For me the notes app is almost like a workspace - I need to figure something out, I write it down, start to break it down, describe, analyse - this process helps me to understand the problem. The fact that the artifacts of this process will not disappear is a nice bonus. A lot of the time I don't ever read them again, but I got the main benefit (understanding) already anyway.

It's a bit similar to writing a journal - just the act of writing it down has big therapeutic and introspective effects.

For me, the act of organizing the information actually does not take too much time but that might be caused by the fact that I typically don't obsess over correct categorization or do this "refactoring" when I'm bored. Main tool to find notes of interest is search anyway, categorization for me serves as a way to find related notes.

> The turning point was spending months of part time hacking writing my own Evernote’s clone in Clojure in the backend, a Firefox plugin, and a web app. It was a fun project, but mire fun writing it than using it.

Lol, sounds like me, except it's been almost 3 years since I started (https://github.com/zadam/trilium if anybody's interested)