I used to think that I alone struggled with various tools and apps to manage, track and digest all the things I want to keep track of, but I now suspect this is a pretty common source of discontent.
Every few years I go through a phase of ‘churn where I signup for something new, with the hope that now, at long last, my cognitive load will lessen, ideas will be remembered, snippets and quotes will be stored and retrieved, and so on. Yet inevitably, after some initial enthusiasm, the experiment ends in deadlock and decay.
In the best case, the tool or app becomes inconvenient and sluggish, while in the worst case everything laboriously entered in is los forever. So after about a decade and half of this ridiculous waste of time, I thought I’d try to think through to figure out what exactly it is that I’m looking for.
There’s no point pretending that the one true, great tool out there will solve these problems. So this post isn’t about finding solutions, but just listing problems.
- I need away to remind me to do something on a one-off basis
- I need to be able to track a small group of related tasks
- I need to be able to make lists of things, sometimes collaboratively
- I need to be able to write medium size posts, like this one, with minimum fuss
- I want to be able to save bookmarks (lots of them!) and find them later, by date and ‘tag’
- I want to be able to save quotes or extracts from web pages
- I want to be able to save pdfs and later search within them
- I need an easy way to make short notes without making an official ‘doc’ about something with a title, etc.
- I want to be able to quickly snap a photo of something, annotate it, and file it away, sometimes with a reminder
- I need to make notes about a certain topic as I go along, sometimes sigh snippets of text or code, and retrieve his later by date or by ‘tag’
- Sometimes emails have to be be turned into tasks
- I have to be able to quickly capture thoughts and ideas for future retrieval
- I don’t want to be locked in to proprietary formats or hidden libraries, as far as possible
- It should be possible to ‘sync’ between devices
- I don’t necessarily want to keep everything ‘in the cloud’
- I want a lot of photos around, forever, accessible from everywhere
- I need to be able to search across text, images, pdfs, but without always doing a huge amount of tagging up front
- I want to be able to create small ‘projects’ with tasks, but without having to fight some rigid ‘true way’ of defining them (fluid due dates, deferred dates, priorities, easy capture and editing)
- I need recurring reminders too (sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly, sometimes quarterly, sometimes biannually, etc)
- I don’t want to think too much about where to file a given snippet, all I care about is being able to look for it later as if I had filed it correctly to begin with
- I want to avoid the risk of some one going out of business and taking my data with them (stick to regular files and plain text as far as possible)
Yeah, a lot to ask for, but also … it’s not all that much, there has to be a way to get all this to work somehow.
Abacus Noir 