 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, there's books, there's art, and there's a lot more. And of course my long-term memory is terrible. If I don't note things down in some way, then I'm probably going to 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 a man's thinking methods. It was never made, but he called it a memex, and he described it in an essay called As We May Think. 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 I was reading something now and then ten years later I came back to it, I would be able to see what I read and then what I wrote about what I read. And then not much happened in between. And then what happened is I had a hard drive crash where I lost everything. It finally convinced me to put all of my stuff online, and ultimately I landed on Evernote. 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 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. A basic list of tags that you can add to any single note. And then over on the left side here, there's a lot of different folders that you can set up on your own. And so I have a folder that's a breakdown of things I found on the web, annotations and highlights from books, notes from short fiction, notes about movies, and a list of music that I ultimately will get around to listening to. Another great thing about Evernote is it has really great image support. And so if I see something online that I really like, I will just save it into here and then come back to it later when I'm working on a layout for The Verge or a story or coming up with a design of my own. So the number one way that I pull stuff in here is via Chrome. 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 highlight it, pull up the Evernote web clipper, and I clip the selection. Pretty simple. 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 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 of the things that were among the best that I 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, clip the image, and Evernote will save it. You can jump 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 to highlight and save for later. Usually I would use the 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 in Instapaper and I go for that same jellyfish article, so I'll highlight it the entire thing, click share, email link with selection, email it to myself, it'll send, it will appear on Evernote. So yeah, it'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 I'll have highlighted and saved 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 what you can do is plug it directly into your computer and then save those highlights into a text file. And then a couple of 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 the new Chrome extension, you can search Google and in the sidebar 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 JellyfishArt.com, but then what I also have is a note from Evernote which is that story, can a 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 and 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 of 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've found for augmenting my rapidly fading memory.