Reading about other people’s tools and systems is always interesting, so I figured I’d sit down and record what I’ve come up with.

It’s a process that’s evolved over the years to try to capture and manage information - calling it an “information management system” would be grandiose and pretentious, but this workflow is what (currently)works for me.

On a daily basis I read a lot of things that could be useful at some point in the future, but unless I explicity try and store them somehow, they get lost. Online search is becoming ever-less useful in the age of AI slop, and a lot of online content is only fleeting. And that’s after I’ve allowed for my imperfect memory and recall.

The process has two basic components:

• somewhere to store text-based information in a way that’s as flexible as possible
• tags and search to (hopefully) retrieve info when needed.

I’ve tried to end up with something as low-friction as possible, on the basis that if it’s easy to use and as far as possible always within reach, actually using it will become an embedded habit. That helps when trying to capture “fleeting thoughts” - flashes of what passed for insight in the shower, that kind of thing.

Principles

From what I’ve evolved, I can reverse-engineer some “principles” which makes everything sound way more calculated and sophisticated than it actually is.

Don’t try to remember anything

This is something that I picked up decades ago from Dave Allen’s “Getting Things Done” book. (My) human memory is imperfect, so don’t rely on it. If there’s a chance that a piece of information might be wanted again in the future, throw it into the system as soon as you find it, and rely on the system to surface it again. This approach works equally-well for both information and future tasks

Keep the tools at hand

If the tools aren’t immediately to hand, you’re back on relying on human memory in order to remember to get the info into the system. Therefore, put the tools where you can reach them - which in my case means a iPhone, an iPad and a Macbook in that order.

Keep the friction minimal

If the ingestion process is slow and painful, you’ll end up not bothering. Ideally, a single click or tap should be enough. I’m not quite there with my processes, but I’m close enough for this to take just a few seconds in the moment - which is fast enough.

Good enough is better than perfect

There’s no such thing as an ideal system, so don’t bother trying to shoot for perfection - instead, aim for the sweet spot between “minimal friction” and “workable solution”. That helps to resist the temptation to replace using the system with tweaking the system.

Allow it to evolve…

See above - the available tooling evolves over time, and so do the circumstances your’re operating in. The occasional tweak is needed to keep the processes relevant, so give yourself permission to do that.

…but try to stick with some consistency

The flip side of evolution is constant tinkering, and ideally you want a system that is familiar enough to operate with muscle memory (see the point about keeping the friction minimal). Chopping and changing tooling every 10 minutes will get in the way of that, so resiste the new shiny for shiny’s sake as much as possible.

Where the information comes from

With some principles as a background, where does the information actually come from? In my case, it’s overwhelmingly digital - in rough descending order of frequency, the sources are:

• web
• email newsletters (which tend to resolve to the web)
• RSS feeds (which are shortcuts to the web)
• Posts on services like Mastodon and LinkedIn (which are often shortcuts as well)
• Kindle books

The emphasis on web-based sources that means that something web-centric is going to cover at least 80% of my needs. That has two important benefits - the solution is roughly one-size-fits-all, and I’ve no need for more complex workflows like forwarding email and so on.

Tools

These are the building blocks:

Text notes

I create text notes using the Bear app. This checks off multiple requirements:

• the content is text-based and stored in Markdown
• Bear is relatively open in terms of format, so I can get the information in and out easily
• it’s cross-platform, in the sense that it works on phone, iPad and Mac
• it’s exceptionally well-designed, so actually using it is pleasurable
• it plays nicely with the platform, with first-class support for share sheets and x-url linking

Handling web content

I use Omnivore for summarising long-form web content. This leverages four Omnivore features - the one-click “save for later”, the format-stripping that converts the page into text-only form, highlighting of chunks within the text, and the ability to export those highlights back out to Bear.

I don’t use Omnivore as a bookmarks manager, although it could do this. Once I’ve read a page, it gest archived. Bookmarks get stored as notes within Bear, and I’ve got an item on my to-do list to figure out what better/more flexible approach could be. For now, though, it’s good enough.

Handling RSS feeds

I use RSS feeds purely as a way of scanning through a large number of sites very rapidly. NetNewsWire runs on all three devices, and I open the posts that look interesting in Safari before using Bear or Omnivore to deal with them.

Kindle

Ebooks are a mixed blessing - the idea of being able to carry around an effectively infinite number of books on a device weighing grams is the future already being here; but Kindles also facilitates building a backlog of hundreds of books because it’s just too easy to click on another one.

I’m also not super-happy about being locked into a specific vendor ecosystem, and some parts of the experience are clunky. But a Kindle is good enough, even if deep-down I’d prefer the tactile experience of dragging a highlighter across a paper page.

Dealing with content

My basic process is:

• skim the content in whatever inbox it’s landed
• open it in Safari if it looks interesting
• using the Safari share sheet, add a note into Bear
• stick hashtags in the note before saving

If the content is long-form and looks worth reading in more detail, I’ll save it into Omnivore. Periodically I’ll trawl through Omnivore to see what’s there, and use the highlighting function to mark the intersesting parts. Then the “export highlights” function creates a blob of text that can be pushed into Bear via the share sheet, together with a link to the original and any hashtags that I add.

A combination of hashtags and search within Bear is how I find things again. I’m pretty liberal with tagging, on the basis that I’m trying to aid keyword searches rather than build an alternative to the Dewey Decimal system.

I do use a few specific tags, though - #ideas and #sparkfile for “interesting things that might turn into a future side project if only I had the time”, and specific tags for things that I’ve got going on at the moment (#moving is an example for collecting everything relating to a pending house move).

If there’s something specific that I want to deal with and it’s important enough to become an item on a to-do list, then I’ll use the share sheet within Bear to create a to-do item in the built-in iOS reminders app. That comes along with an x-url link to the specific note within Bear.

Some of the things I don’t do

There are a few things that I just don’t bother with.

• any kind of AI Summarisation is supposed to be one of AI’s killer features, but that feels largely pointless. The process of scanning through an article and making highlights of the important bits is part of the comprehension process to me, so outsourcing that wouldn’t win me back any time.

• using dicatation or voice notes to create content I’d feel a bit self-conscious doing that in the firstplace, and I’d need to be some kind of voice-to-text service in the loop. Maybe it would save time, but it’s not something I’ve bothered with (yet).

• using an external bookmarking service I have done in the past, but it feels a bit like opening myself up to ransom if I end up relying on someone else’s goodwill or product roadmap.

• expect this process to last As the workflow stands it’s evolved over years, so there’s no reason to expect that I’ve got it right permanentily this time.

Tool improvements

There’s definite room for improvement - on the to-do list is to have a go at building my own bookmarking persistence in a more database-y way, for example. The Bear share sheet functionality could benefit from some way of searching or navigating within notes. Reading content might be a bit easier on a larger iPhone, traded off against the convenience of something that just about fits in a pocket.

My dream is some way of seamlessly connecting digital workflows and content with an analogue paper notebook, but that feels a bit like nuclear fusion - always due at some intederminate point in the future.

Overall

Is this perfect? No. Would this work for anyone else? Probably not, everybody’s requirements are slightly different and the point about a workflow that sticks is that it has to fit with the needs of the individual.