Dr. Luc Beaudoin is the co-founder and CEO of CogSci Apps, the developers of a brilliant Mac productivity tool called Hookmark. He is also an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University and author of two books on using cognitive science to improve productivity.

In this conversation, we discuss the origins and philosophy of Hookmark, the concept of ubiquitous linking and how it improves productivity, the importance of deep focus for knowledge work, how to reduce friction in information management, how cognitive science can help you work more effectively, and the importance of deliberate practice for knowledge workers.

Whether you’re a student, academic, or professional, this conversation offers valuable tips and strategies for using this powerful tool to streamline your workflows and help with your focus.

Show notes

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Transcript

Jorge: Luc, welcome to the show.

Luc: Thanks for having me on.

Jorge: I’m excited to have you on. I am a user of a product that you make, and I am very excited to both talk about the product, but also more importantly, the philosophy behind this product. And, before I say too much about it, I would love to hear your perspective on it and hear how you introduce yourself to our listeners.

About Luc & CogSci Apps

Luc: Sure. Sure. I’m the developer of the Hookmark productivity app. I head the development team of the Hookmark productivity app. That’s a CogSci Apps invention. We also make an app called mySleepButton. Yeah, Hookmark is an app that aims to help you link your digital life. It’s for people who work intensely with information on their Macs. So it’s a Mac-only app at this point, although we have an iPhone and iPad version in beta testing.

Jorge: That’s exciting to know.

Luc: Yeah, it’s about linking your digital life. And the history behind that is, I joined the Learning Kit Project at Simon Fraser University. Co-founded it, actually, in 2002. I was tasked with building a general-purpose learning environment. And it quickly dawned on me that one of the key features of a learning environment would be to be able to link anything in the environment to anything else. There was a browser in the app, there was a glossary manager, there was… eventually we built a self-testing kit into it, a note-taking tool, etc. So at that point, we were building that app in Java, and then we reiterated that in a web app. That went on well for a long time. I was leading the project on the software side for eight years. Yeah, so that was the core idea.

And then it occurred to me that actually this linking anything to anything should really be at the operating system level. Why confine ourselves to having this linking done in the app itself? It should be done at the operating system level. And I wasn’t sure why I assumed that only Apple could do this, so I got in touch with Steve Jobs, actually, after the iPad came out, and I pitched an idea to him, which included this. But then we realized that there are actually APIs that we could use, and we could actually build this ourselves if we wanted to be ambitious.

So I sat on the idea for a while, and then we started developing this, actually, in 2016. Initially, we were focused on learning environments, but then it became clear that this is a general-purpose tool for knowledge workers.

Practical Applications of Hookmark

Jorge: I was gonna ask you about that phrase, “learning environment.” When I think of Hookmark, I think that it allows me to link to — I’m gonna use the word “anything,” although I suspect it’s not anything — but it allows me to link to a lot of things on my computer, even things that you would not normally expect to have stable links. Is the idea there that the context, my learning environment, is my computer?

Luc: There might be all kinds of resources and all kinds of apps that you might want to learn from or build knowledge from. So to generalize it, it would include knowledge building or doing project-oriented work. For instance, in your mail app, if you’re writing a paper, you might have emails from the editor. If it’s an edited chapter or journal article, you might have emails from your co-authors, your reviewers, etc. You’d want to be able to link those up to your draft — at least some of them up to your draft — so that you can quickly get from your draft to those emails to refresh your memory on what people are suggesting or asking of you.

So email would be an example that you wouldn’t normally think, “Oh, I can link an email.” I guess if you’re using Gmail, then it’s natural to think of linking emails. But if you’re using Apple Mail or Airmail or something like that, you might not have thought of it. So we cover that. And as well, arbitrary files, like a lot of academics would be writing in LaTeX or people might be writing in Markdown or Microsoft Word. You’d want to be able to link your draft and ancillary material like your outline and whatever elements, files you might have. Supporting materials, you might want to link them to your draft as well. Key papers that you’re referencing.

