Summer 2009 PIM roll-call

Posted by Gary Carson
Jul 29, 2009 at 08:50 PM

After downloading, installing, evaluating and sometimes buying almost every PIM and outliner ever created, I really only use OneNote 2007 any more. I use it as a permanent archive for information that I need to save for a long time (serial numbers, contacts, research articles, etc.) IMO, OneNote is the best PIM available these days, partly because it’s a Microsoft product and not likely to just vanish overnight. It has a good web capture and does everything I need.

I tried the Brain and while I’m impressed with it, I still haven’t found a good use for it and the interface in general is a little complex for my needs. Also, it takes a while to open and there’s no easy way to do web captures and so on.

I occasionally use NoteMap v2 for outlining, but most of the time, I just dictate my outlines, brainstorming sessions, notes, etc., using Dragon Naturally Speaking v9.5. I’ll dictate directly at my laptop or I’ll use a voice recorder (Philips 9600 DPM) while I’m driving around in my car, then transcribe the dictation directly into Word when I get home. Dictation’s a thousand times faster than writing at a keyboard and it’s a great tool for research and brainstorming.

I’m a fiction writer and I just started using a fantastic screenwriting app called Movie Outline to assemble the structured outlines for my various projects. Movie Outline is similar in some ways to a two-pane outliner, but it has a lot of other features that are used to write formatted screenplays, create characters, compare your script to other scripts, etc. It’s rock solid and so far I’m really impressed with it. Hopefully, they won’t go out of business any time soon.

My goal these days is to dictate everything and switch to using audio files instead of text files as much as possible. Speed and simplicity are the Holy Grail. For example, I can dictate an outline for a novel on my voice recorder and as long as I follow a specific format I can then transcribe the dictation into a text file and import the text file directly into Movie Outline, ending up with a structured step outline with associated notes and so on. It’s easy and let’s me get more work done while I’m driving around.