Welcome to our Power User blog series, where we chat with Horse Browser power users and uncover how they're using Horse to transform their online life and boost their productivity.
This week, we’re chatting with Beth McClelland (formerly known as PKM Beth). We first crossed paths with Beth, when she posted an in-depth review of Horse Browser on her blog. Reading Beth’s thoughts about Horse felt like a pivotal moment for us— not only did she understand what we wanted to achieve with Horse, but she articulated it way better than we ever could! As app developers and visual thinkers, sometimes it’s tough to put our product into words. Beth captured Horse perfectly.
Beth McClelland: Digital explorer, system creator, and Horse Browser enthusiast
Since that initial review, we've been keen to dive deeper into Beth's digital world. This week, Elly (Marketing & Community), finally had the opportunity to sit down with Beth for an extended conversation. We hope you enjoy it!
Of course! In 2020, Ali Abdaal introduced me to the world of Notion, Roam and connecting my ideas together, and this was probably the best rabbit-hole of my life because it lead me to the PKM community. Back then PKM meant note-taking for my undergraduate dissertation, and organising my life before I graduated and went into the big wide world. It made me so happy so I just kept thinking about it!
Nowadays, I don't use the term ‘PKM’ as much because it doesn't feel quite right... So the best way I can put it now is it's a life practice to engage in the world around me, and to create systems that help me do that. I need to give myself and my brain room to learn, to be curious, to connect the dots and to understand myself within the world a bit better and that's what my systems are for!
Honestly the first thing is a good vibe, as annoying as that word can be. But essentially any tool needs to look good, feel good and be enjoyable to interact with. If these systems are what support us as humans in the digital age, they need to lift us up, not weigh us down, so it's really important to me to actively want to open an app!
The next thing is that it has to meet a need because that will give me the focus when testing it out, and it's how I'll be able to know if it's for me or not. After that, I'd look to see if the app is actively in development and if the team communicates with users. That gives me confidence that the time I'm willing to spend testing the app will be well spent!
The idea came from a tweet by Stian Håklev that I saw in January. He said he wanted to learn a very top level overview of 12 centuries of history in 12 months. I'd dropped out of my masters degree a few months previous for many reasons, but one of which was I had no time for my own interests and I missed my own research! So when I quit, I spent months with my own research, but then felt I lost some direction! So I thought 12 in 12 could be a perfect mid-point where I broaden my horizons with some structure too.
Yes, this was the perfect environment in which to try Horse because there were so many threads (trails) to go down and it was instantly less overwhelming to do it in Horse Browser because of how neat it could leave the threads.
A glimpse into Beth's research process using Horse Browser
When I'm in my research zone, I have Horse Browser on the left side of my screen and Capacities on the right so I can write my notes down. Other times I just want to read and click around, so I'll open Horse Browser in full screen and close the sidebar and just very happily get lost, knowing my trails are waiting for me when I'm ready!
Beth's dual-window setup: Horse Browser (left) with the sidebar collapsed for exploration, Capacities (right) for note-taking and synthesis