So yeah, all kinds of things. You’d want to be able to link all kinds of things, including your tasks if you use something like OmniFocus or Things or TaskPaper, whatever you use. Everybody’s got some way of recording their tasks. So if you’re writing a paper, for instance, or creating any other artifact, you’d have a to-do list, and it makes sense to be able to link that to-do list to your draft. With Hookmark, you can do that for a lot of apps, let’s say. You’re right. We can’t work with every app at the moment. But we cover quite a few apps.

Jorge: You mentioned Gmail, and I suspect that most folks, when one says “links,” the first thing that comes to mind is web links, right? I think that the environment that folks most closely associate with hyperlinking is the web. Now I remember way back, it’s probably gonna be about 20 years ago, I used a mail/calendar/to-do app on the Mac called Entourage, which was made by Microsoft. And it was like the Mac version of Outlook, right?

I know that Outlook does similar things, but one of the things that I loved about Entourage was that it allowed me to create a new to-do that was associated with an email. I think you could do the same for appointments, right? So it allowed keeping context between things, which is oftentimes what happens in the absence of these things: you write a to-do, it’s like, “Get back to Luc,” and then two weeks pass and it’s, “What, which Luc did I mean?” It’s like I’ve lost context.

I loved Entourage for that feature. And it had this thing called Project Center that allowed you to manage your projects, and it was really useful, but it was limited in that you could only link to things within the context of Entourage. And what Hookmark does for me is that it makes it so that the context is my Mac. It’s like, real, almost literally like anything on my Mac. Almost anything that I work with, I can add links to.

Luc: That’s the idea. I’ve used Entourage as well, and the software that I was alluding to that we had developed had the same limitation as the initial software at Simon Fraser University called GStudy and StudyS. You can only link within those software environments. So yeah, we want to take that, to generalize that, so you can link, ultimately, anything to anything. That’s the ideal. Anything that’s stable.

Jorge: Okay. I was gonna ask you about that because, first of all, when I first installed Hookmark, I remember thinking, “Wow, this is really easy to use, but I bet that there’s a lot of complexity behind the scenes.”

For example, I’ll describe like a common use case for me. I’m taking notes in Obsidian, so it takes Markdown. And I’ll have a Microsoft Word document in one window, and I’ll have my Obsidian notes in another window. And I’m taking notes on this document that I’m reading. And I have a couple of keyboard shortcuts where I will evoke Hookmark when I am focused on the Word document, run a couple of keyboard shortcuts, and then I can insert a link to that Word file in my Obsidian notes, in Markdown format already. So it does all the formatting for me. And then afterwards, when I revisit my note, I just click on that link, and it opens the Word document where I was. And that is true even if I move the Word file to a different location on my Mac, right?

Luc: That is one of the key features we built in. We put a lot of thought into this, obviously, given that we started in 2002, we’ve had quite the runway. We want to cover a lot of use cases, and moving a file is one of them. So a traditional file link is brittle, it’s file:\/\/ . Web developers will know that you get an error if you move that file. So we found a way basically of tracking files so that you can rename them and move them. And under most circumstances, as long as it’s the same file, then the link is robust, or you can think of it as being adaptive basically to the file.

Ubiquitous Linking

Jorge: I hope it’s coming across how enthusiastic I am about the functionality that Hookmark provides. And I’m enthusiastic about it as a user, but one of the things that I think is really interesting about this system is that there is… I’m going to use the word philosophy — I don’t know if that’s fair — but it feels to me like there is definitely a particular intent behind it. And there’s a manifesto on your website that has to do with… is the phrase “ubiquitous linking”?

Luc: That’s right, the Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking.

Jorge: What is ubiquitous linking, and why is it important for people?

Luc: Okay, so ubiquitous linking, it’s actually founded in ideas that come from cognitive science. So I’m a cognitive scientist and the name of our software company is CogSci Apps. So, CogSci applications of cognitive science. And the work I did at SFU was in educational psychology, so essentially cognitive science applied to education. That’s how I think about the software work that we do: I think about it in terms of the properties of the human mind.

