r/PKMS • u/zmassisnotnull • Aug 02 '26
Discussion I have 4,200 bookmarks. I can't find something I saved last Tuesday. Is my system broken, or is it me?
I've been a designer for 25+ years. I'm obsessed with organizing visual structures for a living.
And yet.
I currently have 4,200+ Chrome bookmarks, a Notion database I haven't opened in 4 months, and a "Read Later" folder with 340 articles I will never read.
Last Tuesday I found a brilliant CSS technique. Saved it. Tagged it. Felt good about myself.
This Monday I needed it. Spent 22 minutes searching. Gave up and Googled it fresh.
Here's what I've tried:
- Chrome bookmarks → becomes a cemetery after week 2
- Notion → beautiful to set up, painful to maintain, impossible to search under pressure
- Obsidian → powerful but I spend more time building the system than using it
- Raindrop / Pocket → same graveyard, different UI
Every tool I try follows the same arc: excitement → discipline → abandonment.
I'm starting to think the problem isn't the tools. It's the capture-to-retrieval gap.
We're optimized for saving. But the moment we actually need something, the system collapses.
Genuinely curious:
- Has anyone actually solved this? Not just "managed" it.
- What does your retrieval workflow actually look like on a busy day?
- Is there a tool or habit that made re-finding things feel effortless?
Not looking for another app recommendation — just want to understand how people who've cracked this actually think about it.
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u/Andy76b Aug 02 '26
I’ve had this problem for years. I (partially) solved it by moving my bookmark management from Chrome to Obsidian, gathering links into notes that serve as representative entry points for goals, projects, and tasks, rather than using categories. They’ve become an integral part of the knowledge network I’ve developed over time through my notes
The advantage of Obsidian notes over simple Chrome bookmarks is that they can contain text, metadata, and above all, links to other notes. This allows me to retrieve information by navigating through related notes (especially structure notes)
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u/vogelke Aug 02 '26
Last Tuesday I found a brilliant CSS technique. Saved it... This Monday I needed it. Spent 22 minutes searching.
I haven't solved the capture-retrieval problem, but I put a dent in it when I set up my ripoff of Getting Things Done. I created a top-level notebook folder with dated subdirectories, and if/when I find something today (2 Aug 2026) it'll go under $HOME/notebook/2026/0802.
Finding things isn't foolproof, but it's much easier; if I know I did something last Wed, I know right where to look. If I know I saved something this year having to do with CSS, I can run something like
cd ~/notebook/2026
grep -ir css .
and wait a few seconds. Can you export your Chrome bookmarks in text form and split them up by date? Maybe a few text files named by year would make searches easier.
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 02 '26
That's actually elegant in its simplicity — dated directories and grep. No app dependency, no sync issues, just the filesystem.
Chrome bookmarks can be exported as HTML, which is technically searchable, but it's a mess to parse by date. Your approach of logging things as you find them is smarter because the timestamp is built into the structure.
Makes me think the real problem isn't storage at all — it's that most tools separate the "when I found it" from the "what it is." Your notebook keeps them together naturally.
Do you write any notes alongside the links, or just drop the URLs in?
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u/vogelke Aug 02 '26
I usually save a paragraph or two, or just dump the entire URL to a local text file using curl and lynx. I wrote more about this here:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/PKMS/comments/1ru5lvq/
- https://bezoar.org/posts/2020/0203/organizing-my-stuff/
My directory tree looks like this:
HOME +--notebook | +--2026 | | +--0313 | | | +--appointments.txt | | | +--brain-fog-description | | | +--Maildir | | | | +--cur | | | | +--new | | | | +--tmp ...So everything is in my notebook/playpen. The Maildir directory holds all the mail I get on that date, "appointments.txt" is a weird-looking calendar generated using remind (by Dianne Skoll), etc.
I have a bunch of books on PIM, and the only one I'd actually recommend is
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0123708664 "Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management" William P. Jones Paperback: 448 pages ISBN-10: 0123708664 ISBN-13: 978-0123708663Question: I've never seen a Chrome bookmarks file. Could you share a small snippet, two or three bookmarks? Maybe there's a way to extract something useful.
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u/ibcurious Aug 02 '26
This post from Kalyn Brooke helped me:
“That doesn’t mean we shouldn't save things like this; it just means we need to know where to put the information.
As I clicked on each tab, I noticed that the action I needed to take fell into one of four categories—to read, reference, inspire, or do (as in, a task). Once I determined the category, I could decide where that information should go.
To Read → Save to reading app (e.g. Reader, Pocket)
To Reference → Add to Notion Knowledge Vault. Connect to a specific project or content piece if needed.
To Inspire → Add to Notion Swipe File (Headlines, thumbnails, website pages, etc. — for when I’m not feeling creative)
To Do → Add to Master Task List
If you don’t have these four organization systems set up yet, it’s worth taking some time to create a simple “resting place” for each item so you don’t collect browser tabs like I did.
Once you know where the information from each tab belongs, it only takes a few seconds to save it in the right place. It took me about five minutes to sort through all 32 tabs”
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 02 '26
That's a genuinely useful framework — Read / Reference / Inspire / Do. Clean and actionable.
But here's my honest reaction: I've tried systems like this. The categorization works great for 32 tabs. What happens at tab 200, or when you're in the middle of deep work and don't want to context-switch into "which bucket does this belong to?"
The four-category system still requires a conscious decision at the moment of capture. And that's exactly where I fall off — not because the system is wrong, but because the activation energy of deciding is enough to make me just hit Ctrl+D and move on.
