Andrew McCluskey
I’m not using Sublime the way I know I’m going to use it - but I’m feeding it daily, because my future self is going to thank me. https://sublime.app/
You don't need me to reflect on the onslaught of information - the last time I felt like this was late 2000's, early 2010's when Tech Crunch was blowing up - there was new information, a new tactic, a new strategy to apply every week.
Now it feels like there's something significant every day, hell - every hour. I'm back to using an RSS reader to handle everything, and I've already lost control.
I've got too much information to read, my brain is already full, I'm forgetting things I want to remember and I'm doing this in isolation, i.e., sharing good stuff to colleagues is rarely appreciated as they're under the same information load ;-p
Enter Sublime.
The killer functionality for a bookmarking tool is ease of input and ease of retrieval - Sublime nails both.
When you add something to Sublime it's represented as a card - a discrete container that holds the information, (text, highlight, image, video, associated url, etc.). Browser and phone extensions allow for single click additions to my library - if I want more context I can add a note, categorize, determine access - all from the share interface. When I'm in my library I can scroll through categories or - what I do most - search.
I love the design - it's lightweight & bereft of fluff. You know how sometimes the container influences the content? Sublime doesn't do this. The information is the star - not the platform it's on.
All this to say - for a "Second Brain" / "Personal Knowledge Management" system - Sublime knocks it out the park - and for that alone is worth the price of admission.
But it's so much more than that :-)
With social networks the human is the center of the universe, with Sublime it's knowledge.
In the way you can see who is connected to whom on Facebook - Sublime does the same for information. When I add a card from a url - Sublime will not only show me how many other people have added the same url - it will show "associated" cards that relate to that information.
I don't need to know how the app does, this but it's pretty remarkable. From choosing to save something, I can quickly see if anybody else is giving it weight, which is cool enough, but then also see additional ideas and knowledge that are adjacent to it.
This is pretty cool and opens brand new doors when it comes to researching ideas.
But there's an essential component to Sublime that makes it the killer app for research.
Every piece of information inside Sublime has been added by a person who thought it was useful enough to save for later. The result is the related cards the app suggests - are typically high quality information.
There's no follower counts or likes - yes you can see who's curating a topic you're interested in and follow their feed - but there's no resulting bump in social status. There are metrics around how many people have added a certain url but that serves to enhance the information - not the people that added it.
To steal a bit from the AI that was helping me write this: it's not social media, it's social knowledge - it's not about who you know, it's about what you know. When I'm researching an idea, I can start with my saves, and then jump across associated ideas curated by other sharp people I've never met.
This is cool ;-)
But there's the next level that I'm waiting for.
So I ran a small experiment.
I have a "collection" in my library called: "Remind Me Often" - this is where I add knowledge that makes me feel good about being alive - about being human - there's well over 100 cards in there. Although I couldn't grab all the links - I copied all of the highlights and the context I added from all the cards and pasted them into GPT and asked it to distill what my values and core beliefs are. This was the output:
“I believe in forging genuine human connections, taking a long-haul approach over quick wins, celebrating small but consistent acts of creativity, curating meaningful ideas over shallow hype, and leading everything I do with kindness, nuance, and a spirit of service.”
And sure - my AI is going to blow a little smoke - but it feels about right - I do feel as though that's what I'm about and reflects my work at musicto.com. However - by doing this exercise it got me thinking.
What if I can have a dedicated AI that can help me interrogate the cards fully - in that it can read the full articles - follow the links, etc - so I'm working with a full analysis of cards I've curated. What if that AI can run through the set of related cards and suggest additional insights based on the highly curated information environment provided by the Sublime community?
I've used many bookmark tools over the years, from delicious, to pocket, to evernote and more, and they all had one thing in common: I stopped using them. I think now it was because they failed at the second part of essential "second brain" / PKM functionality - ease of retrieval.
Adding something to a PKM only helps if you know it's there and you can access it easily. I've already forgotten 90% of the things I've added to Remind Me Often or Foundation Architecting - but I'm not worried - I believe that with Sublime's approach to design and smart integration of AI - they're going to not only solve the retrieval challenge, they're going to enhance it with the social knowledge construct.
Sublime isn't just where I'm building my second brain, it's where my future self is going to mine meaning from what I - and other smart people - have already marked as high signal.
It is indeed pretty cool :-)
I'm aware I'm putting a lot of time and energy into building on Sublime and that could be risky if I didn't feel so strongly about the team.
I came across Sari in 2019 and signed up for her Check Your Pulse newsletter - I resonated with her philosophy around human curation and the future of search. I have her launch email for Sublime, back in August '23. I've been using the product for over a year and recently purchased the lifetime plan (and have the socks to prove it!)
Along with Alex as the more visible face of the community - the team feels like regular people that I would want hang with. There's no hyper growth bullshit - there's no move fast and break things - there's a deliberate and considered approach to the evolution of the product.
When you listen to them on podcasts you get a sense of people who want to build something significant, something human, something that will stand the test of time and be a complement to technology rather than compete against it. They're building a life's work around a compelling idea that makes 100% sense to me and I'm so here for it and so rooting for this team to succeed.
So go check out Sublime's basic plan: "it's free until you can't - live without it."
Sublime is a personal knowledge management tool designed to help you save, organize, and create with everything that inspires you. Trusted by leading thinkers a...
(There's no affiliate link - I wrote this 'cos I believe in the product and want to see more smart people using it ;-p)
