Behind the scenes, episode 02: Synthiz, I knew I had seen it somewhere

I read, watch and listen to a lot of digital content. Articles, videos, podcasts, documents: different formats, on very different subjects.

So as not to lose it all, I tried to get organised.

Obsidian held my notes. Reader kept the articles to read. Readwise gathered highlighted passages. Browser bookmarks kept the links I wanted to revisit.

Each tool did its job. Yet the result was always the same: everything was kept, but nothing was truly brought together.

I remembered the idea, not its address

A few weeks later, an idea would come back to me.

I knew I had read or heard it somewhere. But where? In an article saved in Reader? An Obsidian note? A book passage sent to Readwise? A video filed among my bookmarks?

To find the idea, I first had to find where I had come across it.

So the search started with the wrong question: not "what am I looking for?", but "which app did I put it in?"

And the more tools I used to get organised, the more places I created to search in.

Keeping was not the problem

My sources were not lost. They were scattered.

Everything was kept. Nothing could really be found.

I did not need yet another place to drop links or write notes. I needed a shared memory, able to search all that content without asking me to remember where it came from.

I wanted to find an idea from what it said.

Find a passage heard in a video without knowing its title. Bring an article together with a note written weeks earlier. Go back to the exact source of a summary.

That is where Synthiz began to take shape.

Gather, find, connect

Synthiz brings sources of different formats into one workspace.

A video or a podcast can be transcribed. An article or a document can be kept with its content. Every source becomes searchable, findable and connected to the others.

The aim is not to pile up more. It is to lay your hands back on what you have already learned.

A summary should lead to the sources that fed it. A recovered idea should lead back to the original passage. Memory should not replace the documents: it should let you return to them.

Synthiz was born from this scattering

Synthiz was not born from a wish to build one more app.

It was born because none of the tools I used let me find my knowledge regardless of where it had been filed.

Everything was already there: the articles, the videos, the highlights, the notes and the bookmarks.

What was missing was the link between them.

That link is what Synthiz builds.

The full story, with Obsidian, the Zettelkasten and hours of configuration, is told in Obsidian, Reader, Readwise: I had filed everything, I could find nothing.