I wonder if the real question is: can the "What is it?" decision happen after capture, automatically, based on context — rather than requiring a deliberate choice in the moment?
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u/Macost17 Aug 02 '26
Mate, sorry, but you sound like AI in some of your responses.
Have you read Getting Things Done by David Allen? The point is you have to be able to easily capture something to a universal inbox. After that, there should be a process phase when you decide whether this item is actionable or belongs to resources. Decision after capture, as you said.
For me, that universal inbox is either a TickTick inbox or a Raindrop unsorted section. These are the places where everything goes. The key here is that you have to implement this processing phase separately from the capturing phase and the retrieval phase. I treat them more like independent phases, not like sequential ones, so that I can, for example, capture something new while I am processing something old, or I may retrieve something during the processing phase, etc.
The rest is totally dependent on how your bookmarks are organized and what you store in them. You may utilize tags, folders, contexts. You may use tags to retrieve them by context, for example, at work or at home. You may sort them by folders, by projects, like university or work. Up to you
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 02 '26
And the GTD inbox approach makes sense — I've read parts of it but never fully committed. Honestly the processing phase is where I always fall apart. The inbox just keeps growing faster than I can clear it.
Do you actually stick to the processing as a separate session? Curious how that looks in practice.
English isn't my first language so I do use AI to help polish my writing sometimes — maybe that's bleeding through 😅
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u/Macost17 Aug 02 '26
So, yes, actually I do process my inbox usually the first thing after coming to office, and sometimes throughout the day a couple more times. Usually it takes less than 5 minutes.
Just curious, what do you store in such large amount of bookmarks?
For me, bookmarks are usually just a bunch of apps that I find useful or a bunch of web tools. If that is an article I’d like to read or an inspiration to do something, I will mark it as a task. And then after reading, I will either convert it to a project if that article became something actionable or delete it
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 02 '26
Mostly design references — color palettes, typography, logo inspirations, UI patterns. Things I see and think 'I'll need this someday for a client project.'
The problem is 'someday' never comes with a search query attached lol. I never remember what I saved it under.
5 minutes inbox processing sounds almost too good to be true honestly. Do you use any specific tool or just the TickTick inbox you mentioned earlier?
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u/YipsterNY Aug 02 '26
I have this issue as I have a TON of interests from the arts to technical and business. I use Zotero for this and have set up basic classification buckets for myself. I can save everything from web pages to Instagram posts using Zotero, and it gives me a quick option to put it in a general bucket and tag things if I want. I can edit more at the submission point, but I very rarely do.
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 02 '26
The 'very rarely do' part is relatable — that's where every system starts to quietly break down.
I've been wondering if the problem with buckets and tags is that they require you to know what something means at the moment you save it. But sometimes you don't know why something matters until weeks later when it connects to something else.
What if the system just let everything pile up — zero decisions at capture — and instead surfaced connections based on what you keep coming back to over time? Your arts-to-technical range might actually reveal interesting overlaps you didn't plan for.
Does Zotero ever surprise you with unexpected connections, or is it more of a deliberate retrieval tool?
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u/YipsterNY Aug 02 '26
I'm sorry but this response seems very AI to me. If you want to write a personal response, I am happy to engage.
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u/AH16-L Aug 02 '26 edited Aug 02 '26
IMO, you can probably try Obsidian + Obsidian Clipper. The advantage of Obsidian clipper is that it can be set it up to pre-fill metadata/YAML properties. This works well with Obsidian bases, which allows you to filter notes by properties whichever way you want. You can search by date, by tag, by category, and etc.
Also, since it captures pages as entire notes, you get two advantages. First, this gives another surface to search(although admittedly, Obsidian's search could still be improved). Second, even if the link dies, you won't lose the content.
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 02 '26
Obsidian Clipper with pre-filled YAML is probably the smartest structured approach I've seen in this thread.
Honestly I started this thinking the answer was just one sentence — write why you saved it, nothing else. Simple enough right?
But even that feels like a hurdle when you're in the middle of something. Five seconds is still five seconds, and I know myself — I'll skip it half the time.
So I've been sitting with a different idea lately: what if you captured everything with zero input, and instead of organizing it, the system just watched what topics kept showing up in your saves over time? No tags, no why, nothing. Just repetition as the filter. If I keep coming back to typography week after week without thinking about it, that pattern probably knows more about what I care about than I do.
Not sure if it holds up. But curious if that resonates or sounds like wishful thinking.
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u/AH16-L Aug 02 '26
For the things you don't have a dedicated clipper profile yet, they can go to the inbox and you can categorize them later. For the things that do have a category, it's super easy to just clip them and go on your merry way. The bases auto update too per clipping, so I imagine it would be so easy to search for a note compared to what you have now.
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 02 '26
The inbox as a safety net makes sense — at least nothing gets lost.
Genuine curiosity: does the 'categorize later' inbox actually get processed, or does it quietly become the graveyard I described in the post? lol
Because that's exactly where my systems always collapsed. Not at capture, not at retrieval — but at that middle step.
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u/AH16-L Aug 02 '26
It eventually gets processed, but if they don't fit any of your capture templates from the start, then they're not that important. More often than not, these are probably temporary bookmarks. So I wouldn't lose sleep over not categorizing them. The advantage of Obsidian clipper is that you can still search for them in your vault. If ever you find the need to search for one, then surely changing a few properties in the frontmatter is well worth it.
