Glasp
Gmail-Posteingang · How to Connect Glasp to Claude, ChatGPT, and Claude Code (MCP Connector)
View this post on the web at https://read.glasp.co/p/how-to-connect-glasp-to-claude-ch…
🌐 Read this in your language: 日本語 [ https://substack.com/redirect/20de6b87-80f5-46c3-beb3-25d… ] · Español [ https://substack.com/redirect/551aadb1-b7db-49c9-b272-049… ] · Français [ https://substack.com/redirect/e18c9c01-6a5a-4d3a-b710-428… ] · Português (BR) [ https://substack.com/redirect/ff1ccc1d-286c-4d77-8a24-50f… ] · Tiếng Việt [ https://substack.com/redirect/1d28de1e-e2f3-46a5-861b-1f0… ] · 한국어 [ https://substack.com/redirect/cd199761-a0a4-47eb-b921-142… ]
We’re excited to announce a new tutorial on Glasp: How to Connect Glasp to Claude, ChatGPT, and Claude Code (MCP Connector).
Have you ever wished your AI assistant knew what you have been reading? With Glasp’s MCP Connector, you can connect your Glasp account to any MCP-compatible AI tool, including Claude, ChatGPT, Claude Code, and clients built on the OpenAI API, and ask them about everything you have read, highlighted, and saved.
Picture this: instead of digging through old bookmarks, you ask Claude “what did I save about deep work?” and get your own highlighted passages back, with their sources, right inside the chat you already use.
The connector is read-only and private to you. It can read your own highlights and memories, and nothing else. It can never post, edit, or delete anything.
🔌 How to connect
Before you start. Go to the Settings page [ https://substack.com/redirect/d7d2948d-699f-4463-8d71-416… ] on Glasp and click MCP Connector in the left sidebar. You can also learn more on the MCP Connector page [ https://substack.com/redirect/d3dde296-4ddc-44db-a6f8-ac3… ].
The MCP server URL you will use in every client is:
The full step-by-step guide covers Claude, ChatGPT, Claude Code, and any MCP client, with screenshots:
💡 What you can do once connected
Write with your own sources, not generic AI text. Ask your assistant to pull the passages you already highlighted and weave them in with citations.
“I’m writing about deep work. Pull the quotes I highlighted on focus, and draft an intro that uses them.”
Resurface what you forgot you saved. It searches across every article, PDF [ https://substack.com/redirect/120511a5-51df-4f03-8fe9-215… ], YouTube video [ https://substack.com/redirect/2e697143-040e-4a79-a899-e27… ], and Kindle book [ https://substack.com/redirect/0d40fda7-ddf9-4fa6-a9b9-45b… ] you saved.
“What have I saved about pricing strategy, and where was each from?”
Get a briefing before a meeting or decision. Turn scattered highlights into a one-paragraph brief.
“Summarize everything I’ve highlighted about a competitor or topic into five bullet points.”
Review what you are learning. Turn your reading into study material.
“Quiz me on my recent highlights about AI agents.”
Stay in your coding flow (Claude Code). Ask about something you saved without leaving the terminal.
“What did I highlight about rate limiting in that API article?”
🔌 Connecting takes about a minute
For Claude and ChatGPT, it’s OAuth: no token to copy, just sign in with Glasp and approve read-only access. For Claude Code and other MCP clients, it’s a single command with an access token. The full step-by-step guide covers every client, with screenshots:
With the MCP Connector, your highlights and notes stop being a static archive and become a knowledge base your AI assistant can actually use. The more you highlight, the more your AI knows about what you have learned.
Sign up for Glasp [ https://substack.com/redirect/d3dde296-4ddc-44db-a6f8-ac3… ]
👉 FAQs [ https://substack.com/redirect/f2b88300-4811-4850-b3b3-eea… ]
👉 X [ https://substack.com/redirect/593c78e2-ce58-4a72-bd93-e4a… ]
👉 Reddit [ https://substack.com/redirect/4f8b9476-e399-4dec-9839-7d4… ]
See you next time,
Glasp team
–
Partner With Glasp
We currently offer newsletter
Das ist eine Newsletter-Ankündigung von Glasp über ein neues KI-Integration-Feature. Keine geschäftliche Relevanz für uns – kann archiviert werden.
View this post on the web at https://read.glasp.co/p/the-highlights-by-glasp-july-2026
Hi friends,
This month was about meeting you where you already read. The extension is rebuilt from the ground up and finally landed on Firefox, three more apps joined the list of places you can import highlights from, and the Obsidian plugin now brings your summaries and bookmarks across too. Whichever browser you open and whichever app you think in, your highlights come along.
