In order to keep the high volume of media I stumble upon manageable, be able to reference it later, and keep a record of all that I see, read, watch, listen to, and generally enjoy, I’ve long had no systematic way of going about this until recently (read half a year ago). Most of what I’ll talk about in this post can most likely be replicated on other platforms, but the apps discussed here are exclusive to iOS and macOS.

I used to keep a spreadsheet holding all the books, movies, and shows that I’ve read or watched, but using that spreadsheet on my phone where I log that information the most, made it feel like a chore. So I started using the apps Book Tracker and Movie Tracker for books and shows/movies respectively, and MusicBox and Play for music and (YouTube) videos respectively.

The most important piece in it all was GoodLinks, a read-it-later app, the kind of app that I didn’t know I needed. GoodLinks let me save links for later and get done with my social media doses for the day much quicker instead of reading articles right in Ivory or something.

I even used it as a bookmarking app until I found out the links aren’t archived. They’re flushed from the device storage after some time and not saved to iCloud. With my 400 links at the time, I discovered that 8 were rotten links. Mind you, my GoodLinks collection started in July of 2024 and by December of that year, 8 links were already rotten.

This put me in panic mode so I began searching for a bookmarking app that archives pages for me. Raindrop.io was at the top of search results. I had known about that app for a while, but never liked using it, especially on macOS. It just didn’t feel like the user experience I was after. That’s where Anybox comes into play. It’s a bookmark manager that can handle every file type you throw at it, just like Raindrop.io. It’s a native experience and syncs over iCloud and not some third party servers. Most importantly, the lifetime license to Anybox is just a little more expensive than the former.

Since getting that app, I’ve put 5gb worth of data into it. My entire GoodLinks library, memes, some cultural artifacts that have since been taken down, bookmarks, all in that one app. Everything follows the same tagging hierarchy I use in GoodLinks, though I modified it to fit the additional filetypes Anybox can handle. What ties all of this together is in the next section of this blog post.

I’ve tried this “new” hot thing called the Zettelkasten note taking method, but this pretentious stuff is really not for me. What I took away from this method is the principle of files over apps. What this means is that I store any notes or information that stuck in my brain in one central place which is my note taking app of choice Bear.

GoodLinks offers some highlighting with notes. Instead of storing notes about the article in GoodLinks, once I’m done with it, I move them over to Bear. The result is one central hub containing everything I know and enjoy. The aforementioned iOS apps also support deeplinking so I can link to each item from another app directly in Bear.1 Speaking of linking, Bear supports Markdown wikilinks, which I use a lot when one note references another. It’s a good thing Bear lacks the notorious Obsidian graph because that makes me link much more intentionally and not just to grow the graph.

In general I try to keep the number of items, that land in the tracking apps to begin with, to a minimum. I routinely triage what I will eventually look into and what not, so even if the backlog grows, I can trim it if necessary. When watching shows, I write down what I think – not for this blog, but for me. I might get into a conversation about this or that show/book/album/movie/topic and I would very much like to remember what I thought about it when I took it into me.

We truly live in the Information Age. But this age doesn’t mean for us that all the information we crave is easily accessible, it’s just that we’re flooded with it. I save a ton of videos locally because I don’t trust to find them online a few months later. Been burnt way too many times, but now I also save every link I stumble upon. Most importantly, I save what I understood from it, too. Because of this large information intake, our brains rightfully can’t handle it. So we run out of memory and forget things one by one. What I did here is try and remedy this problem a little.