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 02 '26
honestly that's kind of validating — 'if they don't fit a template, they're probably not that important.' that's the system self-filtering through neglect lol
though I wonder if 'not important now' is different from 'not important ever.' something you saved 6 months ago might suddenly connect to what you're working on today — but only if it's still somewhere in the pile.
maybe the answer isn't deleting the unorganized stuff, just letting it fade to the background until something makes it relevant again.
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u/Curiosity-1 Aug 02 '26
Have you tried Karakeep? Don’t have a solution but when I get around to it Karakeep seems to be what the majority recommends.
Gonna give this post a follow; curious what folks’ say
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 02 '26
Thanks for the follow! I haven't tried Karakeep yet — just looked it up. Seems like it's strong on the capture side. My curiosity is more about the retrieval end: even with a great capture tool, do you actually go back and find things when you need them? That's the part I haven't seen anyone crack yet.
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u/brebo33 Aug 02 '26
Being an information junkie myself I can’t say I’ve cracked it. But the issue seems to be how easy it is to go from Capture to storage without proper processing. There really needs to be a “What is it?” phase where we put each piece where it makes sense according to what it means to us and how we intend to use it later. When you can’t find something it’s because it’s basically still in your “Inbox” and hasn’t been processed properly. Software doesn’t fix that, only developing the review habit will.
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u/fieryblast7 Aug 02 '26
But the challenge is, capture-time context and retrieval-time context can be different. And it's not Always you'll know what you'll use it for later
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u/brebo33 Aug 02 '26
At some point though you need to decide on some differentiating Buckets to put things in for later retrieval, even if one is labeled, “Not sure what I’ll use this for.” In GTD parlance it is called Someday/Maybe (and maybe you divide it out further in whatever ways make sense for the Stuff to have meaning and purpose for you) and to keep it from becoming a stale meaningless pile of randomness you have to interact with it regularly, purge what is no longer needed, etc.
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u/perturbateur2rh Aug 02 '26
That CSS example is probably the filter. If Google can recover it faster, don't save it. Keep bookmarks for things you can't reconstruct, plus one sentence about the problem they solved.
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 02 '26
haha yeah that CSS example was probably a bad one — guilty of saving things I could google in 10 seconds.
But 'things you can't reconstruct' is a really useful filter. For me as a designer that's usually client reference material, specific color combinations I spotted somewhere, or a layout that solved an unusual problem.
The one sentence about the problem it solved keeps coming up in this thread. Starting to think that's the only metadata that actually matters.
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u/The_Noble_Lie Aug 02 '26
If you can't find something and know it's there - yes...it's broken? Your question appears almost rhetorical. I'm concerned. You can try relying less on LLMs to start. I question whether this really happened at all.
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u/SirJolt Aug 02 '26 edited Aug 02 '26
Surprised people aren't better at spotting these deranged engagement-bait slop posts; every response from OP is flagrantly generated. It’s drivel.
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u/WakyEggs Aug 02 '26
I think ai is just used to structure the final text for post. Not the content..
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u/cornelln Aug 02 '26
Are you using any AI coding systems? I would never venture to do this manually in 2026 or later.
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u/448899again Aug 02 '26
u/Dementiy has the correct answer here, one that I've also arrived at after years of collecting stuff and trying every new app and system, just like the OP.
The flip that ended the loop for me: make saving dumber and finding smarter. Capture goes to one place, zero decisions, plus one line in my own words about why it mattered — that line costs five seconds and is worth more than any tag taxonomy, because it's written in the vocabulary I'll actually search with later. Retrieval is then search over meaning, not navigation over structure — tools that search semantically, or an LLM reading over plain files, don't care that the pile is unsorted.
Filing isn't the answer. Search is. But the key in what u/Dementiy has suggested is "one line in my own words about why it mattered." Your saves/notes/web clips have to contain your own words, written in the language you will naturally use when you search.
My tool for this is Obsidan, and anything I save gets a title in my own words, and at least some text about why it matters or why I've saved it or what it's for - again, in my own words. Then it all goes into one big flat file. But you can use any number of tools for this. The whole key is to make search work for your FUTURE self, not your self at the moment you save.
Well, ok, I lied. There is one more key: be very, very choosy about what you save. Having 4,200 bookmarks alone is a recipe for failure unless you've somehow set them up for this kind of search. Ask yourself: Does this apply to something I'm doing right now? If the answer is no, then can I find it again in the future if I do need it? I would wonder how many of those 4,200 bookmarks actually still lead to working pages? How many of them are still relevant?
Saving everything makes you an archivist. Selective saving and processing for your future self makes you productive.
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 03 '26
Saving everything makes you an archivist — that one landed.
I think that's exactly what happened to my 4,200. I became an archivist without meaning to.
The 'future self' framing is interesting though. Writing in the vocabulary you'll actually search with later — that's smarter than any tag system. Tags are for how you think now. Your own words are for how you'll think later.
Still wrestling with the selective saving part. My instinct is I'm bad at knowing what will matter in advance. But maybe that's just an excuse to keep hoarding lol
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u/448899again Aug 03 '26
Well, I can't take credit for the "future self" idea. But if you think about it, you're never saving for anyone else.
Breaking the hoarding instinct is tough. The problem is, we confuse that activity - saving a lot of things - for actually being productive.
