Keeping what you are told
How to keep your best finds and trusted recommendations from friends.
Keep them all in one place, and save the two things everyone forgets. Who told you, and what they said.
The usual ways
What everyone tries first.
Screenshots. Fast, and the reason your camera roll has four hundred of them. Fine for an address you will use this week. Hopeless in six months, because you cannot search a picture.
The group chat. Where most recommendations actually arrive. Good for asking, bad for keeping, because a thread is ordered by when something was said rather than by what it was.
A Google Maps list. The best of these if places are all you save, and genuinely good at it. No help at all for a plumber, a GP, a book or a case of wine.
Instagram saves. Where a lot of it arrives now, usually as a reel somebody sent you. Easy to save, impossible to search, and a year of them is a folder you never open.
One long note. Searchable, which puts it ahead of the rest. But it grows into a wall, and nothing in it tells you which ones you would actually go back to.
And nobody uses just one of them. Your finds end up spread across all five, which is why you can never put your hand on the one you need.
Finding it again
You do not have to remember the name.
Six months on, the name is the first thing to go. What stays is that it was a restaurant, and that someone you trust was sure about it. That is enough, because everything is filed where you would look. Restaurants and bars, hotels and travel, home and trades. You open the category, not your memory.
In the moment
Write it down while they are still talking.
Later never comes. While they are still describing it you have all of it. The name, where it is, and what made them sure. An hour later you have the name.
So say it out loud, or paste what they sent. And keep their own words. What you are keeping is somebody's experience, which is the reason you trust it at all.
Where to start
Start with your calendar.
Everywhere you have already been is sitting in there. The dinner, the hotel, the physio who was actually good. Little Lock Book turns those into cards without you retyping a thing, and keeps each one with the note about why and the person it came from. Private, and with no opinions in it from people you have never met.
Available in Australia on iPhone and Android.