App Identity

March 1, 2022

I bounce around productivity apps, and I donā€™t like that.

I bounce from Notion to Craft to Goodnotes to Obsidian to something-I-built-myself and back again. I canā€™t stick to one thing.

My notes are fragmented across apps. Things arenā€™t all in one place. I donā€™t have the mythical ā€œsecond brainā€ app where every thought Iā€™ve ever had is written down and searchable.

It feels like I want my identity to be attached to one app. That I use one app, and itā€™s my go-to. A piece of my identity. Itā€™s really similar to how my brain wants ā€œdefault stacksā€.

But I think that I have to accept that that just wonā€™t happen for me. I enjoy testing out new stuff too much; a shiny new app comes around, or I just want the features back from an app I used to use, so I switch.

And at the end of the day, it doesnā€™t really matter! I feel like it matters that my notes are all located in the same app, but Iā€™ve also never had an issue remembering which app I was using when I took those notes. Itā€™s a problem that Iā€™ve never actually had. For some reason, my memory for ā€œwhere did I take these notesā€ seems quite strong.

So at the end of the day, maybe my ā€œidentityā€ (for myself, in my own brain) is jumping around from app to app when I feel like I want to. Iā€™ll keep doing that. It makes me happy.

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