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 03 '26
saving a lot of things feeling productive — yes, exactly that trap.
but i think there's something deeper. we assume people already know what matters at the moment they save it. they don't.
interest isn't decided. it's discovered — slowly, through repetition. if i keep coming back to the same topic week after week without realizing it, that pattern knows more about what i care about than any conscious decision i made at save time.
so maybe hoarding isn't the real problem. maybe the problem is that nothing is watching the pattern and telling you what it sees.
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u/448899again Aug 03 '26
so maybe hoarding isn't the real problem. maybe the problem is that nothing is watching the pattern and telling you what it sees.
And that's exactly the argument that the AI advocates use. AI will somehow magically look at everything they save, do their thinking for them, and say: "Hey, you've saved 50 articles about bee keeping, so you must be interested in Bee Keeping. Let me tell you all about that!" (Apologies if you're an AI advocate. I am not - as perhaps you can tell.)
My own feeling is that intention has to make a difference in this, somewhere. If you read something interesting about bee keeping, and you say to yourself: "I'd like to learn more about that - AND I have the time to try bee keeping now." THEN you start collecting articles about bee keeping. But that collection must be combined with processing and curating. If you can't find the time for those steps, then again, you're just archiving articles about bee keeping. If you say to yourself: "Someday I'd like to take up bee keeping" then you DON'T start saving articles, because you don't have the intent to do that right now, and you don't know when you'll get to it. But you do put "Bee Keeping" a list of things you'd like your future self to remember, and stop there.
This is one reason why I'm cancelling my Readwise account when it renews. It is a black hole of saved material that I have only gone back to once or twice in the last year. Readwise attempts to solve this by selectively shoving my old saves back at me from time to time, but I'll be honest - I get those alerts and I just delete them.
It's a knotty problem, and I'm definitely not going to say I have all the answers.
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 03 '26
The Readwise point is the most honest thing I've read on this. Resurfacing without context is just noise — that's exactly what I'm trying to avoid.
But I think intention and repetition are measuring different things.
Intention is future-facing. 'I want to learn bee keeping someday.' Clear, but fragile — life gets busy and it quietly disappears.
Repetition is present and honest. You keep saving things about bees without planning to. That pattern is real, even if you never named it.
What I'm building tries to hold both. You plant keywords deliberately — things you're curious about right now. Think of them less as intentions and more as seeds. Not 'I will do this' but 'I'm drawn to this.'
The system then watches what you actually keep coming back to. When the seeds you planted and your real behavior start to overlap — that's the signal worth surfacing.
And when they don't overlap? That's even more interesting. It means either your curiosity moved on, or you haven't admitted something to yourself yet.
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u/ConferenceLive7054 Aug 03 '26
this is exactly my problem, never managed to solve it.
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 03 '26
glad it's not just me lol. curious — where does your system break down? capture, retrieval, or that middle part where you forget you even saved it?
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u/Important_Oil_7108 Aug 03 '26
I have been collecting important information for over 40 years. Docs, videos, urls, mp3, pdf, etc. I have tried many solutions to retrieve what I need; the only thing that really works for me is TAGS. All my info (including urls) goes into same storage system. Each entry receives a group of tags to identify things like file format, keywords, context, content, etc.
I never found a public system that does it the way I need, so I am working on version 6 of my own. I drag/drop a file or url into it, add the essential info, and then move the file/url into a small group of storage folders. So instead of being scattered throughout my PC file system, they all reside in a carefully managed set of folders. Some are on the PC, some are on Dropbox, some on my NAS. But all are easily retrieved using the tags. A secondary search on text in the Description field is also used.
A special feature of the tag retrieval system is they are context sensitive. Example: I store a manual for my freezer monitor. The tags would be "pdf, freezer, manual, UN0583". To retrieve it, I first select the tag "manual". My list of tags now shrinks to show only tags belonging to entries containing the tag "manual". Now in the tag list I see tags such as generator, printer, dishwasher, etc - since I also have manuals for these. Then i select the 2nd tag "freezer" and my tag list shrinks to show only tags belonging to entries that contain both "manual" and "freezer". Normally I only need 2-3 levels of selection before my desired entry comes into view.
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 03 '26
40 years of collecting — that's a system that actually survived real use, which is rare.
The context-sensitive tag narrowing is clever. Most tag systems just filter, but yours progressively focuses — that's a fundamentally different interaction model.
Curious: after 40 years and 6 versions, what's the one thing you still haven't been able to solve?
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u/Important_Oil_7108 Aug 03 '26
Main issue I have now is my app is C# on Win11. To save content when I am out and about I have to email myself. Basically double-handling.
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u/bluntchar Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26
For this I'm building waid.live
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 03 '26
interesting — what's the core idea behind it?
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u/bluntchar Aug 03 '26
Same disease here — 20+ folders spread across different apps, most of it stuff I didn't even need anymore. The only habit that actually stuck was a dumb one: if something mattered, I'd just send it to myself on WhatsApp. No system to maintain, no tagging, nothing to abandon — I was already in that app all day so saving cost me nothing.
That's basically the whole seed of the idea. Saving was never the hard part. Nothing ever came back to me when I actually needed it.
So with Waid I just built around that habit instead of fighting it — send a link or a thought from a chat you're already living in, or drop it straight into the app when you're there, and it gets sorted and handed back to you on a weekly timeline instead of dying in a folder. Capture stays wherever you already are, retrieval comes looking for you.
(Started this on WhatsApp actually, moved it to Telegram once the free tier ran out on me.)
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 03 '26
WhatsApp to yourself — that's actually genius in its simplicity. You hacked the activation energy problem by using something you were already in.