And, when you can establish a link between two related information items, you can use those links. Basically, it circumvents the need for searching or navigating and gives you immediate access to the information that you need. And while a search may seem like an instantaneous satisfaction of an information need, in fact, searching for information — Googling or using Spotlight or whatever — requires multiple steps. And as you execute those steps, there are consequences for the human mind. The information in your working memory starts to decay, and other information becomes active. So your context starts to shift. And that’s not a good thing, especially if you have to repeat this multiple times because there are multiple information items that you need to work with.

And also there’s the distractibility component. So when you’re searching for information, like for instance, an email, you need to consult the email from a co-author. So you go into your mail app. That’s the most dangerous environment — the browser in the mail app — it’s just so distractible. You can notice something, and the next thing you know, 20 minutes have gone by, and you’ve completely lost your train of thought, and you have to restart. So those are some of the aspects, some of the rationale behind ubiquitous linking.

Another kind of datum there is what happens in expertise. So cognitive scientists have studied expertise in things like chess masters or surgeons or whatever. And one of the things about experts is that they can rapidly encode information and rapidly retrieve information. So a chess master, for instance, can look at six different chess boards and quickly encode it and figure out and know where every piece is on every one of those chess boards.

So that’s an extreme example. So what that means is that their long-term memory, which is information that’s stored for a long time in the brain, approximates in speed working memory, which is very fast memory in the human brain. So the analogy is like RAM and, say, a hard disk in terms of differences in speed.

So that analogy holds with respect to knowledge-intensive work on a computer. To maximize one’s expertise, you need to be able to rapidly encode information — that might be creating that note — and it would be something you need to be able to do quickly. Hookmark assists with that too. And retrieving the information needs to be quick. So yeah, the philosophy, if you will, comes from thinking of knowledge workers as information processing agents themselves.

And then there’s the whole story of consciousness. When people think of consciousness, they tend to think of just the short term — what’s in my immediate awareness — but in fact, consciousness has different time spans. And here I’m inspired by the theory of Merlin Donald, who wrote a book called A Mind So Rare, and many papers on consciousness. If we’re having a conversation, you’re going to be able to remember things that were said previously in that conversation. That’s not in working memory, but it’s in a kind of intermediate memory. So that’s the context that we set up when we’re working. It goes well beyond working memory, but you want the information retrieval and encoding to be quick again. So those are some of the psychological ideas that inspired this particular software and that led to the manifesto.

Jorge: What I’m hearing there is that there’s this element to it that has to do with reducing friction somehow. And I love this analogy with RAM and longer-term storage, which in computers is slower, right? And what I’m hearing here is that when you are doing thought work — I think the phrase you use in the manifesto is deep work, which I’m guessing echoes Cal Newport’s stuff — this idea that you want to have your attention focused on the task at hand. You don’t want to have to be sent off on these side quests to retrieve the information. If you have links to the stuff that you need, you can just click on them without having to go through another tool that might potentially distract you. That’s where the friction would come in.

Luc: That’s right. Yeah, that’s exactly right. The more you repeat that friction, the more tedious it becomes to get stuff done with your information and get your deep work done. So yeah, essentially I think of Hookmark as extending consciousness because a function of consciousness is to retrieve and process information. So this helps you retrieve information that you’re working on.

The most stark case is when you set up your work environment. When you start, let’s say, to resume a draft of some creative artifact, if you can have links to the various pieces that I was referring to, then that saves you a lot of setup time. But also while you’re working, when you’re 15, 20 minutes, an hour into the project, you repeatedly need to access the information. Reducing the friction at setup time and reducing the friction during the process of working are what Hookmark’s about.

