Unbundling Tools for Thought

The idea of having this giant graph where all your data is hyperlinked is cute, but in practice, it’s completely unnecessary. Things live in separate apps just fine. How often, truly, do you find yourself wanting to link a task in your todo list app to a file in Dropbox?

People have this aspirational idea of building a vast, oppressively colossal, deeply interlinked knowledge graph to the point that it almost mirrors every discrete concept and memory in their brain. And I get the appeal of maximalism. But they’re counting on the wrong side of the ledger. Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt . Every link dou... See more