Gadgetory

so here's my problem there's simply too much stuff out there and there's a lot of really great stuff out there there's magazines there's newspapers there's tons of blog posts there's movies whose books there's art and then there's a lot more and of course my long-term memory is terrible if I don't know things down in some way that I'm probably gonna forget it dr. Bush has been called the Dean of American scientists one of the great mathematicians electrical engineers and research administrators of our time back in 1945 Vannevar Bush imagined a hypertext information machine the analytical machine which will supplement the Lambs drinking method and has never made but he called it a medics and he described it in an essay called as a mythic so the idea was that the system would keep track of what you read and what you write and then you would be able to pull that back at any given time so if you know I was reading something now and then 10 years later I came back to it I would be able to see what I read and what I wrote about what I read and then you know not much happen in between and then what happened is I had a hard drive crash that you know where I lost everything it finally convinced me to put all my stuff online and ultimately I'll and oh I never know you know a lot of people get confused or overwhelmed by it because it can do a ton of different things but what I tend to use it for is you know keeping track of notes keeping track of things I've read or places I want to go or restaurants I want to check out it's a lot of different things you know a basic list of tags that you can add to any single mode and then over on the left side here there's a lot of different folders that you can set up on your own and sorry I've Boulder that's you know a breakdown of things I found on the web you know annotations and highlights for books notes from short fiction notes about movies and a list of music that I old plenty we'll get around to listen to another great thing about ever noticed it has a really great image support and so if I see something online that I really like I will you know just save it into here and then come back to it later when I'm working on on a layout for The Verge or a story or coming up with the design of my own so the number one way that I pull stuff in here is is via Crom and so let's say I'm reading this piece about jellyfish and the secret of immortality and I find a line that I really like I highlighted pull up the Evernote Web Clipper and I clip this ledge pretty simple and then I can jump back over to Evernote click my inbox and it will show up there what I tend to do is add tags during the week and so if this is like one of the top stories I read during the week I'll give it that tag and then as I'm working on on a column of the best reads for The Verge I can come back at the end of the week click that and I can see all the things or the you know among the best that I've read for the week and so let's say you have this really great illustration and you want to save it it's the same thing so you right click it click the image and Evernote will save it you can come back and then here it is and then because this is sort of like a weird art sci-fi thing I will drop it into that folder and then whenever I want I can come back so yeah I usually like to read during my commute and there's a lot of stuff I want highlight and save for later usually I would use Evernote mobile app but unfortunately it's kind of terrible so instead here's what I do so here's the Evernote app all of your notes are here you get your notebooks here tags here places here but ultimately I really hate using it what I usually do is actually just email stuff to an Evernote specific email account so if I'm an Instapaper and I go for that same jellyfish article so I'll highlight it the entire thing click share email link the selection email it's myself it'll send it will appear ever done okay that's a bit of a workaround and it's not really perfect but it works for me so it's not just things on the internet that I'm finding and saving and annotating what's really important to me is saving notes from books that I've read whether they're physical or ebooks on my Kindle and so usually what I do is you know I'll have you know highlighted and save things and then afterwards I'll just manually type them by hand and pull it into Evernote with ebooks it's a little bit easier on the Kindle it lets you go through and highlight passages and so as I'm reading I save those it doesn't sync directly but we can do is plug it directly into your computer and then save those highlights into a text file and then you know a couple years from now I can look back and I see all the highlights from everything that I've read so the system would be kind of useless if there was no way to get stuff back out of it really easily and fortunately in in the new Chrome extension you can search Google and in the side row will show up results from your Evernote library so let's say I want to look for jellyfish it's a couple months later you know I get the usual list of Wikipedia entries and jellyfish are calm but then what I also have is a note from Evernote which is that story cannon jellyfish unlock the secret of immortality and so this completely changed the way that I use Google so essentially on the left side I have the world's knowledge in Wikipedia and all of that but over on the right side I have my knowledge and all of the things that I've read and all the things that I've noted and I'm able to dive back into that in a way that Google simply can't do so maybe Vannevar bush didn't get it quite right Steven Johnson didn't either and to be honest I've got a long way to go but so far this is the best system I found for augmenting my rapidly fading memory