I Know I Had It Saved Somewhere
Why things disappear into our saves, and what it would mean to create a way back at them.
Image by Quan Jing via Unsplash.
I have had the same thought more times than I can count: I know I saved it somewhere.
Maybe it was a restaurant I wanted to try, a design reference I wanted to return to, or a tutorial I did not have time to finish. I remember the idea well enough to know I cared about it. I just cannot remember whether it lives on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or somewhere in my browser.
I open one app and scroll through my saves, hoping a thumbnail looks familiar. If it is not there, I try another app. Finding the post is only part of the work. I may still need to watch the whole video again to recover one useful detail.
I saved the link, but I did not save my reason for keeping it.
Saving feels like taking care of something
Two Instagram reels from Kathryn put words to a pattern I had felt but never properly identified.
In the first reel, she explains how the internet is excellent at helping us discover new things and much worse at helping us return to them. In the second, she suggests a different way to look at unused saves: what appears to be a motivation problem may really be a systems problem. Motivation is a topic for another day.
Her point matched my experience. Pressing Save gives me a small sense of relief. I can keep scrolling without worrying about losing the idea. The item feels handled, even though I only moved it into a folder.
Saving is still useful. I cannot stop for every interesting thing I find online. Trouble starts when saving is the only thing that’s happening.
A saved post loses its why
My saved folders hold several kinds of things. Some posts are keepsakes. Some are references I may need during a project. Others carry an intention: visit this place, try this idea, learn this technique.
The platform stores all of them in the same way. It knows which post I kept, but not which detail caught my attention or what I hoped to do with it.
Time weakens the connection between the link and the original moment. “Later” does not give me a date, a place, or a next step. I return with the content in front of me and still have to work out why it mattered, and why I even saved it in the first place.
Coming back for it has its own cost
Using a saved post starts with remembering it exists. I also need to remember where I saved it, recognize it among everything added since, and consume enough of it again to find the useful part.
None of those steps is difficult on its own, but if put together, they add enough friction for the original intention to disappear.
This is not actually a new problem. In 2001, a Microsoft Research study looked at how people kept web information for later. Some participants emailed links to themselves. Email did more than hold the URL. It returned to an inbox they already checked, allowed them to include a note, and acted as a reminder.
Traditional bookmarks stored the page without offering the same route back or context.
The material we save has changed since the study. We now keep short videos, threads, screenshots, products, places, and conversations across several platforms. Returning is still the hard part.
A place worth returning to
I do not want every interesting post to become a task. I also do not want to organize every link the moment I find it. Either approach would add more work to an action meant to be quick.
What I want is one dependable place for the things I choose to keep. I should be able to find a saved item from the part I remember, even if I have forgotten its creator, title, date, or original platform.
Some saves only need to remain searchable. Others carry an intention and need a short note or a reminder. The goal is not to remember everything. I only want to shorten the distance between remembering an idea and being able to use it.
Where Fig enters the story
This question eventually became part of why I started building Fig currently a personal app. Fig is my attempt to bring saved links from social media and the web into one app, where I can organize them, search them, and return to them without having to remember which platform they came from. For the links I genuinely want to revisit, reminders can create a path back instead of leaving that intention buried in a folder. The internet already made collecting easy. I am more interested in what happens after Save.
The internet already made collecting easy. I am more interested in what happens after Save.