Keeping Track Of Random Things: Springpad, Backpack, and A Few Others

I am not tremendously organized. I am what is called a ‘scruffy’ when it comes to personal organization:

[via 3 Life Meta Hacks: Erosion, Streams, And Piles]

Scruffies don’t organize everything: they are “data-driven”, using their environment to channel their work, like the piles of things I leave on my desk to which I will eventually turn my attention, or the electronic stickies in which I clip things. “Neats”, on the other hand, use a small number of “explicit coordinating structures” — organizers, to-do lists, and in-boxes — to determine what to do next.

So I may not be the right person to talk about organizing the myriad links, clippings, and chunks of information that seem to fill every corner of our digital lives.

For several years, I used 37 Signals’ Backpack application as a tool to manage all sorts of extraneous information, and after fiddling with all sorts of other tools, I am still using it, especially for two things:

1. Music, in the form of chords and lyrics — using Textile for formatting tables is the best and fastest way to do this that I have found.

   

   
   
   

2. Short-lived activities where I want share snippets of information with small groups of people. Strangely enough, this is a case where Backpack is a direct competitor with Basecamp.

Anyway, without a deep dive (see Backpack: A digital version of a miscellaneous drawer for detail) I have found Backpack a free form sort of place, where I can create ‘pages’ with all sorts of links, pictures, lists, and notes, and basically keep track of a lot of junk.

I have started to use a variety of specialized apps for certain things, like AwardWallet, which keeps track of all the travel loyalty programs for me, updating mileage automatically and notifying me about expiration dates.

But what I haven’t found is a more sophisticated solution that allows the combination of the automation of AwardWallet and the free form flexibility of Backpack.

I think that’s what the folks at Springpad have tried to create, but for me — at least given the amount of time that I am willing to spend customizing things — it falls short of the promise.

As a simple example, imagine I read a reveiw of fried chicken restaurants in the NY Times. My current approach is to simply create a Backpack page called NY Restaurants, add a note, and paste the addresses in, like so:

At some point in the future, I will open the page, and decide where to have dinner.

The flow is totally different with Springpad. First, I might have been using the Springpad bookmarklet to capture the text associated with the restaurants:

And if I did that, fine, it would be more or less like the snippet I saved on Backpack. However, Springpad has a specialized app built into it for restaurants, so If I want to go down that route, I need to copy the restaurants one by one, using a more specialized interface, like this:

This integrates with Yelp, has ratings, links, and a rafter of other information. It is mouch more sophisticated around the matter of sharing, too.

The Springpad people are going down a completely different road, based on a very sensible branding approach. An internet celebrity like Gary Vanerchuk can integrate his wine selections into Springpad, so that I can add his recommendations to my Springpad wine wishlist:

In a similar fashion, they are co-marketing with famous cooks around recipes, and they could get into a dozen verticals.

But for me, each of these verticals represents a different decision to make. If I am already heavily invested in using a wine app, like Adegga, I am unlikely to switch. I personally have dozens of recipes in my Epicurious account, and I am unwilling to transfer to Springpad to use its marginally better sharing.

And lastly, for a simple free form piece of music, that is a breeze in Backpack, I have to laboriously create a table using a tool that seems designed to tabulate numbers. So hard that I never even finished a single song:

In the final analysis, I may be judging Springpad using the wrong approach, which was to see how well it allowed me to do what I am used to do already. If I had been willing to drop my preconceptions, and work the way Springpad was steering me, I might have been happier with it, at least after a few weeks. But I am just too set in my ways, and scruffy. I really just want a simple and flexible tool that isn’t very specialized at anything, instead of a bag of very specialized vertical tools sharing a common — but very complex — user interaction framework.