Vertical vs horizontal organizers

Posted by Franz Grieser
Apr 19, 2018 at 02:06 PM

What a strange distinction. When working on a large project - say a book - it’s not “either/or”, you can only succeed when combining a vertical and a horizontal approach (or top-down and bottom-up to use Dellu’s wording).

A horizontal approach may suffice when you write a book that has only 119 pages as does the German translation of Perry’s book (a funny and thought-provoking read). In this case, you might be able to stay on top of things when spreading out all the pages (as Perry suggests). But try to do that for a book of 300 pages…

I’d say that’s one of the reasons why most of the tools we discuss here allow you to look at the big picture and to zoom in on details. Any 2-pane outliner gives you both a horizontal+vertical view and a detail view. The same is true of word processors such as Word, OpenOffice Writer, Textmaker (with the navigation pane opened) or Scrivener.