Amish Computing (forked from:Question: What software is absolutely essential to you)

Posted by JBfrom
Aug 13, 2011 at 07:47 AM

I too have a great deal of respect for Org Mode.

It is my primary word processor and working environment. It contains my scratch working files and my chronological tapes of all the text I generate.

I don’t use the TODO functions and agenda. I just like it for its text management and basic outlining, and Emacs ability to have lots of text files open without choking, control windows, switch screens, etc. All mouse free.

I also tried living in Org-Mode with its GTD features and outlining, but I found that the outlining was not as flexible and powerful as BrainStorm, and that I needed to manage actions differently, not according to the GTD model. Now I keep all my actionable items in a single BrainStorm file and sort them all against each other to surface urgency and priority. This relative ranking is far more useful to me than trying to set each individual GTD attribute for an individual task in a vacuum. GTD prioritization is relative, not absolute, and this is a critical failing of the GTD methodology that can only be solved with the affordance of a rapid outliner like BrainStorm.

So I am pretty close to Amish Computing in a lot of ways… my chron tapes are all plain text, BrainStorm is 100% plaintext compatible, and then it goes into blogs and wikis, which are mostly plain text. The text must flow.