Holy grail or holy grails?

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!