Welcome to issue #8 of Homescreen. Here you can find ideas, thoughts and reasons why I choose which app deserves to stay on my phone, tablet and smartwatch.

This week, I finally end my search for a knowledge base app, settling for Anybox.

As I mentioned in issue #3, I always struggled to find a proper knowledge base app. I tried Obsidian, Evernote and many other platforms and apps.

Writing this newsletter is bringing more clarity in my thoughts, because it forces me to think deeply about my choices, and this deep thinking is actually bringing very good results. After challenging Reader by Readwise with Reeder in issue #7, I really thought I should solve the issue of not having a proper knowledge base. Up until a few weeks ago, my knowledge base was my ‘Saved Messages’ conversation in my Telegram account. I would periodically check notes there and delete the ones that were not interesting anymore. But in doing so, I lost a lot of things that in a specific moment I thought were not useful, but that maybe could be useful in the future.

That’s why I put myself to the task of finding a proper knowledge base app. I opened the App Store and looked for anything that had these few basic requirements:

• A free plan that include 90% of features

• A premium plan that costs less than 50€/year

• Universal app across macOS, iPadOS and iOS

• Nice interface

• A simple but not trivial way of organizing items into folders and/or tags

I could go on with listing each app I installed a tried and why it didn’t work, but you could guess that it didn’t work for me because it didn’t have one or more of these requirements.

I eventually ended up sticking with Anybox, that I thought was just a copy-paste app because it has a very minimal and generic interface. But it does the work!

Anybox is available on any Apple device, has folders and tags, provides an extension for all types of browsers and even has a lot of different widgets!

I surely needed a way to store ‘unprocessed’ items’ and processed ones, and Anybox does that in its own way: Unsorted items are stored in a special inbox, that is different from the All inbox, which instead stores all of them.

It also has two other inboxes, Starred and Today, for which I set up a dedicated workflow:

• When an item is saved from a link, browser extension or share sheet, it gets both saved in the All, Unsorted and Today inboxes;

• Hopefully every day, I go through the items in the Today inbox and move them to their dedicate folders. I have several folders for my personal stuff, one folder for work stuff and a dedicated folder for all my Pokémon-related links, that grow quickly over time. I don’t use tags for the moment;

• If I don’t process the items every day, I can go through them in the Unsorted inbox. Ideally, my inbox zero would be the Unsorted inbox to have zero items.

• If there’s something that I have seen but I still don’t feel it’s processed (maybe something I need to do about that item or revisit a few times more before archiving it), I put it in the Starred inbox, meaning that it deserves my attention among all other links. I usually have no more that a dozen links here, to keep my focus high.

• To help me review items over time, I set up a handful of widget, especially on my 13” iPad Pro, that put them in front of me every time I need them. I configured each widget (one for each Focus page: Personal, Work and Pokémon-related) based on a specific smart list I created in the app. Smart lists are a nice way to organize items with a specific pattern. For example, ‘items that I saved in the past week, are starred and are in a specific folder’. This keeps the most important things I want to revisit ast the center of my desktop every time I want to get some things done. And it doesn’t even matter if I don’t click on them to see the actual content: it’s more of a way to keep me hooked with those items.

Anybox seems very powerful, and I believe I only scratched the surface. And as soon as I surpass the threshold of 50 items saved (I’m very close, but I only started using it a week ago), I’ll surely upgrade to the lifetime plan, that only costs 45€. I could also compromise on the 20€/year plan, but 45€ for this seems like very reasonable, for how powerful this is. I’ll link to the official website for more info.

Thanks for reading!

Did you try Anybox? Let me know if you give it a try! And if you have ideas about new apps to try or feedback about this workflow, don’t hesitate to shoot an email to hey@jaack.me