Building yourself a digital file makes your life a lot easier.
The title of this text is “Apps to Never Forget Anything”, but the most crucial benefit of these apps and tools is that they make you feel safe to forget things so you can focus on thinking, rather than trying to remember everything in your head.
As David Allen says, your brain should be thinking and arising with ideas, rather than holding information.
Writing down and saving things to your digital file allows you to unload information from your mind, which frees up mental space.
Up next
The first one on my list is Up next. this is often a new app I discovered recently. Essentially, it’s quite a reading app like Pocket and Instapaper, but I feel it’s great as a digital library where you can save your favorite articles, videos, and websites than on.
It’s almost like another reading app I like called Matter, but I picked Up next for this list because it’s available both on iOS and Android, whereas Matter is an iOS-only app.
You can save any blog post, video, or anything you don’t want to forget from your mobile and also from your internet browser with just a few clicks.
Then, what’s cool about it’s that it organizes the items you saved into categories like a long read- short listen, etc, which makes it easier to navigate and find the things you’re looking for.
It has a full-text search, meaning you can search inside the articles and websites you saved.
Also, you’ll follow your favorite blogs, newsletters, and creators so whenever they publish new content, it’ll show up in your timeline so you can save it directly to your library.
And then you can organize the things in your library into lists. So for instance, you’ll make a list of Photoshop tutorials and a list useful apps, and so on.
Also, you’ll attach a note to any item too if you want to add a bit of description or memo so you can remember them or find them more easily later on.
And it is often connected to Readwise. It means if you create highlights in Upnext, they will be exported to your favorite note app.
Highlighting
It’s got everything you would like as a digital filing cabinet. It’s not free and is a touch more expensive than apps like Pocket and Instapaper, but I feel the extra features are well worth the price.
My Reach
the other is reach. Again this is often a new app, but I feel it’s fascinating and has tons of potential. What’s unique about this app is that you simply can connect the items you saved directly to each other. So for instance, if you think that a blog post is related to a book, you’ll link them together so you can build a network of items inside your digital filing cabinet.
linking saved items
And counting on the item you saved, you’ll give it various properties like in Notion which can be location, URL, priorities, due date, status then on which makes it easier to organize them.
Properties
Once you give them your preferred properties and connections, you’ll switch to the visualizer which is kind of like the graph view in some note apps. I feel this is useful so you can easily see how different items are related. you’ll build your own Wikipedia inside your digital library.
The visualizer
Right now, my reach is free and available both for iOS and Android. So try it out!
Notion
The next one I want to recommend is Notion. Well, I don’t think you would like an explanation for this, so I’ll keep it brief. The notion is simply so versatile that it can be anything. Some people use it as a note app. Others use it as a project management tool etc.
So naturally, it is often a digital filing cabinet too. Simply save anything you would like to save on the web from the share menu on mobile or the browser extension. then you can organize them inside Notion however you like. I’m not an expert on this app, so I’ll skip the small print.
And also Evernote remains a great filing cabinet too with arguably the best web clipper in the market!
Raindrop
The next one is the one I usually use, that’s Raindrop. If you’ve been following my channel and blog, you would possibly be sick of hearing this already. But it’s incredibly useful and cheap.
You can save any link as well as photos, videos, pdfs, and audio files in Raindrop. then organize them into lists or with tags. which you’ll share with your friends and family easily. This could be handy when you’re collecting resources for a project with other people.
My app collection
Sharing an inventory
A great thing is that you can upload up to 10GB a month if you have the pro plan. So you’ll use it just like Google Drive and Dropbox. But apparently, you can’t upload a huge file that’s more than ~300MB, so not suitable if you’ve got lots of big files.
What I like is that it can save permanent copies of the items you saved. It means if you save a blog post to Raindrop, it’ll automatically take a copy of it so you can see it even if the blog post got taken down or disappeared.
Permanent copy
But my favorite thing about Raindrop is its integrations with many apps. most significantly, you’ll connect it to Alfred and Raycast if you’re using Mac. This way, you’ll instantly look up things in your Raindrop library anywhere on your Mac so you can find the links, photos, videos, or anything you saved in only a few seconds.
Raycast with the Raindrop extension
For me, Raindrop is an almost perfect digital file. Some people are concerned about its privacy policy. If you’ve got a look at their app privacy, you’ll see it collects some data about you. And also some points out that it’s made by a Russian company. If you’re worried about that, you would possibly want to try another tool. Perhaps you wish for the next one!
My mind
Last, but not least is my mind, which is one of my all-time favorite apps. it’s an excellent privacy policy as well as unique great features as your digital library.
My mind uses AI to automatically organize the items you saved. So let’s say you see an awesome blog post. you would like to save it so you don’t forget about it. Just send it to mind and it’ll automatically analyze the content of the article using AI and assign a bunch of tags. Doing so makes it much easier to seek out this item later when you need it.
So, this is often the biggest benefit of using this tool — it saves you tons of time for organizing the items you saved by yourself because it does that for you. So if you’re uninterested in reviewing everything you saved and giving it some tags, this is often perfect.
Also compared to Raindrop, it doesn’t collect any data about you, so if privacy is your concern, this might be the one!
On the opposite hand, it doesn’t have an honest sharing option like Raindrop maybe because it emphasizes privacy. It allows you to generate a public link to an item that only lasts 24 hours. But that’s it. Not quite that. To most people, this could be enough, but I find it a touch insufficient for my workflow.
Another thing is that you simply cannot create folders or lists for organization, which is understandable because the concept of this app is your mind which doesn’t have any folder. But it’d be nice to possess, in my opinion.
But I heard they’re developing an identical feature now, so there could be something like lists and folders soon.
Overall my mind is such an incredible app. I’ve been an enormous fan of it for more than 2 or 3 years now and am excited about how it’s going to be in the future. It’s available both on iOS and AndroidSummary
Summary
Alright, those were my favorite tools as your digital file. Let me know in the comment which one you liked! There are different apps to keep yourself focused and they are available for both IOS and Andriod Users.
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