Ultimately, Hookmark is very simple. And I’ve had many people tell me, this should be built into macOS. And whether that would be good for us or not, I don’t know. But it certainly feels like something that you’d expect the operating system to have. The OS gives you a search tool. It gives you folders and various apps. But for whatever reason, they haven’t built in linking from anything to anything. And that’s why I got in touch with Steve Jobs when the iPad came out because I thought this and a few other things were things that the iPad and macOS should have.

Jorge: Again, it comes back to this notion of context, right? What is the environment that we’re operating in? I use the Mail app — the built-in Mail app — and Mail app exposes URLs for each message. They have this message URI format, and tools like OmniFocus have shortcuts that allow you to create a new task and associate it with the mail message you’re looking at. And I know that the URI scheme that they use for the Mail app travels between Apple’s platforms. So if I’ve got the same IMAP server configured on my iPad or on my phone, and I click on one of those links in OmniFocus, it’ll take me to the message, right?

Luc: Yeah, it’s message:\/\/ if you look at it, yeah.

Jorge: But again, it’s limited to the Mail app, right? And the ideal would be that every information object that I work with in any of these devices would be addressable in the way that a webpage is.

Luc: Yeah, so we looked at what Apple was doing with Mail and decided to take it further because the user might want to switch to a different mail app or might be using a different mail app. So at the moment we’ve got three core and one or more ancillary… I can’t remember the ancillary ones, but with the three core mail apps, you can actually switch which mail app you want to use, and the links will continue to work. Whereas I don’t know that will work with Apple’s scheme.

Technical Insights and Challenges

Jorge: That’s amazing. One thought that comes to mind in this conversation is that in some ways what you’re driving to here is a manifestation of a vision that has been around for a long time. And I’m thinking of the work of Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart in particular. Why don’t operating systems do this by default? I don’t know if you can answer that, but it’s curious because we’ve known that this is desirable for a long time, right?

Luc: Yes. That’s a good question. And when I started out, I hadn’t referred to the greats. Eventually, I did my homework. And I’m going back to 2002 here and realized, I’m not the first person to have this thought here. There’s a history back here, and it should be known. I don’t understand why they haven’t gone there. And there’s two aspects to this. There’s providing the support in the user interface, but there’s also the automation aspect, which is less obvious to users, but it allows automators, third-party apps, etc., to build things into the system.

So in our manifesto, we’re clear that we’re seeking user interface support and automation support. And Apple does some stuff behind the scenes that they don’t expose through their automation. For instance, if you receive a calendar invitation for a specific date in an Apple message, you can set it up from the message. You can set up that calendar event from the message, and then there’s going to be a back link to the message. But they don’t expose that to users generally in the interface. Like, you can’t copy a link to a message. And the automation is not exposed either. So that’s quite inconvenient.

So we hoped — we being the people who originally signed the manifesto and then subsequent signatories — that having a manifesto, a bit like… it’s actually formally structured like the Agile Manifesto; some of your listeners will be familiar with that highly influential manifesto — that having a manifesto would create a movement. And in fact, it’s made it easier for us to get other developers on board. So there were, I think, 24 of us who originally signed it, mostly developers, but also professors, a product manager, influencers like David Sparks, and Brett Terpstra, who signed this manifesto. If Apple or anybody at Apple is listening, please consult the manifesto and see how the macOS could be even better.

Jorge: And they’re doing little bits of this, right? Like when you were talking about the Messages thing, the feature that came to mind was, in recent OS releases both on the iPad and on the Mac, they’ve been building the capability of the Notes app where they have this notion of contextual notes where if you take a note about a webpage, it’ll automatically bake in a link back to the webpage that you…

Luc: Yeah, Quick Notes.

Jorge: Yeah, Quick Notes, that’s the name of it. But what I’m hearing here though, which I think is the key, is that this really needs to be thought about as an API, as a platform that you can build upon and not just like a per-app bespoke functionality.

Luc: Yeah. So Apple leverages the APIs of several apps who… some of them had the support without us even needing to contact them. When we started out, we looked at their AppleScript dictionary and said, “Oh, wow, we can…” That’s how we got the idea. “We can do this!” Apple certainly didn’t do anything specific for us with its Mail app or the Finder, but it had the support that we needed. And so did other apps.