Here’s what’s new.
📣 Community Updates
📌 Community Milestones
Glasp posts [ https://substack.com/redirect/9fde2505-8d28-41a3-a21c-0f1… ] published: 8,000+
Kindle highlights [ https://substack.com/redirect/a69a169a-5999-4e13-b121-091… ] imported: 78,000+ unique books
YouTube Channels Tracking [ https://substack.com/redirect/97683995-a8d8-4fcb-954b-140… ]: 3,500+
Audio files [ https://substack.com/redirect/c3fc9214-d2bc-4221-be8a-5f6… ] transcribed: 80,000+
🔧 Feature Updates
Glasp Extension v2.1.2: The biggest rewrite since we launched. A new highlighting engine that holds up on pages that used to fight back, a redesigned sidebar, and Suggested Highlights, where AI picks the key sentences and you accept the ones you agree with. Plus AI Overview, a better Community view, 7 languages, and dark and light themes. One thing to know: the upgrade signs you out of the extension once, and nothing is lost. → Read the announcement [ https://substack.com/redirect/171050a3-bbcc-492a-b91f-22f… ]
Firefox Extension: Glasp is on Firefox at last. Highlight the web, PDFs, and YouTube transcripts, with your highlights syncing to the same account you already use everywhere else. It has been the single most requested thing in our inbox for years. → Get it on Firefox Add-ons [ https://substack.com/redirect/22fed920-deb0-4bd2-b8b8-74e… ]
Mobile App: Image highlighting is now on mobile, so you can mark up what you see, not just what you read. The Feed gains a Newsletters section, and you can pull your Raindrop highlights in from the app. The Safari extension got a round of polish too. Update from the App Store [ https://substack.com/redirect/41b0104b-d218-4575-8d58-ebd… ] or Google Play [ https://substack.com/redirect/62734af9-a447-4510-899e-342… ].
YouTube Summary Extension: A redesigned sidebar puts Transcript, Summary, Chat, and Highlights in one place. Chat is the new one: ask anything about the video and the answer comes back grounded in what was actually said, with starters like “What are the key takeaways?” if you don’t know where to begin. The transcript now lives in our sidebar instead of leaning on YouTube’s own panel, so it keeps working when YouTube moves things around.
Obsidian Plugin v0.3.0: Summaries and Bookmarks now import alongside your highlights, and each source gets its own Obsidian Bases database view, as a table or as cards with thumbnails. We also fixed a bug that duplicated Kindle notes on re-sync. Requires Obsidian 1.9+. → Get it from Community Plugins [ https://substack.com/redirect/7a24f14e-b7ec-4808-b60d-f13… ]
Zapier: Summaries can now kick off a Zap. The new New Summary trigger fires whenever you generate an AI summary of a page, PDF, or YouTube video, so a summary can land in Notion, a Slack channel, or a spreadsheet without you moving it. It joins the existing triggers for new highlights, bookmarks, and documents, plus actions to create highlights and bookmarks from anywhere. → Browse the Zaps [ https://substack.com/redirect/76c24927-4e67-479c-8df0-3fb… ]
Import & Export: The biggest expansion yet, on both sides. Coming in, Matter [ https://substack.com/redirect/ff7ef7f7-0059-45c8-b9c2-434… ], Raindrop.io [ https://substack.com/redirect/7ecdf3af-2dd8-4dfe-9657-a60… ], Diigo, and Wallabag all joined. Raindrop connects with one click and pulls your highlights with their notes, colors, and tags, with no file export needed, and only pages you actually highlighted come across, so your plain bookmarks stay where they are. Going out, five new destinations: Zotero, Tana [ https://substack.com/redirect/b463fc04-4b5d-4242-84f4-fef…
Dies ist ein Newsletter von Glasp (Highlight-Management-Tool) über Juli-Updates. Keine geschäftsrelevante Anfrage, Bestellung oder Termin. Kann gelöscht oder archiviert werden.
View this post on the web at https://read.glasp.co/p/the-top-10-kindle-books-glasp-rea…
Hi friends,
Here’s something we noticed while pulling this month’s most-imported books.
Half of this list is people learning how to move other people. Offers, negotiation, brand stories, leverage. The other half is people learning how to sit still with what won’t move at all. Stoics, a shepherd chasing an omen, a Navy SEAL in the snow.
