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Digital Tools I Wish Existed (2019)
My digital life in a nutshell: I discover relevant content I don’t have time to consume, I find time and become overwhelmed with my scattered backlog, I wish the content were in a different format, and then I’m unable to find something again once I’ve consumed it. Not retaining enough is a valid problem but we’ll tackle that one later. There’s a lot of generalization in my summary but the core issue is an extraordinarily high level of friction in the process of finding, organizing, and sharing digital content.
Content is published in a variety of formats including but not limited to images, sound files, videos, Google Drive docs, diagrams, long-form paywalled articles, PDFs, powerpoint presentations, and base 64 encoded blobs. A well-designed tool should disappear and allow complete attention to the task at hand, but digital devices today are far from this ideal - often due to arcane copyright laws or profit-seeking. My thanks to Arthur Tyukayev, Alex Ly, David Heimann, Em deGrandpré, Alexey Guzey, Sam Tkachuk, and Brian Timar for reading drafts of this and providing wonderful feedback.
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