Information conveniently captured in Evernote; now what?

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Mar 24, 2013 at 05:00 PM

This is the dilemma, isn’t it? That “synthesis” phase is the missing link to the holy grail. While I love TheBrain and use it daily for my day job, I am not sure it is a great synthesizer of data as once you put the links in, they are pretty rigid. That is, TheBrain doesn’t facilitate experimenting with information organization until you tease out new meanings and structures that illuminate your ideas if you haven’t done that work up front at the time of capture. I do agree with the commentator on TheBrain forum that it is better than Evernote for giving you context for your information—I’ve called TheBrain a GPS system for my information and I still think that’s an apt description.

I also agree with the notion implied by that same commentator that we handcuff ourselves some worrying about the ease of capture of information, when the real work comes with the synthesis. So, I would change the question to, which application is the best at synthesis? Then build an information capture system that works with that application. My initial feeling is that the best application for synthesis on Windows might be ConnectedText. (For the Mac I think it is Tinderbox.) But admittedly synthesis may mean different things to different people, and may change depending on the type of project.

This is a system that begins with Evernote capture might be a problem, since sharing of data is not so easy with Evernote, as exemplified, I think, by the relatively few Trunk applications available for use in Windows.

I’m sorry this ramble hasn’t added anything resembling insight, nor has it answered your initial query.

Not that this is part of this discussion beyond being an interesting and useful workflow: I created an outline in Noteliner on my office PC, saved it as a text file (with indents marking the hierarchy) to Dropbox. Used my Dropbox app on my iPad Mini to send the text file to the OmniOutliner app, which opened it as a perfect outline. I then saved this back to Dropbox as an OPML file, which I was then able to open in Tinderbox. Sounds complex, but the process of moving it from the text file to Tinderbox didn’t take more than a minute.

Steve Z.