Read them together and the seam between the two halves is the whole argument:
You control the offer. You don’t control the answer.
Alex Hormozi opens with an offer so good it can’t be compared. Chris Voss follows by questioning the assumptions everyone else takes on faith. Then Ryan Holiday shows up twice in a row to say the quiet part: direct your actions properly, and willingly accept what’s outside your control. Morgan Housel prices that same idea in dollars. Paulo Coelho’s most-underlined line calls the loss of control the world’s greatest lie. By the time Gary Keller closes the list with one thing at a time, the argument has come all the way around. Do the work that’s yours. Release the rest.
As always, we’re not just sharing what got imported. For every book, we’re showing you the single line that the most readers stopped to highlight, what we call Reader Consensus. It’s the closest thing we have to a room full of strangers nodding at the same sentence.
One more thing before we start. Only two books carried over from June’s list, and both of them brought back the exact same sentence, with more readers behind it than before. Consensus, it turns out, is sticky.
Here are July’s top 10.
1. $100M Offers [ https://substack.com/redirect/e3c48721-27b9-4e0d-a323-de4… ]
Alex Hormozi [ https://substack.com/redirect/baa74069-e635-4ac4-a405-43a… ], gym-owner-turned-investor who wrote the playbook for pricing what you sell far above what it costs you to deliver.
“The Grand Slam Offer only becomes valuable once the prospect perceives the increase in likelihood of achievement, perceives the decrease in time delay, and perceives the decrease in effort and sacrifice.”
Reader Consensus: 24 of 86 highlighters (28%), tied with his definition of the Grand Slam Offer itself. July’s most-imported book by a clear margin.
📖 Read on Amazon [ https://substack.com/redirect/e04207ae-b5f8-484b-9729-3bf… ] · Highlights on Glasp [ https://substack.com/redirect/e3c48721-27b9-4e0d-a323-de4… ]
2. Never Split the Difference [ https://substack.com/redirect/5ac52297-d736-40ab-87fe-455… ]
Chris Voss [ https://substack.com/redirect/17d71e92-f17d-44bb-ac1a-e6f… ], former lead FBI hostage negotiator who brought tactical empathy from life-or-death standoffs to the boardroom.
“Great negotiators are able to question the assumptions that the rest of the involved players accept on faith or in arrogance, and thus remain more emotionally open to all possibilities, and more intellectually agile to a fluid situation.”
Reader Consensus: 23 of 58 highlighters (40%). The same line June’s list surfaced, now with six more readers underneath it.
📖 Read on Amazon [ https://substack.com/redirect/f30eec92-c467-40e7-9796-94c… ] · Highlights on Glasp [ https://substack.com/redirect/5ac52297-d736-40ab-87fe-455… ]
3. The Daily Stoic [ https://substack.com/redirect/d4df247d-14f4-4a79-93e5-120… ]
Ryan Holiday [ https://substack.com/redirect/c92e2b9a-3ae7-41f3-bf4c-d08… ] and Stephen Hanselman [ https://substack.com/redirect/9b96ddb7-bcf6-4dde-9414-3f4… ], who turned Marcus Aurelius [ https://substack.com/redirect/e88ea4d3-9d50-47c1-83b6-b72… ], Epictetus [ https://substack.com/redirect/f71fbf4d-0a43-480b-9334-ba6… ], and Seneca [ https://substack.com/redirect/7ab0eb21-0082-4f56-a46a-1d5… ] into a page a day and put Stoicism back on the bestseller list.
“Control your perceptions. Direct your actions properly. Willingly accept what’s outside your control.”
Reader Consensus: 16 of 57 highlighters (28%).
🌐
Das ist ein automatischer Newsletter von Glasp über populäre Kindle-Bücher im Juli 2026. Keine geschäftliche Relevanz für unser Unternehmen – kann archiviert oder gelöscht werden.
View this post on the web at https://read.glasp.co/p/the-best-quotes-about-journaling
Glasp’s note: At Glasp, we value the close personal relationships we’ve built with thinkers, creators, and doers who fuel curiosity and growth. This week, we spotlight Bobby Powers [ https://open.substack.com/users/45053889-bobby-powers?utm… ] —a lifelong learner passionate about leadership development and continuous improvement. With more than a decade of experience leading teams and developing learning and development at startups, Bobby understands the transformative power of curiosity and mentorship. You might remember him from his Glasp Talk [ https://substack.com/redirect/a9b9edeb-45f8-497d-8b47-103… ] appearance, where he shared insights on leadership and personal growth, inspiring thousands. We’re honored to continue learning from Bobby and are thrilled to share his thoughtful reflections with our community.
