a single thing. You get email apps that maybe can define tasks from an email. Rarely more than one task per email. This is siloed from the bookmarks in my browser. Actually, more than one browser, so multiple bookmark lists. But using this even as a simple "to read"-list doesn't work, because I cannot add books, printed articles or PDFs to the usual bookmark list. Adding annotations is something to dream of. Mobile or desktop support is often broken or absent.

I'm currently trying out org-mode plus git. But I've tried a lot and I'm not getting my hopes up.

For people looking for customers: I wan't everything integrated. Don't assume everything to be the Web. Don't assume Gmail as my mail provider. Don't assume that I work primarily from my desktop or mobile device. Don't assume I'll write everything in word. And the kitchen sink ;)

Yes, of course it is a tooling issue.

I apologize in advance for my jadedness, but I see this sort of comment every time someone mentions the possibility that information organization tools could be better: "This is all very nice, but this other tool I've tried was kind of bad, and didn't really solve the world, so I think that actually everything sucks, and we should just (learn how to) deal with it."

Besides, I really don't see how this is relevant here, as it doesn't even seem to apply to most of the article's content - for instance, how would "organization" help with the fact that e-books/PDFs are woefully uninteractive and retain print-based limitations? Sure, I could manually collect all the illustrations, their backreferences, and look up every paragraph's mentions online, but isn't that kind of what computers are good at? Same with the book recommendation / sharing system.

And as for the "queue manager" and the "memex", this was exactly the author's point, it is a call for tools for organization! No amount of self-organization will help with the scatteredness of digital information, that's just its nature - we communicate in different modes, using different media, on different platforms, for different purposes. Sure, you can and try to limit the amount of services one uses: only use Twitter instead of other social networks, only use e-mail instead of IMs and Slack, only watch videos on YouTube... or file every little bit of potentially interesting info into a unified personal database - but I think it's obvious how both approaches are untenable.

Regimented approaches only work in their own, specific contexts - for a multi-modal multi-medial landscape, one needs tools that operate with these principles in mind, and so far one can only wish they existed.