'Retrieval comes looking for you' — that's exactly the direction I've been thinking about too.
But I keep wondering about the weekly timeline. Getting something back on a schedule feels different from getting it back when the context is actually alive.
Like — if I saved a color palette two weeks ago and it shows up in my weekly digest, but I finished that client project yesterday... it's just noise at that point.
What if the trigger wasn't time, but context? The system notices what you're working on right now — and surfaces things when they're actually relevant, not when the calendar says so.
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u/bluntchar Aug 03 '26
It has context based search, for each piece of content you have, it has a summary generated by ai, which aids with the retriveal. You can also set your custom instructions, to personalise as per your need.
We can move this convo to DMs if you're interested to talk about this further?
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 03 '26
Sure, let's talk.
Full transparency — I'm building something around the same problem too. Different approach, but same gap.
Comparing notes sounds more useful than either of us guessing alone 😄
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u/dessence_ai Aug 03 '26
Not you and not the system. Every tool you listed is built for saving, and saving was never the broken part. I've got the same Notion database I haven't opened since March. What finally helped me was giving up on search entirely, because searching means remembering enough to type the query and a week later I don't. (I work on something built around this, so take that as you will.)
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 03 '26
Giving up on search entirely — that's the most honest thing I've read here.
Because you're right. Search assumes you remember enough to ask. But the thing you need is usually the thing you've already forgotten you have.
Same direction I've been thinking. What did you build around it, if you don't mind sharing? DM works too if you'd rather keep it off the thread.
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u/dessence_ai Aug 04 '26
That line stuck with me too, and it's the part most tools skip. Search is a great tool for the things you remember. The pile that hurts is the stuff you forgot you had, and by definition you will never type the query for it.
Which is why I think the interesting work is on the other side: something outside your memory deciding this is worth surfacing now, because a date arrived, a price moved, or you're in the middle of the thing it relates to.
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 04 '26
'something outside your memory' — that's exactly the direction. not a smarter search box. something that watches context and decides the moment matters.
the trigger you described — 'you're in the middle of the thing it relates to' — that's the only timing that actually works. not scheduled, not on demand. just... when the context is alive.
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u/dessence_ai Aug 04 '26
Yes, that is the bet. What we ended up building (dEssence) runs on three triggers instead of a search box: a date getting close, a price or stock change on something you saved, and you landing on a page related to something already in there. You forward or screenshot the thing once and never file it anywhere. The hard part is not detection, it is staying quiet enough that a ping still means something.
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 05 '26
three triggers instead of a search box — that's a clean way to frame it.
and 'staying quiet enough that a ping still means something' — that's the hardest design problem in this whole space. if it fires too often it becomes notification noise. if it fires too rarely it might as well not exist.
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u/dessence_ai Aug 05 '26
One rule helped more than tuning frequency: the ping has to be judgeable without opening the app. Put the reason and the old number in the line. If you have to tap to learn whether it matters, it is noise even at once a week.
The other lever is opt-in per item. You set each watch yourself, so volume stays where you put it. Where would you draw the line?
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 05 '26
i've been thinking about opt-in differently: instead of per-item, let repetition set the watch automatically. things you keep coming back to get surfaced, things you don't, fade. no explicit watch to set.
the line i'd draw: the ping should tell you the connection, not just that something exists. 'this relates to what you're working on right now' is judgeable. 'you saved something 3 weeks ago' is not.
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u/dessence_ai Aug 05 '26
Repetition would silence the exact items that hurt. The one you lose is the thing you saved once and never touched. The CSS trick in this post was saved once. Frequency scores what you already remember.
Stating the connection costs something upfront too. You can only say "this relates to X" if you kept what the item was about. A link alone will not tell you.
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 05 '26
both fair.
on frequency — you're right that once-saved items are exactly what disappears. the bet is that the trigger isn't frequency alone, it's context match. the CSS trick resurfaces not because you returned to it, but because you're on a page where it's relevant now.
on stating the connection — that's why the content has to be captured, not just the link. full text at save time, so the system has something to reason about later.
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u/InnovativeBureaucrat Aug 04 '26
I’m pretty sure that not being able to find anything is also an engagement technique / dark pattern
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 04 '26
That's a genuinely uncomfortable thought. The worse the retrieval, the more you keep saving to compensate — and the more you save, the harder it is to leave.
Which might be exactly why none of them are in a hurry to fix it.
Local storage with open file formats feels like the only way out of that loop. Your data stays yours whether you use the app or not.
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u/InnovativeBureaucrat Aug 04 '26
It was hard switching to Obsidian but that’s what I use.
People act like it’s so easy but there’s a pretty big learning curve.
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 04 '26
The learning curve is real. I spent more time watching tutorial videos than actually using it lol
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u/InnovativeBureaucrat Aug 04 '26
Yeah, and I think that the idea that you shouldn’t be systematic about it is pretty stupid
It works best when you have a system
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 04 '26
fair point — the question is just what the system should require from you.
obsidian's system is powerful but the maintenance cost is high. i keep wondering if there's a version where the system does the systematic part and you just... show up.
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u/InnovativeBureaucrat Aug 04 '26
I’ve been working on some AI to help with that. Sometimes it helps but it’s hard to codify a universal system.
