The places & things system

I go to a lot of restaurants, read a lot of books, watch a lot of films, and for years kept track of all of it in one enormous, unwieldy spreadsheet. So I built a system I call Taste. It captures what I try and what I decide about it afterwards, structured enough that I can actually query it later instead of scrolling back through old messages trying to remember whether I liked a place.

Membership in the system is a test rather than a list. Something belongs in Taste if it has a lifecycle (a point where it moves from something I mean to try to something I have actually done) and if, once it is done, there is a verdict worth recording. Both conditions have to hold, which is why the system only ever holds things I consume or experience directly - places to eat and drink, books, films, television, theatre, recipes. It never holds people or companies, because you don't rate a person, you rate what they made, and where it is relevant an entry links back to whoever recommended it or came along.

Every entry carries the same basic shape, whatever kind of thing it is. A rating, when I first tried it and when I last did, its current status (still on the list, in progress, or done) and who recommended it, all on the same fields regardless of category. A second or third visit to the same place adds to that one entry rather than creating a duplicate, so somewhere I have been five times is a single note with a running history and not five separate ones.

I never have to type any of this into a file myself. I speak into a dedicated capture channel on my phone, or type a quick note, and a process running on a fixed schedule turns that into a structured entry, working out which category it belongs to, whether I mean I am planning to go or I have already been, and matching it against any existing entry. A photo of a handwritten or printed recipe gets read directly and turned into a proper ingredients and method list (a recent addition). And because my journal gets mined for more than just tasks, a place or a book I mention only in passing while journalling gets picked up and filed into Taste without a second capture.

It also watches a source entirely outside the vault. I keep running lists of places in Apple Maps, and the system reads that library directly from the app's own local sync data on my machine, checks it against what Taste already knows and pulls in anything new automatically - no manual export, no sharing a link and hoping it stays current.

On top of the whole store sits a booking agent. I can ask, in a single sentence, for a table around a given time in a given area, and it builds a shortlist from places I have been and recorded a verdict on plus a few fresh suggestions from critics I trust, checks live availability, and comes back with real options rather than guesses. The moment any card details are needed it hands me the link, because that is a decision I make and never it.