There are so many interesting and useful apps out there these days. Have you taken a look at the note-taking landscape? How about task management? These are just some examples. There are apps _everywhere_. Lots of these apps are good and have overlapping functionality. How do you decide which one to use? Ideally, you chose the app that’s “best” at whatever it is you’re doing. For example, here are some use cases from my own workflow: - Journaling: DayOne - Blogging: Notion - Web annotation: Hypothesis.is ## The problem With this many different apps it becomes difficult to remember or locate pieces of info. This blog post mentions my use of web annotations, but... - Maybe I wrote about that in my journal? - Maybe I _annotated_ the Hypothesis website and wrote about it there? - What about alternatives? I remember researching alternatives when choosing this tool. Where did I write about _that_? > [!important] Since none of these tools talk to each other it’s a pain to find things and it’s often impossible to make connections. There’s also the problem that with hosted apps you might lose access to your data for reasons outside your control. ## A solution A “meta” app to search, aggregate, backup and connect data from all your other apps. Most apps are happy to live in their own universe. This is normal and proper. However, to gain greater access to our own data across these apps, we need to know about them. A meta app has to take _other apps_ as an input to the system. ## How is this useful? - Search Being able to search all your stuff in one place is useful to me. If you use only Google or only Apple services, this may not apply. - Connect Information is connected. My annotations on a website connect to a blog post I wrote which was reviewed by a friend of mine. ```JavaScript Website <--[REFERENCES]-- Blog post <--[PROOFREAD]-- Contact ``` A meta tool should be able to capture and convey this meta information. - Backup Having a backup of your most important info is good practice. With so much data on so many servers a modern backup strategy does _not_ need to involve yet another server (although it could). You just need to back up all your data _on your own computer_ so that it exists on some server and on your computer. Cloud based apps like Notion do _not_ store your data on your computer. You need another way. - Aggregate Think of this like personal analytics. - What websites do you visit most often? - What apps do you use? - How much time to you spend on youtube vs coding vs meeting on zoom? A meta tool should have all this information, so it should be able to aggregate it for you and answer these questions at a glance. With this information you can set goals, rank your time, steer your life. Your computer already knows everything you do, put it to work providing this information to you.