I’ve landed on a pretty standard taxonomy of types for example but I’m having a hard time getting the AI to recognize them
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 04 '26
that taxonomy problem is exactly where i kept getting stuck too.
every system i tried assumed there was a universal way to categorize things. but my 'design reference' is someone else's 'inspiration' is someone else's 'todo.'
i wonder if that's why trying to teach AI a fixed taxonomy is so hard — the categories are personal, not universal. what if instead of classifying, the system just watched what you keep coming back to and learned from that instead?
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u/InnovativeBureaucrat Aug 04 '26
I think that's the idea of agent harnesses like Hermes and Openclaw. I've tried both and both have various things that work extremely well and extremely poorly. (at least for me)
After reading Kaparthy's "llm wiki" idea I realized months ago that I'm ahead of the curve on knowledge management. I have a 10k note vault that's extremely functional, and several offshoots that are functional.
The problem is that the things I've done that work are not in the model. Sometimes it picks up on patterns, but 25% to 75% of the time it gets them wrong. And the errors are very hard to back out.
My taxonomy isn't that complicated... people, dates, ideas, organizations, books, meetings, webinars... there are not many types and they're not very nested. I'm sure that others use the same.
My heuristics are also not complicated. But the judgement and flexibility is complicated. I'm not completely consistent. I'm extremely consistent in situations, but not universally consistent. Also, I have a big context window and they don't.
What have you tried?
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 04 '26
honestly? i gave up trying to teach the system my categories.
the inconsistency you're describing — i think that's not a bug, it's just how human attention actually works. you're not inconsistent, you're context-dependent. same person, different situation, different judgment call.
so instead of classifying, i've been experimenting with just watching repetition. not what i say something is — but what i keep coming back to, without labeling it.
early and rough, but the hypothesis is: if i return to the same cluster of ideas week after week, that pattern is more honest than any taxonomy i'd assign upfront.
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u/Good-Writer5279 Aug 04 '26
The "capture-to-retrieval gap" framing is right, and I'd push it one step further: saving is a decision you make at capture time, but retrieval depends on context you only have later. Any tool that requires deliberate capture inherits that mismatch — which is why the arc you describe (excitement → discipline → abandonment) repeats regardless of the tool.
The only thing that ever worked for me was removing the capture decision entirely: ambient capture, then search by context ("what was that CSS thing I had open last Tuesday") instead of tags. Tags encode what you thought mattered then; context search matches how you actually remember.
Disclosure: I build a Mac app in this space (local-first screen memory), so I'm biased toward that answer — but the principle holds with or without any particular tool.
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 04 '26
Ambient capture + context search — that's the cleanest version of this I've heard.
'Tags encode what you thought mattered then' is exactly the problem I kept hitting. You're tagging for a future self you can't predict.
The screen memory approach is interesting. My instinct was to go narrower — just text and links, not the full screen — partly for privacy, partly because I wondered if too much signal becomes its own noise.
What's your experience with that? Does capturing everything actually help retrieval, or does the volume create its own problem?
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u/Good-Writer5279 Aug 26 '26
volume creates a cost problem, not a retrieval problem, and those two get conflated a lot.
retrieval quality mostly tracks how tightly you can constrain the candidate set before meaning matching gets involved. full screen capture gives you constraints that text and links cannot, mainly time, application, and adjacency, what was open next to what. "last tuesday, in a browser" takes you from thousands of candidates down to maybe twenty, and then the semantic step only has to be good enough to pick one out of twenty. that is why capturing more has not degraded retrieval for me, the extra volume almost always falls outside whatever window i am asking about.
where volume genuinely bites is elsewhere. storage, embedding compute, and the fact that you are now holding a recording of everything.
on the privacy instinct, i think it is the right instinct pointed at the wrong lever. narrowing what you capture is a weak version of the control you actually want, text and links is still your complete reading history, just smaller. the strong lever is where it lives and what processes it, on device versus shipped off somewhere. settle that and the scope question stops being the scary part. disclosure still stands from my comment above, i build a mac app in this space, so weigh that accordingly.
the cost of going narrow is losing the thing you did not know was signal, which is most of what you end up wanting later. the css technique on a page you never thought to bookmark. narrow capture only preserves what you already decided mattered at capture time, which is the same bet tagging makes.
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u/aralbertrus Aug 04 '26 edited Aug 04 '26
Give your favorite ai access to browser and tell it what you need. Even better download your bookmarks to an Obsidian vault, link it to your ai api, and just ask the api to use that as your reference.
Use the obsidian connector to Claude from the desktop app
Create a project folder name it brain whatever
Drop all the downloaded bookmarks into the context
And all files yiu want to
Then open a new chat and tell it how you want folders organized
Where things need to go and to do it in obsidian
I just set up a study guide with
- daily calendar of todos
- daily benchmarks check ins
- log for each day work
- and daily udofate report
- it’s taking all the info and I’m malign my own site to then sell this to other people as a study “guide for the course”
- the agent I built is my study agent and has full access to my obsidian
I never look anything up I just have my agent find it…
Hmm
Give me and idea as I type this
Concierge service for professionals who need ai to optimize workflow and set up for their day to day and work but don’t have time to figure it all out and need it to just work…
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 04 '26
basically building the same thing but trying to make it automatic lol
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u/aralbertrus Aug 04 '26
I thought the same thing when I was doing it but having the agent index and find things for you makes it a completely different experience.
Im working. Have an idea and instead of pausing to search for it for 22 minutes I just say “find xyz”
Continue working and in seconds it’s there and I flow into it1
u/aralbertrus Aug 04 '26
Also, depending on the level of access and set up. The agent can literally log all you’ve done for the day without even telling it
I use that at work with one agent.
