Your digital memory — organized, searchable, and always available
I’ve recently started a small personal project—not to build something complex, but to organize myself better by using tools I already have. Operating systems today come with excellent file systems. macOS, for example, includes built-in tagging, which helps with categorization. Markdown is a flexible, portable format for writing and linking ideas between files. So I thought: why not combine these into a productivity and organization system with zero overhead?
This approach reminds me of something I did as a kid. I once reused wooden packaging to build a model of the Eiffel Tower. The packaging itself was made of long, polished, and varnished wooden sticks—someone had clearly put effort into making them. It felt wrong to throw them away. All I had to do was measure, cut, and assemble. I didn’t need to paint or sand anything—the finishing was already done. What I built wasn’t just a reuse of materials but of their craftsmanship and form.
Over the years, I’ve tried many tools to organize my research, hobbies, and notes. But almost every time, the same problems emerged: the tools would get abandoned, become too generic, or fail to integrate search effectively. Information would get scattered and slowly lost over time.
Then, a few days ago, a friend visited. While showing him around, he noticed the Eiffel Tower model and was surprised I still had it. As we reminisced, I had a sudden insight: what if I reused the tools I already rely on—Finder, Markdown, and file tags—just like I reused the wood? What if the answer isn’t building new software, but building new meaning on top of what already exists?
As a Mac user, Finder is my daily interface for everything. It does a good job organizing files. Its tagging feature, though often overlooked, works well once you adopt it. For writing, Markdown is ideal. It’s readable, flexible, and easy to link across documents. I use vscode.dev as a lightweight, browser-based editor—no installation, no setup.
The combination is simple but powerful:
- Finder handles the file structure.
- Tags let me group, filter, and categorize across projects.
- Markdown allows links between documents, paragraphs, and even web content.
Each of these tools operates at a different layer—file-level, tag-level, and idea-level. Together, they map naturally onto the way memory and knowledge are organized: sometimes hierarchical, sometimes graph-based. Markdown links mirror cognitive connections between ideas; tags resemble thematic overlaps; and documents themselves can form structured trees.
The beauty is that this system is entirely portable. It can work on Windows, Linux, or macOS. Other tools—like Excel, image editors, or video software—can fit in too, as long as the file formats support links or metadata. Like my Eiffel Tower project, this isn’t about inventing from scratch—it’s about repurposing what’s already useful.
The only thing missing now is a way to visualize the structure I’m creating—how files, tags, and links intersect over time. That’s what I’ll explore in my next post. Feel free to reach out if you find this useful.