The Three-Ring Binder Problem: Keeping Reference Material at Hand

That spectacular super moon is rising. You're holding the camera, three years after you bought it, trying to remember how to change the exposure compensation. The manual came as a PDF. You downloaded it. That was three years ago, on a laptop you've since replaced.

Reference material has a particular way of disappearing. Tasks and notes stay visible because they demand something — a deadline, a reminder, a count on the home screen. A manual demands nothing. You need it occasionally, at a moment you can't predict, and the rest of the time it sits quietly wherever you happened to put it. There's no pressure to file it well, so it lands wherever was easiest at the time: a downloads folder, a starred email, a screenshot in the camera roll.

Storage isn't the hard part

Any of those places can hold a PDF perfectly well. The trouble is that "somewhere it's stored" and "somewhere you'll think to look" are two different questions, and they tend to have different answers — especially when you're looking for something in the middle of doing something else.

What helps is fewer places to check. maxamind handles images, PDFs, text and markdown in two ways, depending on what the material is for. Things that stand on their own — a camera manual, a subway map, travel documents for next month, a chart you refer to at work — go in the Pocket Reference Library. Things that belong to a specific piece of work attach directly to it: a PDF on the action that needs it, an image in a journal entry. Either way, once you open it, it's cached on your device, so it's there whether or not you have a signal. The subway map is most useful underground.

What you make, not just what you save

Attachments cover the material you bring in from outside. But a lot of what you'll want later is what you worked out yourself, and that's easier to lose because it never existed as a file.

Every action and every journal entry carries notes — unlimited text, with simple markup and an outline editor. That's more room than it sounds like. The notes on a single action can hold the whole history of a piece of work: what you decided and why, the numbers you looked up, the approach you tried that didn't work, the phone number of the person who knows about it. Over a few months a project's actions become a genuine record of the thinking, not just a list of what's left to do.

The Assistant can write into the same place. When you've talked something through, the More menu in the chat has options to save the chat to your journal and to this action, when you opened the chat from an action. The whole dialog goes into the action's notes, or becomes a journal note tagged with the date and time. The reasoning ends up filed with the thing it was about, instead of evaporating when you close the panel.

You can find it all through the search panel that pushes in from the right — full text, across actions and notes, from anywhere in the app.

Start with the next thing

There's no need to gather up everything you own and file it. The next time you're about to screenshot something so you don't lose it, or email a document to yourself, or you find that camera manual, put it in the reference library. That instinct to screenshot is a reliable signal — it means you know you'll want this again and don't trust where it currently lives.

The point isn't a tidy archive. It's that when you reach for something, it's there.

For more on what the Reference Library handles, see the Quickstart guide.