Your top 3 tools?

Posted by Dr Andus
Feb 25, 2013 at 11:45 PM

A variation on the software roll call. Perhaps it gives a different view of people’s use of outliners. What are your top 3 (outliner, PIM, writing, note-taking) tools right now? Do they form a toolchain (fit in a workflow)? They don’t need to be ranked.

I realise the answers will depend on the type of task you tend to work on these days, so the context would be helpful.

I am mostly doing academic writing right now, which requires me 1) to refer to notes, 2) create a final outline, 3) write the draft, while referring to 1 and 2. For these steps I use, respectively:

1) ConnectedText - for storage, analysis and recall of notes. Easy to find them, link to them, annotate them.

2) Freeplane - after not seeing the point of mind mappers for many years, Freeplane emerged as my surprise fave outliner! I don’t really see any major difference between mind mapping and outlining, other than it is a more spacious view. But perhaps it’s just my use, as I try to emulate an outliner as closely as possible (starting node on the left, all child notes to the right).

3) Outline 4D (StoryView) - again, a bit of a surprise, as I thought I’d be doing the final writing in Scrivener or in Word. But there are just so many visualisation options for reverse outlining and comprehending a large and growing piece of text (20k words at the moment), provided by the single-pane structure and the multiple document interface.