Preface

It has never been easier to share or drown in new information. Anyone with a thought, opinion, reaction or discovery can almost immediately send it out into the online world. This makes our job, curation and archival of the relevant bits, that much harder.

I think a lot about how to filter the signal from the noise.

Three big questions come to mind following the widespread adoption of tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, LLAMA et al:

1. How can I curate the information I consume?¹
2. How can I archive what matters?
3. How can I make use of the information I'm storing?

I’ll be answering the first question in a later article, but for now, I’ll answer the second question as a preface to my answer for the third that’ll also come later.

Here are the building blocks I’ve explored to help with question two:

Tools

Personal Notes

I use Obsidian for my personal notes. I like that I own the files and that I can use them however I wish with no restrictions or fear of a service shutting down.

I sync my files to all of my devices with their sync service for $48 USD per year. Yes, I could use an alternative like iCloud, OneDrive, Google Drive or Dropbox, but I really like the company’s philosophy and I’m happy to support them for building such an amazing app and ecosystem around it.

I try, as much as possible, to keep my notes structured in nested folders for projects or other areas of my life. As initially tedious as it is, I find the downsides of uncategorized notes come very quickly and are painful to rectify once the mess is big enough.

The biggest revelation to me, about Obsidian, came to me earlier this week when I finally made time to explore their web clipper. I screamed the first time I tried it.

Obsidian’s web clipper allows users to export the content of any web page, formatted as markdown, into a brand new document in your vault. In seconds. My mind was blown. Why? Because LLMs thrive on context, and with the web clipper, I can clip relevant bits of the internet to store, and also to feed into Claude to help with my work. Remixing ideas, an idea I’ll come back to, has never been more accessible.

I can’t say I’ve used Obsidian as a digital Zettelkasten yet, but I think structuring information and making connections between ideas will hold increasing value as we expose ourselves to more and more information, and as we explore co-working with AI.

I know many people who use Notion for similar reasons and all its possible integrations. For some reason, typing using Notion feels extremely sluggish, so I never bothered setting it up for personal use, mostly out of frustration. I also have no need for the bulk of their features for personal use, so I’d rather not add another subscription to my list.

Team Notes

Last year was the first time I’ve had to work with a team using my own system. Until then, when working or consulting, I’d adopt whatever system was mandated by my employer or client. This meant I had a lot to figure out, and also meant I had to weigh my personal preferences against the needs of the team.

Startup credits also helped sway my decision-making.

When it came to team notes, ease of use, ease of collaboration, integrations and pricing were my largest considerations.

I explored Notion and Slite, but temporarily settled on Notion for a few reasons:

1. Most people I worked with had experience with Notion or could grasp the basics fairly quickly.

2. Many external collaborators used Notion extensively, so it was easy to for both our internal and external collaborations.

3. Notion has a TON of integrations with other tools in our stack, making it very easy to pipe information from one source to the next, automatically.

4. We didn’t have to pay for 6-months through their Notion for Startups Program, so I didn’t have to factor in cost at first.

   Unfortunately, we really only used Notion for notes, and nothing fancier. So, looking towards the future, I found it hard to justify the per-user price.

   As I was exploring alternatives, Craft, introduced to me by Garrett Tolbert, released v3 of their docs platform. I played around with it a bit and fell in love with both the app and their pricing of $50 USD / month for up to 25 users. Their launch discount was a welcome bonus.

   For the time being, I think it has all we need: docs, folders and an offline mode. Like all apps these days, it does have an AI integration I’ll explore at some point, but my core need is a collaborative docs workspace for my team. That’s it.

   It also has tasks and and a calendar I think will come in handy for keeping the team organized. I see it as a less intimidating alternative to Linear for our team members who aren’t used to issue trackers.

Bookmarks

I learn a LOT through Twitter. I’d find it impossible to keep up with developments in the AI and web dev space without it. Whether staying current is necessary or not is another story entirely, but for the time being, I find it very useful.

I should add that I aggressively mute and block distractions to increase the signal to noise ratio of the Tweets that come my way and I’m actively looking to improve on this. I’ve heard BlueSky is a more thoughtful alternative. For now.

It’s very hard to keep up with the volume of information on Twitter, so I create folders for each focus area I’d like to learn about.

Unfortunately, Twitter bookmarks are largely useless in their respective folders, so I need to figure out how to export the content of each bookmark folder into Obsidian.

The next two apps on my list have been absolute revelations over the past two months. If you’ve ever found yourself wading through dozens or hundreds of open tabs or bookmarks, these two apps should help you like they’ve helped me.

I use Reader by Readwise as an inbox for all the articles, blog posts, newsletters and papers I’d like to read, later. I can add material from any of my devices and highlight important quotes or passages I’d like to save.

The integration with Readwise’s main app is top notch, allowing me to revisit a random set of my highlights every day.

Much like with Twitter, I’ll need to explore exporting my highlights to use with Obsidian in the near future.

If Reader is for text, MyMind is for everything else. From quotes, to book suggestions, to restaurants I’d like to visit, to UX and design inspo, to dev tools I’d like to try, I throw everything into My Mind.

I’m tagging everything manually and creating my own spaces (folders) at the moment, but I plan on exploring their AI tagging in the near future. I’m a bit wary of delegating the categorization entirely to AI, in case it doesn’t match my mental model of how I’d like to retrieve information, but I’m curious.

Some Parting Thoughts

1. Before diving into a new set of tools, try identifying the problems or little frictions you experience day to day. Then, and only then, should you reach for tools to help meet your needs. Subscription creep is real.

2. I think there’s immense value in creating a pseudo-second brain filled with context about the information you find most useful or inspiring. I’ll explore this thought process more in a separate article.

TLDR / Summary

In case you just want the list and prices, check out this post.

If you'd like more hands on help, I offer both productivity coaching and AI workflow consulting to help you achieve more with less frustration. Please contact me here to have a conversation about your specific challenges and goals.