Holy grail or holy grails?

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Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Sep 10, 2011 at 05:53 PM

These days, rather overwhelmed with both the quantity and diversity of things I am trying to do, I found myself working with various kinds of information in different programs. By ‘kinds’ I don’t necessarily mean types or formats; in fact, most of my information was in textual form and quite similar in its nature (outline structured and/or categorised). I mostly mean that they were related to different projects or different areas of my life.

The result: a rather unusual (for me) clarity of mind while moving from one piece of work to another.

Hereby an indicative pairing of kinds of information and programs that I use (I am sure that some other combinations might have worked at least as well):

- Tasks: Brainstorm (btw, I think the official name now is BrainstormSW); also trying out Noteliner

- Habit-related short notes and ideas: Cintanotes

- Informative (non-actionable) material collected from the internet: Evernote

- Project-related material collected from the internet: Surfulater; also considering Citavi

- Project plan for project X: Excel

- Project plan for project Y: Treesheets

- Project plan for project Z: MindView

- Faith related notes: Zulupad

- Personal contacts: Ultrarecall

- Professional contacts: Google Docs (shared spreadsheet)

(I leave out from the above list some purpose-built information managers that I use, such as Linkstash for internet bookmarks.)

My initial hypothesis: through the use of different programs for different areas of work, I am able to focus better: the software environment is identified with the area I am working on.

The above insight is by no means conclusive; I have not been working this way consistently for long, and I still occasionally experiment with the specific piece of software I will use for a given work. I am also going through the new Cyborganize videos and thinking how this approach might influence my workflow (the software there is more or less diversified according to the stage/maturity of the information entities, not the kind). I therefore remain open to new ideas; but I though the experience was worth sharing anyway.

Sidenote: I was able to easily use all these programs due to my CRIMP past… Such diversification could come at a cost!

Posted by Dr Andus
Sep 10, 2011 at 06:20 PM

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>Sidenote: I was able to easily use all these programs due to my CRIMP past…
>Such diversification could come at a cost!

But that is a good point. Were one not to accumulate and try out various software for different tasks over time, how could one learn to use them at the right time for the right purpose? So CRIMPing might be a very important part of developing productivity and creativity.

Posted by Cassius
Sep 10, 2011 at 06:41 PM

Some thoughts come to mind:

If one is never, ever, going to again use the material stored in a particular program, then crimp* away. But, if one is likely to need it sometime in the future, one needs to be aware that the program may not work in a future operating system. If one is lucky, an update will exist and one can pay for the update, but it can get costly to update all of ones CRIMPware. And, if there is no update, ...?

(In the case of software that was expensive to develop, my recommendation was to save a copy of the operating system and all of the associated software used, including, possibly, the hardware used. Much cheaper than rewriting the software.)

Of course, even if we don’t crimp, we still have the problem that whatever software (PIM) we used, its development may cease and it may by crippled or unusable in a new version of the operating system. GrandView is a good example.

* Verb form of CRIMP

Posted by JBfrom
Mar 4, 2012 at 01:04 AM

Alex, I think you’re right about Ultra Recall for personal contacts. I’ll have to try that.

Posted by skylark
Mar 4, 2012 at 12:58 PM

>So CRIMPing might be a very important part of developing productivity and
>creativity.
I find my self agreeing complete with Alexandera statement above. The delopment of my own modus operandi comes from being a commited outliner user and evaluator…

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