If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.
Glasp Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Hi, I’m Bobby Powers! I run the Leader & Learner publication [ https://substack.com/redirect/c5914f1f-1a5b-4342-99d8-c2c… ], where I share two posts per week that will help you become a more curious leader and learner.
I’ve been collecting quotes for the past decade. My database now contains thousands of witty insights from books, podcast interviews, articles, YouTube videos, etc.
Here are the best quotes I’ve found on journaling and self-reflection:
“The palest ink is better than the best memory.” -Chinese proverb
“The quieter you become, the more you can hear.” -Ram Dass
“Sometimes, you have to look back in order to understand the things that lie ahead.” -Yvonne Woon
“The biggest lie we tell ourselves is ‘I don’t need to write this down because I will remember it.’” -Kevin Kelly
“I examine my entire day and go back over what I’ve done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by.” -Seneca
“Reflection is one of the most underused yet powerful tools for success.” -Richard Carlson
“Paper is more patient than people.” -Anne Frank
“I would rather be an authority on myself than on Cicero.” -Michel de Montaigne
“One dull pencil is worth six sharp minds.” -Anonymous proverb
“If [your journal] was for sale and you were the only buyer, you’d buy a million copies because this was the most interesting book that you’ve ever read. And that’s because everything resonates with your life. This is exactly how you felt.” -Amy Tan
“Notetaking is like time travel—you are sending packets of knowledge through time to your future self.” -Tiago Forte [ https://open.substack.com/users/532856-tiago-forte?utm_so… ]
“Self-reflection is a much kinder teacher than regret is. Prioritize yourself by making a habit of it.” -Andrena Sawyer
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” -Anaïs Nin
“As time goes by, when you look back over those entries that had seemed so ordinary, they become really interesting—to look back 15, 17, 20 years...you can’t anticipate how important it will be when you’re doing it because you’re just caught up in the moment.” -Joyce Carol Oates
“Remember what it was to be me, that is always the point.” -Joan Didion, re: her journaling
“Envy is inversely correlated with self-examination. The less you know yourself, the more you look to others to get an idea of your worth. But the more you delve into who you are, the less you seek from others, and the dissolution of envy begins.” -Lawrence Yeo [ https://open.substack.com/users/12759075-lawrence-yeo?utm… ]
“To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility.” -Flannery O’Connor
“To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” -Aristotle
“Who has dared to tell himself the truth? Who even when surrounded by crowds of toadying sycophants is not his own greatest flatterer?” -Seneca
“Our best teacher isn’t experience. It’s evaluated experience.” -John Maxwell
“Don’t become too preoccupied with what is happening around you. Pay more attention to what is going on within you.” -Mary-Frances Winters
“A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others.” -Kevin Kelly
“Fear is a question. What are you afraid of and why? Our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.” -Marilyn French
“Self-reflection is the quality that most differentiates those who evolve quickly from those who don’t. Remember: Pain + Reflection = Progress.” -Ray Dalio
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” -Mark Twain
“I shall keep watching myself contin
View this post on the web at https://read.glasp.co/p/how-to-follow-youtube-channels-an…
🌐 Read this in your language: 日本語 [ https://substack.com/redirect/477551b7-a487-48bd-b90e-df1… ] · Español [ https://substack.com/redirect/be9af0cd-ac19-450d-8de9-7ac… ] · Français [ https://substack.com/redirect/afc3b540-f5ca-46d0-8d08-33d… ] · Português (BR) [ https://substack.com/redirect/66403cb7-5ad8-4e55-af27-51d… ] · Tiếng Việt [ https://substack.com/redirect/4e93d50c-b980-41da-bc9a-800… ] · 한국어 [ https://substack.com/redirect/5b9aa2d7-1395-416d-822b-8a3… ]
The Glasp app for iOS and Android has a Feed tab, and it exists to remove one small, repetitive chore: copying a link every time you want to read or watch something on your phone.
Copying works fine for a single video or article. It gets old when you regularly watch the same YouTube channels or read the same newsletters. Each new item means finding it elsewhere, copying its URL, returning to the app, and pasting it before you can start.
The simpler approach is to follow the source once. After that, new videos and posts arrive in the Feed on their own. You open the app, see what has been published, and choose what to read. The Feed has two segments: YouTube brings together uploads from the channels you follow, and Newsletters collects new posts from the newsletters and blogs you follow.
