Two-Way Links with Hookmark
I want to start writing about the tools that hold my work together, not just the ones I use to produce it. First up: Hookmark.
What Hookmark actually does
Hookmark is a macOS app for bookmarking things — an OmniFocus task, an Obsidian note, a DEVONthink document, a file on disk, a browser tab, almost anything with a URL or a stable address — and then “hooking” two of those bookmarks to each other. The link runs both ways. Hook a task to a note, and the note carries a link back to the task, while the task carries a link back to the note. Neither side is the “primary” copy; they’re just connected.
That sounds small until you notice how much of your day is spent re-finding things you already found once.
It took me a while to actually get what Hookmark was doing — the concept doesn’t click from a feature list, only from using it. Once it clicked, it became indispensable.
The problem it solves
OmniFocus’s built-in notes field is thin — plain text, no formatting, no backlinks, nowhere to actually think. For a long time that meant a choice: write a note inside OmniFocus and undersell the context behind the task, or write the real context somewhere else and lose the connection back to the task that needed it.
Hookmark gets rid of that trade-off. Instead of writing the note inside OmniFocus, I write it wherever I actually want to write — Obsidian most of the time, Apple Notes for something quick, Drafts App if I just need to get text down before I’ve decided where it belongs — and hook that note to the task. The task stays a task: title, due date, project, nothing more. The thinking happens in a tool built for thinking, not in whatever text field the task manager happened to give me.
Two-way links remove the searching that setup would otherwise cost. If I’m looking at a task, I can jump straight to the note behind it. If I’m looking at the note, I can jump straight to the task it produced. The link isn’t something I have to remember to maintain — I make it once, in either direction, and it works from both ends from then on.
How I actually use it
The core loop is OmniFocus ↔ Obsidian: a task gets hooked to the note with the research, the decision, or the context that explains why the task exists. Weeks later, when the task resurfaces, I don’t have to remember which note it belongs to — Hookmark already knows.
It extends past those two apps, though, because Hookmark doesn’t care what it’s linking as long as the thing can be addressed somehow. DEVONthink documents hook in the same way notes do, so a task can point straight at a PDF or a reference document instead of a note that just describes one. Teams messages work too, since Teams can generate a link to a specific message — hook that into the relevant note or task, and a conversation stops being something you have to scroll back to find.
The result isn’t a single tool doing everything. It’s a lot of small, specific tools, each good at one thing, stitched together with links instead of being replaced by one tool that tries to do it all.
One caveat
As far as I can tell, none of this carries over to iOS. Hookmark is a Mac app, and I haven’t found any way to look up a hooked link from my phone — there’s no “what’s this connected to” to reach for on mobile the way there is on the desktop. When I need one of those links on iOS, I go back to Hookmark on the Mac, copy it out, and paste it in by hand wherever it needs to go. It works, but it’s a manual step, not the automatic two-way link I get everywhere else.
Tutorial links
More to come
This is the starting point. I want to come back to specific patterns — how I structure the OmniFocus-to-Obsidian hook, what I’ve learned about when not to link things, and how this holds up once a project has fifty hooked items instead of five.