For the new year, I challenged myself with a new habit – to stop using Facebook during work hours. I’m certainly not the first person to find the platform entertaining enough to suck me in, but useless enough to add little value to my life. As I shared on Facebook before, “Facebook is a platform for sharing emotions, not ideas. Once you recognize that fact, it makes more sense.” Yet, I’m the type of person that likes to approach life in a thoughtful and considerate fashion. Facebook represented the opposite.
In stepped a new platform called Thoughtful. I first heard about Thoughtful on Alex Epstein’s podcast The Human Flourishing Project. Alex teamed up with Brian Amerige, a former Facebook senior developer, to develop Thoughtful. I’m hesitant to call it a new social media platform, because even though there contains elements of social in it, that’s not the primary purpose.
What is Thoughtful?
Thoughtful might best be described as a tool for organizing and consuming long form content. Not the quick and dirty posts or tweets of Facebook or Twitter. Nor the images or short video clips of Instagram or TicTok. Instead, Thoughtful helps you curate the best blogs, books, podcasts, and videos. You can subscribe to various RSS feeds or select ad hoc items recommended by other Thoughtful members or found elsewhere online.
Once items are added to your queue, you can consume them when time is appropriate. Thoughtful also tracks your progress on items and takes you back directly to where you left off consuming it. After consuming the content, you can recommend the best content to your followers.
My review
After one month of usage, I’m finding the platform useful, well built, and worthy of my precious time. I track my favorite blogs and podcasts and even physical books. Instead of looking in multiple different places for content, I can find it all in one spot.
What’s cool about the queue is that I can track books I’m currently reading and books I would like to read. I can even purchase those books in app.
Now, I’m brainstorming how to integrate the app with my daily habits so that I get the biggest bang from its usage – to make thoughtful consumption an inevitable part of my day. Particularly, I need to brainstorm if and how to integrate it with my GTD system.
It’s also clear the app sits in the early stages of development. While the app has performed without errors, there are many features I would like to see added. Undoubtedly, additional features will emerge in the coming months. One feature I hope they consider would be to add the ability for my recommendations to be shared on other platforms. For example, I like writing book reviews on my blog. Wouldn’t it be great to somehow merge what I write on my own blog with the recommendations I make on Thoughtful? Write once – post in two (or more) places.
I also understand releasing the app on just one operating system to begin with, and iOS is a good choice. But I do a fair amount of thoughtful reading activities on my laptop. A Windows app (they have a browser plugin, but that’s not the same thing) would greatly increase the value of the platform for me. Not to mention all the Android users that want to use the app. Hopefully, we will see releases on these platforms soon.
As more people join Thoughtful, there may be opportunity to add a dialog between users – a thoughtful back and forth discussion of content. Not just thoughtful consumption, but thoughtful creation. But how to structure the app to encourage thoughtful discussion and discourage mindless comments presents a challenge that no one has yet mastered in online environments. Never-the-less, that feature would make more people apt to use it.
Conclusion
Although the app is still new with limited features, those features add significant value. The design helps me to stay focused and avoid pointless rabbit holes of meaningless junk. From what I know of the founders, I expect future developments will stay true to this vision. If you haven’t already, I recommend getting on the waiting list and/or downloading the app to use.