📱 Get the app: App Store [ https://substack.com/redirect/b226f574-1af6-4118-99da-f0a… ] · Google Play [ https://substack.com/redirect/f9032363-2b3f-4ee1-98fa-26e… ]
If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.
Step 1: Follow YouTube channels
In the YouTube segment, the channels you follow sit in a row across the top of the screen. Scroll along that row to move between sources. At the end, the Add circle lets you follow another channel, so you can build the row around the creators you check regularly.
Below the channel row, the videos from all followed channels appear together in date order. A recent upload can therefore reach you even if you did not visit YouTube or remember to look at the channel. A New badge marks a video you have not opened, which makes it easy to see where to begin when several channels have published since your last visit.
Following changes the routine from collecting individual links to checking one current list. You still decide what deserves your time, but the new uploads are already waiting when you open the app.
Step 2: Follow newsletters and blogs
To add a publication, open the Newsletters segment and tap + in the control bar, or tap Add a source from an empty or management view.
Paste a website URL or a feed URL into the field. Its placeholder reads “https://example.com or a feed URL”. Tap Find feed, and Glasp checks the address for a feed it can follow. If it succeeds, you see a preview rather than subscribing immediately.
The preview shows the source title and its three most recent posts. Check that you have found the intended publication, then confirm with Subscribe. Its future posts will appear in the newsletter timeline.
Below the URL field, Suggested sources provides a curated starter pack. Tap the + beside any suggestion to follow it directly. Sources you already follow are hidden from this list, so it remains focused on publications you can still add.
If Glasp cannot detect a usable feed, it says “No feed found at that URL.” Try the publication’s feed URL if you first entered its home page. If the source cannot be accepted, the message is “That domain isn’t allowed.” In that case, the domain cannot be added to the Feed.
Step 3: Read what arrives
The newsletter timeline organizes posts under Today, Yesterday, and older dates. Each row gives you enough context to choose quickly: the source, publication date, title, and a short snippet. New posts from different publications share one chronological view, so there is no need to open every site to check for updates.
Use the control bar to change what you see. The All sources filter shows the combined timeline. Open it and use Search sources... to find one publication, then select that source when you want a narrower view. You can also switch among Recent, Popular, and Archived to see the newest posts, posts drawing more interest, or items you have cleared from the active list.
Every row includes a bookmark and an archive action. Bookmark something you inten
View this post on the web at https://read.glasp.co/p/ai-agents-keep-obeying-rules-that…
“Trust, but verify.”
― Russian proverb, made famous in English by Ronald Reagan
* Today’s newsletter is brought to you by AfroTech [ https://substack.com/redirect/ca8779ff-4dbb-4d35-adb6-683… ].
Governance and integration are where most AI projects stall: no one signed off on what the agent could touch, or the data architecture gave out after the demo.
At the AFROTECH Conference [ https://substack.com/redirect/2173fd31-8cf0-4328-93b5-40e… ], Gregory Green of VMware breaks down the production stack that makes agentic AI resilient, and cybersecurity author Nicole Dove covers the “32% problem” of over-trusting AI output, plus the guardrails that fix it without slowing your team down.
Secure your pass for four days in Houston, November 2 - 6.
Hi there,
Every agent you run today carries memory it did not earn: notes from a previous session, rules a teammate wrote down months ago, constraints whose original reason has quietly changed. This week’s three reads are about one question. When an agent inherits a rule, does it ever go back and check whether the rule still holds?
The first one is our own. The short answer is no, and the fix is smaller than you would think.
📚 3 Good Recommendations
When Stale Constraints Go Unchecked: Budgeted Verification Failures in Inherited Agent Memory [ https://substack.com/redirect/32e7cad3-292f-45bd-9108-4b0… ] by Kazuki Nakayashiki (65 mins)
We handed 16 language models (Claude Opus 5, Sonnet 5, Haiku 4.5, the GPT-5.6 family, and ten more from nine other labs) six inherited memories and a task with five possible actions. One memory stated a constraint, “this discount hurt retention, do not reuse it.” In the archive, that constraint had already been withdrawn by a newer record. The memory’s provenance link still pointed at the old one.
Each model could open only two source records before deciding. They opened the constraint’s source about one time in five. Across 5,400 episodes, they followed the withdrawn rule 74 to 77 percent of the time.
