I'm trying to get into note taking and the community is extremely hostile to what they call "the collector's instinct".

Well, what they don't realize is that before I fell victim to it, I was falling victim to the procrastinator's instinct. I would find out about a new concept when trying to read something and then feel an unbearable urge to go look for it. This led me to missing deadlines very often because my nervous system can't tell "I actually need to understand this a little bit before proceeding" and "omg going deep in this irrelevant tangent mentioned as a sidenote is the key to ultimate happiness and I'm about to switch careers and start a cult around it".

Now I just have a big quick.org file where I just write anything I want to remember later in any format, completely unstructured. This allows me to keep doing what I actually need to do since it takes away the fear of forgetting to look for it later, even if it's the most interesting thing I've ever seen. And since this ended up becoming my most prized file (more than my actual structured notes), I can trust my paranoia to never lose it and keep a thousand backups of it. This made me so much more productive it's hard to understate how much I would recommend the collector's instinct for people like me.

As a side effect, my actual procrastination and free time became more intentional since now I have my own huge list of nice things to waste my time on. Sometimes when I'm trying to do something and I feel too tired I just skim through the list and it brings me so much satisfaction I actually go right back to being productive.