Capturing is easy. A hundred pins with no structure is a worse problem than never having pinned anything, so the surface is built around getting from the first state to the second quickly and without ceremony.
Collections
A collection is a named group with an optional icon. Create them from the rail on the left.
Name them after the thing, not the type. "Meridian Group" works. "Links" does not, because a filter for links already exists and a collection that duplicates a filter is pure overhead.
The good cases are all specific: an account you are researching, a project running for a quarter, a decision you are gathering evidence for, a subject you are learning.
Renaming, deleting and sharing all live on the collection's own menu.
Deleting a collection does not delete its pins. They return to being uncollected and reappear in the unsorted pile. That is what makes restructuring safe: you can dissolve a collection that turned out to be the wrong shape without losing an afternoon of gathering.
Tags
Pins carry tags, and the rail shows your most-used ones with counts beside them.
Tags and collections do genuinely different jobs. A pin lives in one collection and can carry several tags. The collection is where a thing belongs; the tags are how you find it across everything you own.
Anything pinned from a web search is tagged as web automatically, which makes "everything I found externally, across every collection" a single click and no maintenance.
The four built-in views
At the top of the rail, and they are computed rather than stored, so they are never out of date.
All pins. Everything, grouped by collection, with each collection collapsed into a stack.
Recent. The last fourteen days. The best starting point when you are looking for something you saved and cannot quite name.
Records. Only live records. Your working set of deals, contacts and documents, which for a lot of people is the most-used view on the surface.
Untagged. Everything with no tags at all. This is the backlog view, and it is the one to work through when the surface starts feeling like a pile.
The All view is a sorting surface
In All pins, uncollected items are separated by what they are: records, workspace pages, and an Unorganized pile of loose links and notes.
The Unorganized pile is deliberately the thing you see rather than something tucked away. It is not a reprimand, it is a queue: the things you captured quickly and have not yet decided about, which is exactly how capture is supposed to work.
Working through it is the whole maintenance routine, and it takes minutes rather than an afternoon.
Filtering and searching
Chips narrow to Records, Links or Notes.
Search ranks matches rather than merely filtering them. A match in the title outranks one in the tags, which outranks one in the URL, which outranks one in the body. Matches of equal strength fall back to most recent.
In practice that means searching for a company name finds the pin actually named after it first, then the ones tagged with it, then the ones that merely mention it somewhere in a snippet. You almost never have to scroll.
With no search term, everything is newest first.
Bulk moves
Switch to List view and rows gain checkboxes, with a select-all covering everything currently visible.
With a selection made, a bar offers three things: move to a collection, remove from a collection, or remove the pins.
This is how a backlog actually gets cleared, and it is fast once you have done it once. Open Untagged, filter to links, select the fifteen that belong to one account, move them into that collection in one action. Repeat twice. Done.
Removal asks for confirmation once before it goes.
A routine that keeps it usable
Capture without deciding. The entire point of one input and a keyboard shortcut is that filing is not the price of keeping something. Deciding at capture time is what stops people capturing.
Open Untagged once a week. Five minutes. Move what belongs somewhere, delete what does not.
Make a collection when you have four things about one subject, and not before. Empty collections created in advance are the single most reliable way to make a personal system feel like administration, and administration is what people abandon.
Prune quarterly. A collection about a deal that closed a year ago is not helping anybody, and deleting it does not touch the deal.
Two things worth knowing
A pinned record is never stale, so there is never a reason to re-pin one to refresh it. If it looks wrong, the record changed, and the pin is doing its job by showing you.
A pin that reports itself missing means the underlying record was deleted. It is telling you the truth rather than hiding it, and the only useful response is to remove the pin.
The canvas, and when it is worth it
Canvas view turns pins into objects you place rather than rows you scan. They keep a position and a stacking order, so an arrangement persists between visits.
It is the wrong default and occasionally exactly right.
Worth it when the relationships between things are what you are working out: mapping an account's decision-makers, laying out the evidence for a choice, grouping competing options before committing to one.
Not worth it for retrieval. Finding a specific pin on a canvas is slower than searching for it, always, and arranging things is absorbing in a way that resembles progress without being it.
The honest test is whether you would draw this on a whiteboard. If yes, the canvas is the right surface. If you would write it in a list, use the list.
Sharing, precisely
Sharing operates on individual pins. A collection has no scope of its own, so sharing a collection shares each pin inside it, one at a time.
Two consequences follow.
Anything added afterwards is not automatically shared. A collection you shared last month does not silently share what you put in it yesterday, which is safe but occasionally surprising.
Moving a personal pin into a shared collection does not share it. The pin keeps its own scope until you change it.
Both behaviours err on the side of not publishing something you did not mean to publish, which is the correct direction for a surface that holds half-formed opinions about people.
When Pins is the wrong tool
For something the whole organisation needs, use Documents. A collection is personal or team-shared, and neither is the same as published.
For a live working list, use Plan. Pins keeps things; it does not track them, and a pin will never chase you.
Did this answer your question?
No, ask a person