The failure is not a lack of budget but where the budget goes. Forcing one of the two slots onto the constraint memory recovered 61 to 81 points. A content-blind rule, “check the memory that limits your options first,” recovered 89. Telling the model the memory might be old did nothing.
Designing for Doubt: How to Prevent Automation Complacency in AI Workflows [ https://substack.com/redirect/add0929d-94bb-4b68-bd44-b09… ] by Victor Yocco, UXmatters (11 mins)
Paper one is about agents that stop checking. This is about the people watching them. Complacency sets in under three conditions that describe most AI deployments: the system is usually right, the operator is busy, and nothing has gone wrong yet.
The slide is gradual. “I should verify” becomes “it is right unless something looks off,” then simply “it is right.” The Air France 447 crew in 2009 were highly trained and still followed the automation into the sea.
Four design moves push back: deliberate friction at the moments that matter, confidence signals that vary instead of always reading as certain, periodic unassisted tasks, and treating complacency as a system health metric. “Complacency happens when trust closes the gap between ‘I believe this system works’ and ‘I no longer evaluate whether it has worked this time.’”
AI Agents in 2026: Tools, Memory, Evals, and Guardrails [ https://substack.com/redirect/adc5e77a-decf-4fea-9114-11a… ] by Khimananda Oli (11 mins)
Paper one shows an agent will act on a rule nobody checked. This is the other half: make sure that when it does, it cannot reach far. “The primary failure mode isn’t malicious AI, it’s competent AI operating with excessive permissions.”
Permissions in three tiers, deny by default, allow by function, then bound to the session. No wildcards. Approval gates only where the blast radius is real: production deletions, IAM changes, cross-account moves. Everything routine stays automatic, or the humans stop reading the prompts.
Every policy decision goes to an immutable log, kept at least twelve months, and the guardrail costs 50 to 200 milliseconds per checkpoint. Written by an infrastructure security engineer with working policy code, not a vendor.
Three reads, one shape. An agent will not check a rule that looks settled. The person supervising it stops checking for the same reason. And the fix in both cases is not more trust or less, but deciding in advance which records get opened every time, and how far anything can reach when nobody opened th
View this post on the web at https://read.glasp.co/p/unfinished-tasks-do-not-help-you-…
“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.”
— William James
* Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Clarify [ https://substack.com/redirect/7f1a5e89-02d0-4349-b32f-d82… ].
Founders don't need another tool to manage... they need fewer. Clarify replaces your CRM, enrichment, outbound, and call intelligence stack with one AI-native system that runs itself. One team cut $1000s / yr doing exactly that. This is what "AI-native" really means.
You have been told your brain holds on to what you did not finish. It is why so many products leave things visibly incomplete: the progress bar at 80%, the streak you cannot break, the draft marked unsent. The idea comes from one experiment in 1927, and it has been repeated so often that almost nobody went back to check it.
Someone finally did.
📄 Glasp Deep Dive
The Zeigarnik Effect: What the Research Says [ https://substack.com/redirect/49aea9f8-a407-4fd8-9f7e-e25… ] · 17 min read
Why we went looking. We make a tool for saving what you read, so we had a stake in this one. The case for highlighting has always leaned on memory: capture it, and you will remember it. We went through the literature expecting to find support for that. The memory argument did not survive. What replaced it is a better reason to save things, and it is not the one we had been giving.
Here is the short version.
The finding. A 2025 meta-analysis [ https://substack.com/redirect/6363342e-d42d-43ca-965a-339… ] pooled 37 studies and put the weighted ratio of interrupted to completed tasks recalled at 0.99. There is no memory advantage. Zeigarnik’s 1927 original, with 32 adults, reported 1.9. Everything since has scattered between 0.70 and 2.0, and weighting by sample size cancels it out.
What survived instead. Maria Ovsiankina, working in the same lab a year later, measured something different: not what people recalled, but whether they went back. Across 20 studies the pooled resumption rate is 66.79%, against a 50% baseline. The obscure sibling replicates. The famous one does not.
So the pull back toward unfinished work is real. The memory benefit people built products around was never there.
The part that should worry you. Open loops do not help you remember, and they do cost you. Masicampo and Baumeister (2011) [ https://substack.com/redirect/28df64fd-bdcc-4e2a-bc42-7ee… ] found that an unfulfilled goal produced intrusive thoughts during unrelated reading, inflated accessibility of goal-related words, and worse performance on an unrelated anagram task. What degrades is executive function itself: impulse control, logical reasoning, fluid intelligence, all of it leaning on working memory.
