Organizing vs. searching

Posted by Chris Murtland
Sep 2, 2006 at 06:44 PM

Thanks, I think I just needed some validation that I haven’t been wasting ALL my time for the past ten years.

One thing I did overlook while thinking about this is that even after locating an item, having it in the outline structure also lets you see it in context with other related items that may not exactly match the search.

I guess the thing I need to work on is defining the conceptual boundaries of where to stop building structure because it won’t be used and where it is really useful. A lot of reference type information seems to lend itself to just needing to be able to be located by a search, but active ideas/thoughts and writing are where outlines really help me. And in this case, the tree-based database approach seems less helpful than the one-pane outline approach (where the text *is* the outline item instead of a separate note attached to the outline item). So it looks like I need a more traditional outliner for active thinking and a database approach to storing reference information. Ecco or BrainStorm on Windows would probably be my top choices for the former. (I’ll be sure to try Opal if I ever get a Mac).

It’s sometimes hard for me to make distinctions between ideas/actions/reference material; they seem to shift and morph into each other along the way. I suppose that’s why I still lean toward trying to do all my info management in one app. For all its crippling flaws, one thing I did like about Info Select was that you could kind of effortlessly switch between tree-based database type info and fairly decent one-pane outlining all within one tree.

Chris