How to Remember Everything You Consume

We all have a graveyard of things we found interesting and lost.

The TikTok you saved and never watched. The book you reviewed on Goodreads and never opened again. The movie you logged on Letterboxd and never rewatched. The tweet you bookmarked and forgot.

This is where elaborative encoding comes in, the neuroscience term for the way your brain stores new information by hooking it onto things you already know. The more connections a piece of information has, the more paths your brain has to reach it later, which is why the ideas you sit with stick around while the ones you passively scroll past disappear by morning.

Studies show that relating new material to what you already know holds up far better over time than just reviewing it, because your memory was never a hard drive that files things away intact. It’s why you can still sing every word of a song from 2009 but can’t remember what you read this morning, or why you know a celebrity’s birthday just because you share it, or how a new neighborhood suddenly makes sense the second you realize the coffee shop is two blocks from the place you already go. It’s a web, and a thing only stays if it’s tied to the rest of it.

Saving something, and noting why it caught you and what it connects to, is the thing that turns something you saw into something you know. I know it feels like busywork, but I promise it’s worth your time.

What it is

A fast way to save and organize anything you consume, links, thoughts, images, into a single Notion database, from your iPhone or Mac. You press a button, or share from any app, and answer a few quick questions, what it’s about, a note, and what kind of thing it is. It files the item in Notion with the date attached, tagged and sorted, ready to revisit or build from later. You can also just send the link, skip the rest of the stuff, and add it later if that is better.

Why I built this

I want to pay closer attention to the media, content, and art I take in. Organizing it by topic makes it stick with me longer and gives me room to think about what something actually means and how it fits the world around me. It feeds my writing too, a running library of inspiration and examples.

I built this after watching Mickey Galvin’s video on creative systems. mickey is an actor, director, writer, and creative based in NYC who makes YouTube videos about her life in New York, video essays, and creative process.

In the video above (which you should watch) Mickey mentions Twyla Tharp, a choreographer and author of the 2003 book The Creative Habit. Tharp’s method is the box. She starts each project with a file box, writes the project name on it, and fills it over time with everything that feeds the work, notebooks, clippings, tapes, scraps. In her words, the box is the raw index of your preparation, not that preparation realized. It means you never start from nothing.

This system is a digital box. Everything lives in one searchable place, so a single item can feed more than one project.

Mickey uses a tool called Sublime for hers. Sublime is a knowledge management app built for creatives, you save what you come across into cards, group them into collections, and its AI surfaces related ideas from other people’s libraries. It has a free tier, but the good parts, unlimited saves, the AI discovery, the insights, sit behind paid plans.

Mickey makes a point in the video that if the system she uses doesn’t work for you, find one that does. That’s exactly what I did, and it is what I’d want you to do too. If my system isn’t the one that works for you, feel free to change it or forget it all together.

I wanted something simpler and higher-level, and I wanted to see what I could build myself without spending a dime. I made a system in Notion, for free. Mine doesn’t do the AI discovery or the community side, it just captures, tags, and organizes, which is the part I needed. In the future, I’d like to give Sublime a run to test the other features, but until then, I will be sticking with my Notion page.

What you’ll need

Three things, all free: a Mac and/or iPhone, a free Notion account, and a free Google account. Total cost to run it: $0. It takes about 30 to 45 minutes to set up once, then you never touch the setup again. One catch, it’s Apple-only, since it runs on the Shortcuts app.

The full step-by-step build is below for paid subscribers. Paid subscribers on Substack (which is cheaper than Sublime!!) support me in my writing, guides, meetups, and more. You’ll get every click, no code experience needed, plus the exact script to copy and troubleshooting for when something doesn’t work.