No upside, real downside. The worst arrangement available.
The fix is almost insultingly cheap. In the same work, writing a specific plan eliminated the interference. Not finishing the task. Writing down when, where and how you would return to it. The size of the effect tracked how earnest the plan was.
Leroy and Glomb [ https://substack.com/redirect/dc7f3733-7dad-44b0-b6f8-364… ] found the same thing in the workplace version. Interrupted work leaves attention residue on whatever you turn to next. Across four studies, people who spent a few seconds noting where they were and what they would do on return carried less residue, and the interrupting task did not suffer.
What this changed for us. We had been telling you to highlight so you would remember. That is not what the research supports. Highlight so you can put the loop down: the sentence you came for, the next step you would take, written where you will find it. You are not saving it to remember it. You are saving it to stop paying for it.
Read the full deep dive [ https://substack.com/redirect/49aea9f8-a407-4fd8-9f7e-e25… ], including why the 1927 result probably worked at the time and stopped working since.
What is the one open loop you have been carrying all week without ever writing down where you left it?
📣 Community Updates
🟩 Glasp on mobile passed 100,000 installs:
Across iOS and Android, more than 100,000 of you have now installed the app. Thank you for that. If you have been meaning to try it, this issue is a decent excuse. The phone is where you are most likely to leave a loop open, and the app is where you can put it down.
👉 App Store [ https://substack.com/redirect/c8c522b5-1b02-4fc8-aec8-ff8…
View this post on the web at https://read.glasp.co/p/5-actionable-tips-for-taking-bett…
Glasp’s note: At Glasp, we value the close personal relationships we’ve built with thinkers, creators, and doers who fuel curiosity and growth. This week, we spotlight Bobby Powers [ https://open.substack.com/users/45053889-bobby-powers?utm… ] —a lifelong learner passionate about leadership development and continuous improvement. With more than a decade of experience leading teams and developing learning and development at startups, Bobby understands the transformative power of curiosity and mentorship. You might remember him from his Glasp Talk [ https://substack.com/redirect/af970b45-0455-45ad-8006-619… ] appearance, where he shared insights on leadership and personal growth, inspiring thousands. We’re honored to continue learning from Bobby and are thrilled to share his thoughtful reflections with our community.
If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.
Glasp Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Hi, I’m Bobby Powers! I run the Leader & Learner publication [ https://substack.com/redirect/568781a9-384f-4f10-b241-573… ], where I share two posts per week to help you become a more curious leader and learner.
As an avid reader, I love using Glasp [ https://open.substack.com/users/11842163-glasp?utm_source… ] to save highlights and takeaways from what I learn online. But I’m also a fan of physical books and notes, so I’ve spent years refining how to write better handwritten notes in my journal, work notes, etc.
These five tips have saved me time, improved the readability of my notes, and—perhaps most importantly—made it easier to find relevant notes later.
1. Leave space at the start of every notebook for an index
For years, I found it nearly impossible to find critical notes later. I didn’t have any system for clearly indicating which ones were important and what I could find where.
Thankfully, that problem nearly disappeared when I began using an index.
I now reserve the first 2–4 pages of each notebook for creating an index. In that section, I jot down the relevant page number(s) of important notes, longer-term action items, and anything else I think I may need to reference later.
Here’s a quick peek at the index of one of my past journals.
Having an index like this makes it WAY easier to find important notes later. I’ve also found that it’s surprisingly easy to predict which notes I’ll want to reference later, so those are the ones I make sure to list in the index.
Note: I use a note-taking system called Bullet Journaling, so you’ll notice my note-taking screenshots in this article may look a bit different than your notes. But regardless of what system you use, you can leverage these same tips.
2. Create a distinct symbol to designate action items
Some of the most important notes you’ll ever write are action items you need to complete in your work or personal life—such as completing a presentation, following up with a big client, or scheduling a doctor’s appointment.
Because these notes are so critical, you’ll want a way to quickly find them. The best way to do that is to create a custom symbol that you only use for action items and to-dos. The symbol you choose doesn’t matter. The important thing is that it’s easily identifiable as you scan through your notes.
Many people use checkboxes for this purpose, but use whatever works best for you. For example, I draw diamonds to denote action items, then color in the diamond once I complete the task, which provides a nice little dopamine hit as I finish my work.
3. Dog-ear each page once all of the action items are completed
I picked up this trick from an old boss of mine, and it works like a charm. (Thanks, Annie!) Since I began doing this, I’ve hardly forgotten a single action item in years.
