There are so many other productivity tools we can learn from to improve Memex. Which ones do you use and/or pay for and why?
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Using Trello for organizing own thoughts, long term life planning, personal principles, workflows, key data points on each area of life.
Using ToDoist paid version for managing personal tasks and projects.
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Do you also use Zapier in combination with Trello, when you say “workflows”?
Have you looked into Notion.so. It seems to cover all those use cases for you and you might be able to reduce your tool complexity by 1.
But I am biased because it works for me. Waiting for the API though so I can integrate better with other tools (like Memex) 
Same! I LIVE via ToDoist.
Also use trello for planning
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Hi Oliver,
I don’t use Zapier a lot in my workflows at the moment. Even after many years of improving the way I work I am still searching for ways to set my workflows to fit the way humans think and work.
Are you up for a Skype call? I will be happy to walk you through my productivity workflows as well as discuss thoughts on where we the productivity product space is / should be heading.
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The why for me - I’m a small business owner and other than my own research needs, I enjoy researching data management with productivity apps and their technologies. (shoestring budget style). I do pay for quite a few apps but not at the corporate size level.
- current paid
notion
airtable
diigo
evernote
ticktick
diigo features I rely on.
- diigo icon shows you when a page is added. And an icon on page if there is a note. ( Worldbrain icon should change if there are notes attached. )
- diigo can save/annotate images & screenshots.
- diigo offers cvs export.
-recent past paid
bookmark ninja
papaly
bookmark os
cliplicious
- use free
pinterest
start . me
lastpass
bublup
hundreds more …
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- Onenote - free, love the hierarchy and ESPECIALLY the offline-first function. Notion seems great, but relies on internet connection, which I don’t have most of the time.
- Office 365 - paid, largely for the 1TB storage
- Microsoft Edge - faster, more private than alternatives
- Pocket - free, but can’t wait to switch to Memex when reading and bulk edit functions are available. As with OneNote, I especially love the offline-first function.
- TickTick - paid. Just switched from Todoist Free and Nozbe Free because its the only task manager app that I’ve found that has such a deep offering of features, and is reasonably priced.
- Calibre - best ebook organizer/reader
- Zotero - great academic paper tool, but I’m largely shifting towards consolidating within Calibre now
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Another “app” that I use is the chrome extension Tabs Outliner. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggkanocgddhmamlbiijnphhppkpkmkl?hl=en
I suppose its just a visual bookmark manager with hierarchies and folder names, but what I love is that it automatically creates the hierarchies from all tabs/pages that you open in each window (which are typically pretty logical and related given how they are created by my browsing/research patterns) and then discards pages as I close the tabs (deciding they aren’t worthwhile), and updates them as I drag tabs around to different windows/folders. I have thousands of tabs saved in a semi-organized hierarchy structure and am starting to clean it up now to better match my OneNote knowledge structure, from which my TickTick project planning/task management will spring as well.
It seems like Memex is aiming for a very similar thing (and much more), but I don’t see the auto-hierarchy feature as part of the plans yet - simply a general searchable, “offline personalized Google” database, with manually created hierarchies. There are a couple problems with this:
-
The auto-hierarchies in Tabs Outliner actually closely resemble how I would organize them in Memex Collections, given that they follow my browsing/research patterns. The manual effort is just dragging a few things around and then naming the folders.
-
90+% of pages I visit are “trash” so I have no desire/need to clutter my hierarchy/database with them. The goal is to have a searchable database of useful info, not everything you’ve ever seen - might as well just use Google for that. This can be remedied by turning off the auto-saving feature in Memex, but then you have to manually save each window AND make AND maintain the hierarchies, which would be very slow.
So, if you could make your collections be a “self-maintaining, searchable, auto-hierarchy of snapshotted and annotated pages, able to be viewed through a slick, decluttered reader interface, integrated with existing Task and Reference Managers”, that would be absolutely killer. I’d pay for that in a heartbeat, and it doesn’t seem far off from what you’re already doing.
Here’s an overview video of how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqjcrfKjobY
Looks like an open source version of Tabs Outliner - Open Tree Style Tab - has started to be built in the past month. Seems like something you guys could/should somehow join forces on, no?
Here’s some relevant links:
- Reddit announcement: https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/gcas5g/it_took_some_time_but_tree_style_tab_for_chrome/
- Trello Roadmap: https://trello.com/b/u9Mjyu8s/open-tree-style-tab-roadmap
And another similar tool - Tabli.
https://www.gettabli.com/tabli-usage.html
Overall, one way or another it would be great to incorporate tab management into Memex, not just cataloguing of sites - auto saving tabs into searchable nested trees, with the ability to open all sites within a tree/collection at once.
I use Pocket all day, every day. Paid user. I export all archived Pocket links to Pinboard via IFTTT. Pinboard also paid – for the full-text archive.
But I have over 24000 unread Pocket articles, and it continues to grow. No features for piling and grouping, or seeing an overview by day or week. No real feature development and the UI is poorer than 4 years ago. A pity.
I export some pages from Pocket into Devonthink Pro (paid). Another organising challenge. The tool is good, but like all these things requires effort.
Wiki-style knowledge base in Notion (paid). Good for curated content, not good for serendipity.
Roam for daily writing (unpaid grandfather tier). Great for quick writing and serendipity. No good for sharing.
Things for tasks (paid). It works. I’ve bent its mental model slightly, but I’m loath to switch to another task manager.
Many other smaller productivity apps for Mac (Karabiner, Keyboard Maestro, Atext, Launchbar – these are things that give me flow) but the above are the key knowledge tools.
MS 365 - 5TB lifetime
Raindrop.io - Bookmarking Service
Ifttt - I auto feed RSS feeds from Bazqux Reader to Raindrop.io
IOS - Shortcuts etc
I have used Pocket, Instapaper, Pinboard, Zapier but found all of them lacking in some respect(s)
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I’m giving a few apps (or utilities) that I use:
Googledrive - paid
Canva -free
notion.so (trial)
wordpress (free)
aws (paid)
linktr.ee (free)
cloudconvert (free)
ahrefs (free)
May Add these too:
appstore (subscription paid)
Playstore (free)