Second Brain Workflow
Capture, Inbox, Focus, and Review: the working loop that turns saved links and notes into knowledge you act on.
Arivu is built around a working loop: capture something, triage it in your Inbox, work it from Focus, and let Review bring it back. This guide walks through each stage.
The Loop
- Capture a bookmark or a standalone note.
- Triage it in the Inbox by setting a stage, importance, and next action.
- Focus on items that carry a task or reminder.
- Review older, due, high-priority, or still-actionable items when they resurface.
Then the loop repeats. Nothing you save has to fall through the cracks.
Capture
Capture a URL from the dashboard, the browser extension, the installable app’s share target, or the CLI with arivu save. Arivu archives the page, sanitizes the readable content, starts a background processing job, and opens the saved bookmark.
For thoughts that do not start from a link, use the Notes area to write a standalone note. See Notes & Links for the note workspace.
New bookmarks and notes both enter the Inbox.
Inbox
The Inbox is where you decide what each item becomes. Items move through four stages, shown with plain labels:
| Label | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Inbox | New, not yet triaged |
| Working | Actively being processed |
| Kept | Decided and retained |
| Archived | Set aside, still searchable |
For each item you can set an importance level and a next action. To move many items at once, use bulk triage. For fast single-item triage, focus an item and use the keyboard shortcuts (see Keyboard Shortcuts):
- P moves the item to Working
- D keeps the item
- A archives the item
Focus
The Focus page gathers your open loops, the items that still need something from you. It defaults to pending items, with views for other time horizons:
| View | Shows |
|---|---|
| Pending | Open loops not yet done |
| Overdue | Reminders past their due time |
| Today | Due today |
| Upcoming | Due soon |
| Completed | Recently finished |
Open loops are either tasks or reminders. See Reminders & Tasks for details.
Review
Review brings back items worth your attention. It prioritizes items you started working on, high-importance saves, items with an explicit next action, due reminders, stale tasks, older unreviewed notes, and your resurfacing signal.
Each review item includes the reasons it came back, so a resurfaced item is a prompt you understand rather than a random pick. You can complete a review item or snooze it.
What Stays the Same
The Knowledge Graph, semantic search, analytics, collections, and resurfacing all still work as before. The workflow loop sits on top of them, giving your saved knowledge a place to move through instead of just a place to sit.