Other times, we got in touch with developers. We frequently get in touch with the developer or our customers will get in touch with a developer saying, “I want to be able to get more mileage out of your app to be able to link it.” And we’ve got a webpage that customers can send to developers or that we send to developers so they can see what they need to do. And it’s really not very difficult. And the manifesto specifies what we’re looking for.

Hooks

Jorge: I’m gonna try to address questions that folks might have in listening to this conversation. I have the most primitive possible understanding of how Hookmark works, but my impression is that as I am making these links to documents in the system, the links get stored somewhere. There’s a database that keeps track of things, right?

Luc: That actually turns out to be a really important point we can elaborate on.

Jorge: The question that someone might have in mind is, if I’m doing all of this on my Mac, what happens if I later upgrade to a new Mac or if I lose my Mac and have to restore from a backup? My impression is that the database comes along with a new version, right?

Luc: It’s like any other app. Imagine that you’re using OmniFocus, Things, or another task manager. If one of these adverse events happens, you want to be able to restore from backup. So we have you covered there. We put the information where you’d expect, in the Application Support directory and in your preferences. So we track that. And we also provide an import and export mechanism. We have syncing between Macs, and like I said, the iPhone/iPad version is in TestFlight right now. We have a couple hundred users at least—I forgot the exact number—who have been giving it a go. On the iPhone side, your links traverse except for file links. Now, iOS is very… the sandboxing does not give us access to the file system in the way that we need to be useful. So that’s unfortunate. But you get your mail links and all your other links as well.

What I was alluding to about this kind of surprising but important element of the bookmarking behind the scenes is, when you copy a link or you… we haven’t talked about hooks, actually; they’re bi-directional links. Maybe we should talk about that before wrapping up. But when you perform these operations, you get a copy of the link in your database. It effectively becomes a bookmark. It’s private to you. This does not get sent to our servers. It’s wherever you decide to store it. But it turns out that the copy link operation, once you get into the groove of copying links and pasting them where you need them in your tasks, in your, let’s say in Obsidian or whatever—when you do that copy link, that’s a signal that this particular piece of information is of great value. Like there’s a signal out of all the noise there, this is a signal.

If, when you search that database—we provided a search interface to that; in Hookmark, there’s a search window that looks like any information browser you tend to see, so you can also search in Hookmark and you’re basically searching your information gems—so it’s different from Spotlight or a launcher, which has a much larger number of false positives. If you do a file count on your Mac, you can see hundreds of thousands of—if you’re an established user, you’ve got a lot of information there. So there’s a lot of noise when you search. With Hookmark, when you search for something, if you’ve touched it, it’s very likely to show up near the top. So again, it tightens the loop.

I said that searching takes you out of the zone. I’ve got something called a two-second rule. This is kind of arbitrary, but I put this in my Cognitive Productivity book: 80% of the information that you access in a given day, you should be able to get to it within two seconds if you can. Hookmark’s contextual links, the hooks that we’ll talk about later, provide that. And the search will approximate that given how discriminative the information is in a search.

Jorge: So I’m now super excited. Because it’s evident to me that I’m using only a portion of the functionality of the app.

Luc: Yeah.

Jorge: I have used the search bit, but I am now really curious to hear about the bi-directional links that you’re talking about. How does that work?

Luc: And that’s where the name “hook” comes from. We developed the concept of hooking information. Obviously, historically in a hypertext system, bi-directional links existed, and they’ve become more popular now.

But we do this in a different way in that we’re inter-app. So what you do is you bring up Hookmark on an information item. It could be a file in Finder; it could be an open file, say in BBEdit or Microsoft Word. You bring up Hookmark and you copy a link to that particular item that you want to link to something else. Then you might go to Obsidian or any other app, anything else that you want to link this to, some other file, for instance. And you bring up Hookmark again. And instead of copying the link, you’re gonna use the hook to copied link command. And what this does is, it sets up what we call the hook, which is a bi-directional link between the two information items.