The trick is this: once you’ve completed all of the tasks on a given page, dog-ear that page. That way, you can quickly see which pages still have lingering tasks you haven’t completed yet. (Pics below.)
If you’re writing notes in a digital tool instead of a physical notebook (for example, I use a reMarkable paper tablet), you can do an equivalent version of this with tags. Just apply a “ToDo” tag to each page with outstanding tasks, then remove the tag once you’ve completed the tasks on that page.
4. Include a date and topic at the top of every page
This is the simplest tip but also a very necessary one: begin every entry with a date and topic. This information will help you quickly find notes later.
I keep separate notebooks for work notes versus personal notes (like my journal), and I do this same process for all of my note-taking.
Whenever an en
View this post on the web at https://read.glasp.co/p/how-a-two-person-team-uses-ai-to-…
Glasp’s note: This is Hatching Growth [ https://substack.com/redirect/6ca2aced-bd84-48b0-973b-8ec… ], a series of articles about how Glasp organically reached millions of users. In this series, we’ll highlight some that worked and some that didn’t, and the lessons we learned along the way.
If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.
Popular Episodes at a Glance
#1: How We Found and Acquired Our First 1,000 Users [ https://substack.com/redirect/12df47af-60a0-4ae3-86e1-b88… ]
#3: How We Rode the AI Wave with Side Projects Before It Exploded [ https://substack.com/redirect/8e48d987-be15-4368-ab87-ebb… ]
#10: When the Side Project Outgrows the Mission [ https://substack.com/redirect/f3b4d96d-c595-4ce7-9d8e-525… ]
#17: How We Grew ChatGPT Traffic 37x Using Our Own Server Logs [ https://substack.com/redirect/2871e1e8-ad05-4374-9e46-291… ]
Hi, Kei and Kazuki here.
When people find out how small Glasp is, the question is always the same. There is usually a slight pause before it, as if they are checking whether they heard us correctly.
Two people?
Two people. Between us, we maintain browser extensions, a web app, native mobile apps, a separate AI product, and a research pipeline that has produced about a dozen papers in roughly three months.
Across our browser extensions, the current installed base is about 3.5 million installations.
That definition matters. This is an installation count, not a count of unique people or devices, not monthly active users, and not cumulative downloads. It excludes extensions that have been uninstalled, and somebody running two of our extensions appears twice.
The usual answer to the two-person question is that we automate a lot. That answer is true and almost useless.
The interesting part is not the volume of work we hand to machines. It is the shape we force the work into before we hand it over, the things we deliberately keep in human hands, and the work we refuse to create because its operational cost would remain with us forever.
This issue is about that shape.
We are publishing this field note as a three-part series. This first issue follows one product-growth loop. We do not treat Marketing Ops, Content Ops, Analytics Ops, and product development as separate functions. Product use and distribution create signals. Analytics helps us decide which signals are real. Those findings shape what we build, what content we create, and which relationships we prepare to pursue. The outcomes return to the same measurement system and start the next cycle.
The second issue will cover how we build, support, and study the products with AI. The third will focus on DevOps: how the products are deployed, monitored, and kept running over time.
The loop every system has to fit
Most of our internal systems are built from the same five parts. We did not design them all at once. We arrived at this pattern after enough things went wrong that the systems that survived began to look alike.
A signal. Something actually happened, and it was recorded somewhere we can query. A user hit a video with no transcript. A crawler requested a page that did not exist. A product metric moved outside its expected range. Work begins with evidence, not a content calendar or a vague belief that something might be useful.
A queue. The signal becomes an ordered item with a state and enough context to act. A useful queue records what needs to happen, why it entered, what happened last time, how many times it has been tried, and whether it is finished.
A bounded worker. Code or an AI agent takes an item and performs one narrow task. It has a hard limit on how much it can change, spend, send, or process. A worker without a ceiling is not automation. It is an open tap.
A verification step. A worker reporting success does not prove that the user received the intended result. Something separate has to inspect the outcome and be able to return no.
A retirement rule. Whatever the system creates, the system must also know when to stop, archive, reverse, or remove. We did not take this seriously enough in the first few years. It is one of the first things we would install if we started again.
That is the operating model: signal, queue, bounded worker, verification, retirement.
A script that creates output is a shortcut. A system that detects demand, acts within a limit, verifies the outcome, and stops when the value disappears is infrastructure.
This is the first time we have put anything behind the subscri