Sign in Subscribe

ARC Add Workflow

Several primary apps help me during the Add phase of my ARC ideation workflow to process incoming "stuff" from my environment.

Receive incoming mail

I use the Airmail app to process my email inbox messages at Gmail. Sometimes, I use Gmail directly as a favorite tab in my Arc Read space to process my email. Since Arc Browser is my default browser (rather than Safari), any interesting link that I click will be opened in Arc automatically.

Explore web interests

I configure Arc Browser to open temporary Little Arc windows rather than immediately creating a new tab in the Today section of the browser Sidebar. This allows me to view those pages first so I can determine whether I want to open them in a new tab for one of my Arc spaces like Focus, Read, Efforts, or Recipes. Sometimes, I can simply delete those windows after reading, completing a form, or playing my daily Wordle puzzle.

Process space folders

Within my Arc Browser spaces, I can process tabs with links to web pages, documents, videos, and services. For example, in my Focus space, I work on those topics related to my focus for each day; this allows me to keep these links together without the distraction of everything else that I might have encountered on the internet.

Here, and in all my spaces, I collect and cluster related links together for a specific topic, interest, or app that I'm exploring in a pinned tab folder in the Arc sidebar. When I have many tabs from links that I have clicked on web pages that start accumulating, I can use the Tidy Tabs feature that uses AI to automatically organize these tabs into suggested folders based on their content.

After some Arc browsing activity, first, I use the features to select a group of tabs and choose to make a New folder with n items, and then I select that folder while holding Ctl-Opt and selecting Copy all Links as Markdown to paste the clipboard results into an Obsidian map or note for further processing with my other linked notes.

Often, I will actually save these links into a Links note that I connect to the main map or note so these don't clutter up the primary content, and then I can work them together using split-pane views as I do some shadow mapping with the links to provide structure and context, eliminate redundancy, and enable combining or refactoring.

Review inboxes and spaces

I use my Read space for my Reading time-blocks when I want to read articles or books, watch videos, review RSS feeds, etc. I have specific pinned tabs and folders for frequently accessed web pages; for example, I can use tabs to directly read articles or books, watch videos, etc.

I follow the same steps in my Recipes or Efforts spaces. It's important to make sure that I process all my Today tabs for Arc spaces each day during my Day Review routine.