How I use Recall Daily
Hello there! I’m Sanks, co-founder of Recall. One of the coolest parts of being a co-founder here is that we get to use the product every day. This gives us an incredible sense of all the things we need to fix and improve for a better workflow, ideas for bigger milestones we can work on, but it also genuinely gives us the ability to put Recall to the test of reaching our goal: bringing order to content chaos.
Like many of you, I have been drowning in content. Bookmarked articles I’d never read again. Podcasts I’d listened to but couldn’t remember. YouTube videos with one brilliant insight buried in three hours of footage. I had all this information saved everywhere, but none of it was actually useful.
As a personal side story, I also got off social media 4 years ago, and I found myself a bit lost on how to still navigate my content and consume it intentionally. Being intentional with my content is really important to me. I want to ensure I spend my time well and absorb what is important to me. It has been amazing growing my workflow with Recall and being able to drive incremental improvements at the same time.
My Recall knowledge base has become my external brain. It holds my health and longevity research, my movie watchlist, family recipes from my granny, personal journals, and hundreds of podcasts and videos I’ve actually learned from (not just consumed).
But here’s what changed everything: I stopped just saving content and started connecting it and chatting with it. Now when I’m reading about neurotransmitters, I see everywhere I’ve encountered that concept before. When I need a recipe with cinnamon, I can pull up every dish I’ve saved that uses it. When I want to build a personalized longevity protocol, I can chat across all my health research at once.
I’m sharing my exact workflow, not because it’s the “right” way to use Recall, but because it might spark ideas for your own system. These are the habits that have actually stuck, the use cases that save me hours every week, and the features I genuinely can’t live without.
Pro Tip: Share Recall Links, Instead of Regular URLs
When you share a Recall link, people don’t just get the content; they get your notes, highlights, and key takeaways too. I love doing this for:
- Podcasts and long videos where I’ve captured the best moments and my notes.
- Holiday recommendations with my personal tips on what to see and skip.
- Recipes with my modifications and suggested sides. See this insane Avocado Choc Mousse Recipe
It transforms a simple “check this out” into something a little more personal. No sign-up required: they just click and see everything.
5 Habits to Build with Recall
Pre-screen Content Before Committing to the Full Thing
When I have long-form content, a 2-hour podcast, a long YouTube video, or a dense PDF, I always skim the summary and chat with the content to see if it’s worth dedicating my time to it. This has saved me countless hours of “wrong podcast on a run” moments.
Invest in Keeping Your Tags Tidy
I’m now at a point where I’m pretty happy with my AI-generated tags, but it took me some time to get there and it’s not always right (something we are working on!). So I always do some housekeeping to clean up my tags, drag them into parent tags, and remove duplicates.
Enhance Your Chat with Personal Notes
While I love chatting with my content, enhancing it with my own content makes it just that much better. My favorite conversations are when I @ mention my personal journals or nutrition plans. For example, I’ll ask “create a longevity protocol” and reference both my health research tags AND my nutritionist’s personalized PDF to get something truly tailored to me.
Create Meaningful Connections
Don’t just save content: highlight key concepts and use the lightning bolt to form connections. Unlink irrelevant connections (like city mentions in movies) to keep your graph clean. If you invest in this AND have Augmented Browsing on, it really is delightful to see new connections as you browse.
Swap Doom Scrolling for Quiz Time!
Even though I’ve been off socials for a while, I still get an itch to do something on my phone. So I try to use that time productively! Before bed, I open the app and run through quiz questions on content I’ve saved. The spaced repetition schedule means you’ll see what you’re struggling with more often, helping you actually retain what you learn instead of just consuming it.
My Personal Setup
Browser Extension:
- I always LOCK it in place so it doesn’t disappear when I click away.
- Concise summary mode enabled.
- Augmented browsing turned ON.
- Auto-save turned OFF (I prefer being intentional about what enters my knowledge base).
- Don’t forget that the Notebook is editable! I take notes directly in the notebook while going through content.
- Bulk import is a lifesaver: when I find a great resource with multiple links or want to save several tabs at once, I can import them all in one go.
In-App:
- Custom split screen view is the best! I keep the Notebook on my left and the chat on my right.
Mobile:
- My biggest use case is using the Wiki Search to add new terms or content as I’m out and about.
- I add new names of food items, new words or concepts, or movie recommendations on the go.