Haha! Your joke is both funny and sad at the same time.
I’ve been an academic since 2014 (PhD conferred in 2015), and things only really changed for me when I started using Obsidian around a year ago. The key wasn’t really using Obsidian, it was in changing my mindset from ‘publish or perish’ to a sense of just wanting to learn and grapple with the ideas in my field that I find most interesting/pressing. I had to be able to trust that focusing almost exclusively on thinking and learning (as serviced by reading and writing), all the publications, grant applications, and other academic activies would be addressed as byproducts. In my mind, my identity as an academic is now to be a prolific reader, writer, thinker, and learner, and all the other stuff is just the fruit of these core practices. Obsidian (and similar tools) help with this since you know that you only need to read a paper/book/whatever once. It’s funny to admit this since I really wasn’t motivated to read in the past, but now I literally go to bed asking myself if I can fit in reading a little more of the latest paper before I go to sleep. As I sit there watching a movie with my wife (after the kids are asleep), I’m also reading a paper on the side, chuckling occasionally so she thinks I’m fully engaged in the movie. If I didn’t know that all the good bits of what I read are stored safely and easily accessed in my Obsidian vault for all eternity, I wouldn’t be motivated to read, since I know I’d just forget it all in a heartbeat. It’d be too much work. But by largely forgetting about the outputs you’re working on, and focusing on just learning about your field, it changes not only how much you get done but who you are as an academic/PhD student. Or, it has for me at least!
A book that helped me realise this stuff is ‘Essentialism: The disciplined pursuit of less’ by Greg McKeown. It’s not really about academia at all, but it helped me trim away the stuff in my life that was taking up my time in unhelpful ways. When there’s not as much ‘fun’ or ‘distracting’ stuff to do, your genuine interest in your field and the knowledge that whatever you read is ‘safe’ in your vault will prompt you to pick up the next paper. In a nutshell, this mindset to be a prolific reader, writer, thinker, and learner, coupled with Obsidian, has allowed me to feel happy about being an academic for the first time. I’m not stressed at all - I’m just focused on learning. This is a pretty positive step for someone who literally burnt out in the first few years as an academic.
Good luck with the PhD and the much more important task of being a parent 