Robert Caro's outliner

Posted by Gary Carson
Apr 15, 2012 at 02:33 PM

This is a beautiful system. Absolutely beautiful. I love its minimalism and efficiency. His office is fantastic. I particularly like his SC Electra 210.

Working like this focuses your attention on what’s important: the actual planning and composition. Nothing focuses your concentration like writing longhand, for instance. All these tools we obsess about constantly are completely incidental to the “actual using of the brain,” to paraphrase a line from an old Seinfeld episode.

I also think the old-fashioned hard copy corkboard outlining method he’s using here is a million times more efficient than ANYTHING you’ll ever get from ANY program on ANY computer. You can scan the entire outline in a matter of seconds—nothing is faster than a visual scan. Full sheets of paper work much better than index cards because they can hold more information. You need the wall space, though.

Note how meticulously he prepares and organizes everything. This is a MENTAL skill. It has nothing to do with specific tools.

Fantastic. Thanks for posting this.