And this ends up being important. I think it’s easiest to understand with respect to creative pursuits like writing a document or creating a screencast or something, in that when you bring up your tool then on one side of the link, you get to your destination. So you bring up Hookmark and you’ll see everything that you’ve hooked to it; it’s there in its own window so you don’t have to search for it.

The problem with pasting links is that they’re all over the place. If you look at a web page, there are links all over the place. So what we do is we put these hooks in this window that looks like Spotlight or a launcher. It’s pre-populated with things that you have bi-directionally linked. So when you’re in your draft, you might go to that key email. So then you start reviewing the email. And then you can get from the email—you bring up Hookmark again—and from that email, you can get back to the draft because you’ll see the… It’s like a bookmark, essentially. Hooks are like contextual bookmarks. It’s bookmarks where the item that you’re looking at is like the bookmark folder, if you will.

And for the creative workflow, it’s important, but also for note-taking. If you’re reading a PDF and you want to take a note in the app of your choice, you see, this is the key thing: apps have their strengths, and anybody who’s used a PDF reader—it’s called a reader for a reason, right? It’s not a very good creative environment. You can put your notes in-line, your highlights, etc. I’m not saying that’s not useful, but sometimes you want to take a deep note about something. So then, if your favorite note-taking app is Obsidian, you want to be able to do hook to new note. And we’ve mapped Command-N to that.

So it’ll create the note in the app of your choice. It’ll name that note. The note gets stored and it gets bookmarked and it gets hooked—bi-directionally linked—so that your note is now linked to the PDF and the PDF is linked to your note. So that provides you an additional way to get back to that PDF or to get back to the note if you get distracted. Or even if you’re not distracted, if you’re like me, I typically have over a dozen apps open with multiple files in each app. So getting from one thing to another is easier if you’ve got this contextual hooking information.

Jorge: That’s hugely exciting. Again, I’ve been underusing it because I’ve been using it primarily to get back to the Word file, like I said earlier. But what I’m hearing here is that it can work something like Obsidian’s bi-directional links, where, when I’m in the Word file, I can also bring up the list of places that I’ve linked to that Word file from.

Luc: That’s right. So particularly in creative work, that becomes your hub. It’s your hub. This is where you’re spending your time anyway, and it’s got your links to all your stuff. Actually, we have created a screencast on Bookends, which is a reference management system for mainly academics and other researchers who publish. And I’ve illustrated it with a paper that I was writing at the time, actually, how your draft can be bi-directionally linked to all kinds of pertinent information.

Jorge: I use Bookends myself. So I will look that up.

Luc: Yeah, it’s compatible. They’re an example of a developer we got in touch with and who added functionality that we found helpful. So we partnered with them.

Advice for Knowledge Workers

Jorge: I’m gonna have to do a little bit more reading and watching to get more out of Hookmark itself. There are people who listen to this podcast who are into personal knowledge management. And I would definitely recommend they check out Hookmark. It does change how you use your Mac. But I’m wondering if you have—besides getting Hookmark—if you have any advice for those folks to help them with deep work, primarily through linking, right?

Luc: In terms of advice, I’ve written two cognitive productivity books. So after my stint as a research associate at Simon Fraser University, where I’m currently an adjunct professor, I was in my early forties and I was rebooting my own learning kit. So I said, “What better way to learn than to write some books about what I call cognitive productivity?”

So I have two cognitive productivity books that cover this as one of the elements, but one of them is called Cognitive Productivity with macOS: Seven Principles for Getting Smarter With Knowledge. That’s the subtitle. I also have a book called Cognitive Productivity. In that latter book, I analyze the problems and opportunities that knowledge workers face working with knowledge. So I do a deep dive into that. There’s a long chapter on what makes learning difficult, and not just learning, but doing knowledge work difficult. A lot of that revolves around the software that we have available, which is not quite there yet.

