Between highlighting the web, saving bookmarks, taking notes, organizing browser tabs, & taking screenshots: Context is lost.
The saved items are there, but the overall context is not!
We often can not use the very same resources we wasted precious time on!
We can’t instantly use what we captured to connect & create new ideas.
Essentially because each of these items is captured within its own directory:
- bookmarks → live in the browser
- notes → live in the notes app
- screenshots → live in the file system
- highlights → live in their respective app
It increasingly becomes hard to recapture context and continue from where we left!
And we can’t peek anywhere to visualize the whole thing. It can get overwhelming.
We’re facing an information firehose to the point where capturing is not enough practice to help us get the most out of what we consume.
Solution is: Visual tools for thoughts – Just like how Figma operates for design pieces, there are tools which do the same for your thoughts. You can group, connect, zoom out and zoom in in one view without losing the larger context of things.
One candidate I found is Heptabase.
Reason I chose Heptabase: They’re just getting started, graduated YC’22, and their founder is documenting everything.
How it works:
- Heptabase unit of knowledge is called Card → You can put down anything you want in a card, text highlights, images, pdf excerpts, links, tables, etc
- You can pull cards to a Whiteboard → A whiteboard is your playground, you can connect similar ideas, headline them, section them, or colorize them
- You can see all your whiteboards on the Map → The map is the highest level view, from which you can instantly peek at anything