It seems I’m always drowning in a sea of bookmarks, open tabs, and saved links that I "save for later"—only to completely forget about them. This has been frustrating and has pushed me to start building my own filing/bookmarking system.
I want something I can access from the browser, the terminal, and my phone, and I’m just beginning to put it together.
That brings me to my question: How do you manage saved information? Specifically, how do you organize, search, and tag your content? More importantly, how do you design an interface that makes it easy—and actually appealing for meat-brains like me—to return to and use what you’ve saved?
For instance, I’ve thought about building a browser extension to replace my YouTube feed, which I often scroll through mindlessly, with something more intentional. I’d also love to annotate PDFs, websites, and other content, then store and access it all in a unified space.
I think The Problem I keep running into is just friction. I’ve tried apps like Obsidian, but I find them hard to maintain. I even wrote scripts to clean up things like images and URLs automatically, and set up sync, but it felt clunky, and I didn’t use it as much as I thought I would. Now I’m trying again and really want to get it right this time.
So I’m curious:
What UI/UX features or workflows would make you actually use a system like this consistently?
Do you have ideas or examples of systems that are particularly low-friction and effective?
Have you found workarounds for these kinds of challenges?
Or are there tangentially related ideas or discussions you think might be relevant?