Before I share my take on Reflect, I think it's important to touch on the risk of looking at yet another note-taking application:
If you have ever dabbled in the world of Personal Knowledge Management Systems (PKMS), you know how much "perfect is the enemy of good." There's great pleasure to be obtained from seeing your system grow in size and optimization. With a multitude of new applications being released and improved, you could spend your days continually refining your system, integrating tools together, and migrating from one note-taking app to another.
If you visit the PKMS community, you'll read about some declaring PKMS bankruptcy or describing complex workflows that they know will break as soon as they don't have time to keep them running. This is why it is common to go back to pen and paper. The natural constraints of this old-school system force the user to stop optimizing and actually start using it. Although I understand the appeal, our brains have inherent limitations that a digital application can help offset much more efficiently than a purely analog system.
For this reason, we need to be careful when evaluating new note-taking applications. As with any tool, more features aren't always better as the quality of implementation can vary widely. But additional features should also be understood as potentially adding complexity and slowing down your note-taking.
Reflect provides a balanced approach of features and simplicity. The team is very intentional and understands that complexity easily creeps into these applications. Currently, the product provides a decent balance. At its base, it has three (and a half) core features that make me love it:
- It's highly performant thanks to being local first
Reflect is fast, mainly because it stores all of your data locally. Overall, the application is always snappy, and contrary to tools like Notion, you aren't spending time waiting for notes to load, including notes you haven't accessed in a long time. I remember having tried Reflect three years ago, and its poor performance had prevented me from using it. I remember the problem also came from the fact it's a web app and not Mac native. Thankfully, great progress has been made.
The only limitation I experience is with images. Reflect doesn't store them locally and relies on the browser cache. This leads to images often having to be downloaded again, which is made worse by the fact that pictures taken with a modern phone often reach 15MB. If, like me, you like to upload a couple of pictures to your journal entries, it can be slow to load even on a great internet connection. - Scrollable daily notes
Reflect focuses a lot on daily notes. When you open the application, you're taken to today and can scroll up to previous daily notes or down for future ones. This approach is comfortable as it mimics what you would do with pen and paper. It is a great way to improve your working memory by allowing you to quickly go back to details of previous days.
Yet, you also benefit from the power of backlinks: Let's say you have a board meeting. You can take your notes in your daily note and add a backlink to "Board meeting." Then, when visiting the Board meeting page, you'll see all the past references and notes of your meetings. This also works well for people in attendance. I like this approach as it's low-maintenance and yet a lot more powerful than what an analog system would be. - End-to-end encryption by default
Reflect is E2E encrypted (except for attachments, but that's supposed to come in 2024), which means that nobody except you can read your notes. Personally, this isn't so much a feature as a requirement, and I wouldn't use a note application without it. I don't work for the NSA (although open to opportunities), but if you're fully taking advantage of your notes, you're gradually storing huge amounts of information regarding your personal and professional life. And if you use your notes app as a way to think about various topics, its content might be even more sensitive. For this reason, E2E encryption is essential. - Voice notes with OpenAI's Whisper
The Whisper isn't exactly a core feature and it took me a while to get started, but I now can't go back. On both the desktop and mobile apps, you can start recording text that will be added to your daily note. I find that mostly practical when not in front of my computer: I added a widget to my phone's lock screen, and a single tap starts the recording. I then know that when back in front of my desktop, it will be there ready for processing.
Reflect offers a few other cool features:
- Search: Note search is super powerful and instant.
- History: Every change you make to notes is stored indefinitely. No risk of losing any data.
- Meetings: With a single click, you can add meetings from your calendar with all the relevant backlinks.
- GPT: You can select text and run custom prompts, which are super practical once you find a few use cases that work for you.
Is Reflect the definitive note-taking tool? This will depend on how you work. Reflect is intentionally simple and misses a lot of the powerful features related to graphs that users of tools like Roam Research might expect. It also doesn't have any rigid database structure as Capacities or Notion do.
Personally, I'm fine with the trade-off: features make applications more complex. In the context of PKMS, they also tend to make you waste time organizing your system instead of using it. It's easy to be carried away at first by the power a new tool gives you before giving up once you realize all the work to keep it up. For me, Reflect is just powerful enough. That's what I needed.
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