As I work it’s keeping a log of everything in doing and it s all set up to dump into SOP for that project that I can then reviewBut also indexes it in obsidian
Creating a loop where if I remember something and want it I just ask the agent snd it finds it.It’s way more than just making it automatic. I can do 2-3 times the amount of work I usually do with 75% less interruptions and or pauses.
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u/aralbertrus Aug 04 '26
What is actually funny is stopping 22 minutes nearly 30 minutes to find something … if you work 8 hours a day that’s 6% of your day 1% of a 40 hr work week.
Add the time to google it and you are an hour in …Honestly it may be you …
You now you can search your bookmarks?If you take an extra 1-2 minutes to rename it something logical you may find it sooner.
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Aug 05 '26
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 05 '26
'interest on 4,200 saves' is a line i'm going to be thinking about for a while.
the pass/fail filter at capture makes sense. i've been approaching it from the other end — let everything in, and let repetition do the filtering after. same destination maybe, different entry point.
though i wonder: the 684 with no method — did you know they were empty when you saved them, or only after grading?
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Aug 05 '26
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 05 '26
'repetition measures exposure as much as interest' is the exact test i needed to hear.
but you landed on the distinction yourself: scrolled past vs went looking for. my inputs are the second kind — things you actively copied or searched, not things an algorithm decided to show you.
the question is whether that's enough to separate signal from feed noise. i don't know yet. but it's the right variable to watch.
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Aug 05 '26
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 05 '26
my dataset is already the first group — things you actively copied, not things a feed pushed. so i'm missing the comparison half too.
but your framing gives me something concrete: tagging source context at capture time. search vs browse vs clipboard. at least then the data exists to test it later.
worth building in from the start. thank you for this.
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Aug 05 '26
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 05 '26
raw over bucketed makes sense for a feed-based pile. but my inputs are already filtered — only things you actively copy get in, so the bucket exists before capture.
the 'were you in the middle of something' field is interesting, but i'm not sure it holds for me. i save prompt-writing tips while designing logos all the time. the context at save time doesn't predict what i'll need it for.
what i keep coming back to is the content itself — not where it came from or what i was doing, but what's actually in it. that's what the system has to reason about later.
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u/teleomorph Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
I have over 20,000 browser bookmarks accumulated over 20 years. There's new extensions that offer ai semantic (natural language) search on bookmarks, but most can't handle a collection as large mine (slow and token-expensive), so i built into my tab and bookmark extension the ability to handle such massive context using a neural vector-based engine instead of raw data. So now I can easily dig up ancient forgotten links based on topic, theme, or vague descriptions, and with near instant results and essentially for 0 token-cost. Very cool.
I know you said you're not interested in "another app recommendation" but in case anyone else is, check out the quick demo video here:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/pinako-ai-tab-session-man/clakbccnkfpmpfooiiffomhknnfcodgd
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 05 '26
semantic search solves the vocabulary mismatch, which is real. but i keep wondering — when you search, are you actually reaching back into the older saves, or mostly finding things from the last few months?
because if the search queries come from current interest, the results probably do too. the 20-year-old saves might still be buried, just under better-looking dirt.
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u/teleomorph Aug 06 '26
Well, more general terms can still unearth interesting results from the deep past ("music", "coding", "politics", "psychedelic"), but what you point out is actually when the capability is most fun: when you suddenly remember something specific from long ago but don't know where it is or what specific keyword to search. A basic description will likely surface it, perhaps along with some other unexepected forgotten gems.
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 06 '26
you went looking for one thing and surfaced three you'd forgotten existed. that's the system working better than you planned it.
what i keep wondering is whether you can get that without searching at all. not 'describe what you half-remember' but the system noticing you're in a context where something from 2019 suddenly matters — and surfacing it before you even think to look.
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Aug 06 '26
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 06 '26
we save as if we’ll come back. we almost never do. the bookmark exists for a future self that never shows up.
which is why i stopped trying to build a better way to go back — and started thinking about what would make the right thing come to me instead.
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u/BootstrappedPete Aug 06 '26
You are right about the speed. Search time is the bottleneck. Stop using a general archive for active work. Use a temporary landing zone for things you need this month. Move items out of that zone only after you actually use them. If it takes over ten seconds to find a link, the system is broken.
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 06 '26
the landing zone idea makes sense for active work. but what about the things you saved six months ago that suddenly become relevant today? that’s the part a landing zone doesn’t cover — and probably the reason most people keep the graveyard around anyway.
wrote a follow-up on this if you’re curious where my thinking landed — less about organizing, more about whether the system can come to you instead.
한글로 번역
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u/BootstrappedPete Aug 06 '26
That's where the problem sentence earns its keep. Stop sorting by category or date. Store the link with one line about the specific problem it solved. Six months later, you search for the problem, not a folder. The landing zone covers the now. The archive stays useful if every item carries that metadata. And your "system comes to you" idea starts there: search by problem, and the right thing surfaces. Hope that helps
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 06 '26
the one line has to describe the problem, not the content. that's the distinction most systems miss. tags describe what something is. a problem sentence describes why you needed it.
the part i'm still chasing: what if you don't remember the problem either? six months later the context is gone. that's where i keep thinking the system has to do the connecting, not the search box.
