Re: Use for Outliners?

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 191

Posted by nubuckaroo
1999-08-20 18:25:45

Wow! What a question!

Here are some of the ways I’ve used, and in most cases still use, an outliner:

1. Organizing my life - writing a list of to-do items and then dragging them up and down, prioritizing them, breaking down the tough ones into small items and subordinating them to the main item. I’ve extended this to lifetime goals, which is an interesting exercise in and of itself.

2. Organizing information I’ve obtained from various sources. I use Arrange, but you could use More and make a little button with somethink like OneClick or Keyquencer to copy a selection and paste it into a new topic. Once I’ve finished my research on the web or a CD-ROM, I can go back and structure the information I’ve collected, edit it, and see if it answers my question or supports my thesis.

3. Maintaining a schedule for a large organization. In many ways it works far better than a calendar - calendars don’t lend themselves to reflecting hierarchies, outlines do. Cloning is an essential function in this effort.

4. Managing large projects. See above.

5. Christmas lists.

6. Recording notes at meetings - I use the outline stationary on a Newton MP 130. It’s slow, but I’ve learned to be concise and the OS supports a nifty macro/shorthand feature for commonly used terms and phrases.

7. Running meetings - see the Technography threads and http://www.technography.com

8. Brainstorming or gathering your thoughts. It’s a tool which reduces some of the mental “friction” I get when I’m writing in a more linear fashion (as I am now). In an outliner, I don’t really worry too much about whether the particular idea that has arrived in the forefront of my consciousness belongs in the paragraph I’m writing, I just toss it in as another topic and put it where it belongs later. In other words, I can divorce the creative process from the structure process and give more processor time to being creative. Pardon the analogy.

It just a cool tool for organizing information!

Dave Rogers

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