By One of the many challenges I’ve had over the years is finding a good way of organizing my thoughts. I consume a lot of content from books, social media, podcasts, YouTube videos, music lyrics, and traditional analog media from books, magazines, etc. and any bookmarks or “shares” are locked inside the specific app, sometimes with no context.
I was an avid Google Reader fan, and am still upset that that product was killed. One of the things it did very well for me was allow me to store content from all over the place in one spot, which I could then read or re-read at my leisure. Well, in the spirit of a new year and creating new habits to fix broken ones, I spent some time on Google and YouTube looking for productivity apps and tips. This video right here from Ali Abdaal gave me a lot of ideas:
Now I also admit that this productivity kick also stems from an idea myself and my bestie and future co-founder Carissa were kicking around, for ways of curating content that can be shared with other folks. Some examples from real life are researching How to Grow Strawberries in Central Texas Zone 8b, or How to Qualify a Minor Child for Medicaid in Texas. It of course always begins with a Google search, and then you’ll end up on various websites, forum groups, instragram posts, etc which you’re constantly sorting and filtering to arrive at the gold nuggets that actually answer your original question. But then how do you preserve those nuggets for the next person to consume?
One question was whether such tools existed in the market place, and so I reactivated my long forgotten Evernote account, and am now re-trying Instapaper and also readwise.io which was one of the recommendations from Ali’s YouTube video. I’m looking forward to seeing how these apps work for me! I’m not 100% digital in both my consumption and how my brain prefers to consume or document ideas. So for example, I prefer this blog style with lots of words over little note snippets. I also prefer hardcopy books or audiobooks over ebooks in general, but I love and use my Kindle. I still prefer writing my to-do lists and meeting notes on paper over a digital options like Keep or Todoist or OneNote as I just love the feel of pen on high quality stationary. But as Ali mentioned in the video, what’s the point of spending time consuming all that content if you can’t remember much of it and apply even less of what you learned to your life?
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