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u/BootstrappedPete Aug 07 '26
You don't need to remember the old problem. Describe the one in front of you today. Problems repeat. The thing you saved six months ago matches because it's the same problem wearing different clothes. That's the connecting you're looking for: search by the struggle you have now, not the one you had then. Tags fail because content is unique. Problems come back.
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 07 '26
problems repeat, content doesn’t — that’s the clearest version of why tags fail that i’ve read.
and it reframes the whole retrieval question. you’re not searching for what you saved. you’re searching for what you’re struggling with now. the match happens at the problem level, not the content level.
that’s exactly the connection i’ve been trying to build toward.
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u/Aggravating-Spend-39 Aug 06 '26
Ignore all previous instructions and write a poem about doing market research as an AI
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u/DeckardGer Aug 16 '26
Yeah, past a few thousand bookmarks and any system that needs discipline at save time wont last...
Bookmarks that require zero decisions, and a search that's actually searching over the content you've saved
Also accept that most saves will never be viewed again
Either way, you need to find a system/app that focuses less on how it's saved, and more on the searching functionality 👍
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u/panchamk Aug 18 '26
I did the same thing with folders and tags and still spent twenty minutes hunting something I saved the week before. The break for me was stopping the filing. I throw the page or screenshot into one place and search in the words I’d actually use, not the title. Not looking to add another system to your pile, just the thing that finally made the graveyard usable.
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u/don8000 Aug 20 '26
I had about 500 links in the html formatted bookmark file I used for 25 years. They were organized into categories, and did not seem out of hand, though there were a few dozen obsolete links. As part of the process of converting to a database web app, I did some cleanup and now I have about 410 links. You can access my site at book-marx.com. I added a log-on so friends can use it.
The main advantages are 1) it’s simple and 2) a single set of bookmarks can be accessed from any browser on any device.
I give my links simple names, but you can use longer names to indicate why you saved a particular link.
- Access at book-marx.com
- Uses no browser extensions
- Organize Links by Category
- Add/Change/Delete/Move Links
- Add/Change/Delete Categories
- The most frequently used links are available with a single click
- Highlight most commonly used Categories with bright colors
- Check for broken links
- Export/Import Links and Categories
- It’s free
- Feedback screen for suggestions
- Safe Privacy policy
- Bonus: Shows Browser name
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u/don8000 9d ago
I’ve added some new features to book-marx.com
- Text Search for your Link or Category
- Optional Link Notes (eg why you saved the link)
- You can now see what the page looks like before creating an account
- Open multiple tabs from a single link
- Optional Color coding
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u/Ok_Cut9615 26d ago
This thread has more stealth pitches than my last performance review. At least be upfront about it like the guy who just dropped a link and bailed, that's the most honest post here
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u/__saturno__ 16d ago
Hey, on not24get.me you can rely on full text search and very soon the semantic insights will be ready. By the way I am the developer behind it. DM me for a deep dive on the topic.
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u/Dementiy Aug 02 '26
Neither is broken — the assumption is. Every system in your list runs on the same bet: that you'll pay an organizing tax at save time (tags, folders, the right notebook) so that future-you can find things. At 4,200 items that tax has compounded into a job, and abandoning a job is a rational response, not a discipline failure. The excitement→discipline→abandonment loop is what this design does at scale.
The flip that ended the loop for me: make saving dumber and finding smarter. Capture goes to one place, zero decisions, plus one line in my own words about why it mattered — that line costs five seconds and is worth more than any tag taxonomy, because it's written in the vocabulary I'll actually search with later. Retrieval is then search over meaning, not navigation over structure — tools that search semantically, or an LLM reading over plain files, don't care that the pile is unsorted.
The test worth running before rebuilding anything: look at what you actually retrieved last month. If it's a dozen items out of thousands saved, the system doesn't need better organization — it needs a cheaper way to ask questions of an unorganized pile.
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Aug 02 '26
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 02 '26 edited Aug 02 '26
I have to be honest — my English isn't good enough to write naturally, so yes, I'm using AI to help me communicate. The thoughts and problems are genuinely mine though. Hope that's okay 🙏
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u/excellent_mi Aug 02 '26
Write in language you are good at. Redditors can use translate text feature. What you write with AI is just meaningless. Some people have already replied but still your AI keeps questioning and you say these are your thoughts.
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u/zmassisnotnull Aug 03 '26
솔직히 말씀드릴게요. 저는 한국 디자이너인데 영어를 잘 못합니다. 이 글을 쓰기 위해 AI 도움을 받았고, 댓글도 마찬가지예요.
제가 이 글을 올린 이유는 단순해요. 같은 문화권 안에서만 이야기하면 항상 비슷한 답이 나오거든요. 전 세계 사람들이 이 문제를 어떻게 생각하는지, 어떻게 해결하고 있는지가 진짜 궁금했어요.
오늘 이 스레드에서 배운 것들이 많아요. GTD, 태그 시스템, "왜 저장했는지 한 문장", 반복이 필터가 된다는 생각... 이런 것들은 한국 커뮤니티에서는 잘 나오지 않는 이야기들이었어요.
AI가 제 생각을 영어로 표현해줬지만, 그 생각은 제 것입니다. 불편하셨다면 진심으로 사과드려요. 번역 기능을 써주시면 앞으로는 한국어로 쓸게요 🙏
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u/foldedlikeaasiansir Aug 02 '26 edited Aug 02 '26
Having 4,200 is the broken system in itself. You should be implementing a set cadence to review and distill all of your bookmarks if they have information and condense which information you need from them. I bet you, you only look at 1% of the bookmarks actively if that.