Storage was solved, finding it again wasn't.

There's a box in our loft labelled KITCHEN? The question mark is mine, and it's the most honest piece of filing I've ever done.

I wrote that label in 2019, on a strip of masking tape, at about 11 at night, and at the time it meant something.

Nothing in that loft is lost. Everything up there went up on purpose, in a box, with a label on it, and if you told me which box I could have the thing down in 10 minutes. What I can't do, and it took me an embarrassing number of years to see this, is start from the thing I want.

My notes were exactly the same and I missed it for the same reason. The half that was working was working so obviously that I never looked at the other half.

Putting things away stopped being the hard part

Capture is solved. Widget, lock screen, share sheet, a spoken sentence at a bus stop, and the thought is saved before you've finished having it. Sync is solved and, better than that, it's boring. I haven't lost a note to a crash or a dead phone since about 2016.

Then look at what got built on top. Folders. Nested folders. Notebooks inside notebooks. Tags, then nested tags, then coloured tags. Backlinks, and a graph view to look at the backlinks. I've used most of them and a couple of them twice, which tells you something about me rather than about them.

Every one of those is a way of putting a thought away.

The note itself is fine, it's right there in the box. You just never go up and get it.

A label is a guess about who you'll be in March

A folder only works if the person looking guesses the same word as the person filing. Those are normally the same person, which is why everybody assumes it's fine.

They aren't, though, not really. Filing-you has the whole thing in their head, the meeting it came out of, who said it, why it mattered that Tuesday. Looking-you, four months on, has a vague sense that there was something about the thing, possibly to do with the other thing.

KITCHEN? made perfect sense to a man standing in a loft holding the box.

Tags are the same masking tape, 40 strips of it, on 40 boxes. I've written about the capture side of this before, the way a system asks you to decide where a thought belongs at the exact moment you have it, which is the one moment you can't know. This is the same trap from the other end, months later, when you're the one trying to guess what past-you decided.

The one filing system that ever worked

Libraries did solve this, and they solved it with drawers. A card index, every book on its own card, the same card filed again under author and subject and title, so that whichever end you came at it from you got there.

It worked. It worked because somebody whose entire job it was kept it consistent, to a published standard, for decades, and trained the next person before they left.

Take that person away and within a year the drawers are a cupboard full of old cards. Nobody is going to do that job for your notes. You aren't going to do it for your notes either, and I say that as someone who has tried, on a Sunday, with tea and a fresh label maker and everything.

The question worth asking yourself

How many times this year have you written something down that you'd already written down?

Not looked for it and failed to find it. That one's obvious and it stings and you remember it. I mean written it out again, from scratch, because writing it again was faster than going to look.

That's the real cost and it never shows up as a failure. It shows up as being a bit busier than you ought to be.

I bought a second tile cutter once. I knew I had one. It was in the loft, absolutely, definitely, and Screwfix was 10 minutes down the road. Both of them are up there now, in separate boxes, neither of them labelled.

What brings a thought back

The words you used, the actual phrase you typed at the time, because that's the bit that stayed with you. The title you wrote after the thought had cooled won't do it, and neither will the tag you picked from a list. Search has to read the whole body of the thing or it's searching the labels again, and we've established how the labels are doing.

Roughly when, which is a far better hook than anyone gives it credit for. People rarely remember the subject of a thought and very often remember the shape of the week it happened in. Around when we were doing the kitchen. Just before the holiday. A list you can scroll by month beats a folder tree for that, because the thing you half-remember is time and the folder tree is asking you about topic.

And what sort of thing it was, which survives in your head long after the subject has gone. You can usually say whether it was something to do or something to keep, even when you've no idea what it was about.

There's one thing worth doing whatever app you're in, and it costs nothing. When you write the thought down, write the words you'd go looking for, in the body, the way you'd say them out loud. A sentence, not a tag. "The thing the plumber said about the boiler" finds itself in March. "Home admin" doesn't, and never did, and you knew that when you typed it.

None of that helps with the real failure, mind you, which is not knowing you wrote it at all. If the thought has gone completely there's nothing to search for and no clever index saves you. Nobody has solved that and I haven't solved it either.

What I built, and what it still won't do

Search in Catchlight reads what's inside a Take, the whole body of it, and the search bar rides up with the keyboard so you can type into it the moment you think of the word. There are no titles or tags to search instead, which sounds like a gap and is closer to the solution.

The list groups under month headings and you can tap one to narrow to that month. Sequences filter the whole thing down to notes, or tasks, or reminders, or the ones you flagged as Important, and a long press narrows tasks to the done ones, or reminders to the ones that have expired. That's the kind-of-thing hook and the roughly-when hook, and between them they do most of the work.

Your Takes don't turn up in the iPhone's own search, deliberately. The text of a Take is never handed to the iOS index, and the setting that would let even the type of a Take be indexed is off until you turn it on. The cost is real, you have to open Catchlight to find anything in Catchlight.

It's not out yet. Everything above is built and behaves as described, and I'm writing it down now rather than promising it later. The features page lists what exists, one Take instead of three apps explains why there's only one kind of item to search through in the first place, and the comparison pages line the notes apps up if you want to see who does what.

I still don't know what's in the box marked KITCHEN? Going up and looking would take 10 minutes, and I've had 7 years to spend them.