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Getting Started with Hook Anchor

Here are some practical ways to dip your toes into the Hook Anchor system. These notes are geared towards users of my HookAnchor Mac application, but they are also broadly relevant for implementing the method without the application.


Phase One

At first, you can keep things very simple. Just start adding words and acronyms that you frequently access as hooks. These trigger words will open applications, folders, and documents across accounts, both locally and online. Giving yourself direct access to these frequently used items provides an immediate boost and helps you get used to using the hook anchor as your first method to access content.

I love using the Karabiner macro so HookAnchor is triggered by pressing the Caps Lock key. Using this macro, the key can still serve as Caps Lock as well as your option/command key if pressed in combination, so no functionality is lost. And putting the trigger for HookAnchor helps with muscle memory for commonly accessed items.


Phase Two

Often, you will be in the midst of a couple of activities, each with 5-20 frequently accessed items. It becomes challenging to maintain unique names for all of these items.

The trick is to create an Anchor phrase for each of these groups and to set the “Anchor” check box on this command. This will allow it to be used as the prefix for trigger phrases for each item within the group, and these phrases will all be grouped as a “prefix” menu within the app.

For quick access create a 2- to 3-letter acronym for it so that most menu items can be accessed in 4 keystrokes.

Generally, we want to use a 2- to 3-word phrase for most anchors. This allows us to use each word’s first letters to create a quick access alias so most menu items can be accessed in under 4 keystrokes, and so we can still have a memorable name later when we “retire” the anchor from active usage.

This method allows us to have “muscle memory” access to 100+ anchors, each with 10+ items. Instantly, thought-free access to your 1000 active items across all systems is a delicious feeling. You will be hooked!


Phase Three

The third phase focuses on global, long-term organization. We know we cannot depend upon any deep, unchanging taxonomy, so what can we rely upon?

Unchanging CATEGORIES of knowledge. We are free to define these categories (called streams) any way we like, but for a stream to be a good stream:

  1. It should be instantly clear into which stream a given piece of information belongs, and
  2. The way information is recorded into each stream type should follow the templated pattern for that stream.

This can be tricky to achieve since most information can be organized in multiple ways. Still, with thought, we can often cleave off specific categories of information and decide categorically how we will handle that kind of information. Each time we do this, we simplify both the task of adding knowledge as well as accessing it, but ONLY if we can create streams that really are distinct, sharply defined, and rarely ever change over time.


Facets Primer

Hook Anchor provides a single, logical anchor for tying information across systems. Often, this will result in repeatedly having the same kinds of items across many anchors. For these cases, we adopt a naming convention called “Facets,” these simplify hook name choice, keystrokes typed, and simplicity of recall.

A Facet is a hook name suffix that is used for a particular kind of information. It’s not guaranteed that every Anchor will have every type of facet, but when they do, they will always use the same facet suffix. For all common facets, we choose suffix words that begin with a unique first character. This way, we can often select each facet by typing the anchor’s acronym and one additional character to select the sought item uniquely. Facets simplify the choice of hook name, the typing of the name and remembering its name.

For example, not all of my projects have a local folder, but if they do, the “xxx Folder” suffix is how I name it, “xxx Gdrive” indicates the root Gdrive folder associated with an anchor if it exists, and “xxx Notion” for a root Notion page. This does not preclude creating a hook to name a specific Google Doc or Notion sub-page as well, still, these root pages are so common that it is nice to have standardized naming for them.


Stream Primer

Not all of your information will fit into the streams categories that you create. Still, it behooves you to think hard about a pragmatic set of streams you might use to manage most of your info in ways that will be trivially accessed later. Streamed information is radically easier to find since you already know where and how to look for it, even years or decades later. There is a lot to say about the design of good streams. For now, I will just list a number of my personal streams in order to give a flavor for how they organize one’s information.

I use a year number prefix on all project anchor names, along with a direct name/acronym alias for quick access while the project is active.

Example streams:


Paper Streams

Research information is notoriously difficult to categorize and stream. Still, information associated with specific paper publications can be productively anchored to a page about the paper itself. So, for me, the “Paper” stream is a sequence of markdown pages where each describes a single publication. Its name is the title of the paper, it can be located within any topic relevant topic area. In some cases they are grouped into an anchor associated with a particular investigation, or they might be under a general topic area. Rarely I might add a tag or two to the paper. The fact that I can reliably select ONLY paper pages and I can search by date, usually allows me to find a reference paper even years later with nearly no search.


Person Streams

Information associated with a person is almost always associated with a project, a company, or other items. Still, if it is related to a specific person, I almost always will know or can find the name of the person. This makes people a fantastic stream. Any time I have information that naturally associates with a single person, I will link it directly or indirectly to that person’s “name” page. A person’s name page will have a hook that has “@” then their first and last name. So my entry is “@Dan Oblinger”. Even if I were to have a single conversation with a person that I may never meet again, if I record anything about that conversation I will create a new person entry. It feels like overkill, but it is so helpful later, since you never really know what the future brings, and now the info is captured in a way it can be found even a decade later.


Dan Oblinger (c) 2025