Documents, scans, letters, tasks, meetings, projects. For years I kept all of it in different places — Evernote, Todoist, OneDrive, Google Drive — and I suspect most people live the same way.
Every app has its own structure, its own logic and its own rules, and between them there is a gap. That leaves three options, all of them bad. Make compromises: turn things you have to do into note files that say nothing and still lie around in a mess. Keep only some of it and hold the rest in your head or on paper. Or give up on it, which is what usually happens, and then every one of those places turns into a dump.
The expensive part is not the document you lost. The expensive part is the background hum: a dump in five places becomes a dump in your head. You are always half-remembering something, always slightly loaded, and there is far less left for the thing you were doing it all for.
I built this for myself
For years I looked for the thing that would fit me, and never found it. I tried to write it myself, but there was never enough time, or opportunity, or steam. Then the stars lined up — the technology and my own circumstances — and I could take it on properly. I have been using it myself, every day, for a second month now, and it feels like I do not need anything else: I know where things go, and I know it will not turn into a dump.
It was never about not having to think. Deciding whether something is a task, a note or an event is still yours to do — the app will not guess what you are up to. It is about those things no longer scattering into separate programs, and the connections between them no longer living only in your head.
Now it all sits in one place and holds on to itself. A person — and the meeting with them, the document that belongs to them, the list of what to raise when you meet. A trip — who is going, what to pack, where you are staying. Health — the test results, the chronology of a treatment, what the doctors answered, all on one thread. School — the messages from teachers and the list of what to buy. What stays visible to you alone, and what you hand to someone else, is yours to decide.
There is one place where you can throw things in without deciding: a list. The list is the way in — an idea you have no time for right now goes in as a line, and later becomes whatever it turned out to be, a task, a note, an event. Turning a line into one of those in a single move is something I am still building; for now it takes a couple of steps, but that is the idea. Links do not have to be made straight away either: often you only realise a link is missing much later — you come back, remember what is not there, find it and join the two. Nothing punishes you for the delay. Nothing burns down or turns red; you simply catch yourself thinking you forgot something. You did not — you can just do it now.
Coming back to a project after a pause is its own thing — a weekend, a holiday, a switch to something else. It costs more than the work itself: everything you were holding in your head is gone, and it gets rebuilt from five different apps, from scratch, every single time.
You open a person and see everything you have going with them. You open a project and see everything that belongs to it — the ideas, the discussions, the tasks, the documents. The context comes back on its own, instead of out of your memory.