But I chose to provide tips for making the best of the software available at the time when the book was written. So the Seven Principles book has seven principles, and principle four is called Surf Strategically. That’s where all kinds of superficial information processing tasks—kind of the plumbing of knowledge work—are dealt with, bookmarking and the like.

Jorge: I will link to that for folks to check out. Is there anything else that you would like folks to know about deep work and how they can better do it using their computers?

Luc: We can pick something out. A theme of both books is that deliberate practice is the future of expertise in performance disciplines, right? So chess masters practice. I even met a roofer who did practicing as part of his preparing to be a great roofer. Practice is important and it’s something that, when I wrote the book, there were a lot of flashcard apps, but they were mainly used for students, like learning second languages or exam preparations.

So in my book, I developed a concept called “productive practice,” which includes deliberative practice and other forms of practice like test-enhanced learning and the education literature, etc. So there’s software that we can use and incorporate into our workflows for practicing what we’re learning.

So, as part of reading a book, you might create these flashcards. I think knowledge workers don’t really tend to do that. The cognitive science behind it is that we overestimate the information that we’ll be able to remember. When you’re reading something, it’s so present in your consciousness, you get the sense that, “Yeah, I’ll be able to remember this.” But a bit of experience and glancing at one’s bookshelves, one realizes information goes out.

So I’ve been a proponent of what I’ve called productive practice. There’s software, like I mentioned. Anki’s best of class, and there’s another one called RemNote that came out after I wrote my books that supports this kind of learning. But you still have to shoehorn it a little bit into something called productive practice.

Jorge: Anki is the one I use, and hearing you talk about it makes me think of… I recently heard Arnold Schwarzenegger talking about the importance of reps. Doing reps. It feels like this is like intellectual reps, right? Just get your reps in.

Luc: Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, and it’s actually quite complicated. It’s a real big challenge. In the first book, I’ve got two chapters on it. It’s hard to get it right because if you go too deep or too extensive, then your mind won’t be able to keep up with it. But if you go too little, then you’ll miss out on opportunities to learn. And the software isn’t there yet, although there’s Anki and RemNote. Which is the one that you said you used?

Jorge: Anki.

Luc: Oh, you do use Anki. Yeah. So it’s very powerful, but it’s still not quite there yet. So for instance, you’d want to be able to link your notes to what you’re reading about. And I think we could probably with an API, but we haven’t gone there. The API is not friendly to what we want to do. But I think if there was demand, we’d build that in.

Jorge: The UI is also a little bit janky.

Luc: Yeah.

Closing

Jorge: It’s an open-source project, and I don’t want to bemoan it too much. But you can see the ways in which it could be better. We’re nearing the end of our time here together. I’m very thankful for you sharing all this stuff with us. Where can folks follow up with you?

Luc: Okay. So I’ve got a couple of Twitter handles. I have @LucCogZest; that’s my Twitter handle. The Hookmark app has a Twitter handle, @hookmarkapp. And if they just Google Hookmark, the first result will very likely be hookproductivity.com. So we kept the URL from the original name of the app, which was Hook, and it’s a cognitive productivity app. So those are a few places where you could get more information.

Jorge: I’ll include links to all of those and to the manifesto, which I encourage reading because I think that it provides background on why this stuff works, which is so important.

Luc: And people can still sign the manifesto. So we had the original signatories, but we’re adding signatories. So there’s a link called “Sign the Manifesto” there, and you can put in your information, and we’ll add you to the list. Or you can say you want to do it anonymously. That’s a way you can show your support. You can share that information through Twitter or whatever.

Jorge: Fantastic. I encourage everyone to go in and check it out and sign it. And I want to thank you again, Luc, for joining us and for sharing this valuable information with us.

Luc: Thanks for having me on. It was a pleasure talking with you. I’m enjoying your show. Now that I’ve learned about it, boy, you’ve had some really very good guests and very good conversations, so thank you for having me on. It’s an honor.

Jorge: It’s an honor to have you. Thank you.

Luc: Cheers.