An outline of outlines

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
May 1, 2006 at 01:15 PM

Sometime ago, in the now frozen outliners.com discussion list, I proposed that the most effective organisation of information would be a non-hierarchical network of mind maps or outlines ( here is my original posting as cached by google: http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:dVrUTQQFGs4J:www.outliners.com/discuss/msgReader%241923%3Fd%3D14%26m%3D5%26mode%3Dday%26y%3D2004+deliyannis+power+law+reality+mind+maps+site:outliners.com&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2 ). I proposed Personal Brain or Cmap Tools as a means of creating the network.

Since then, I have settled on UltraRecall as the most effective general information manager for my needs, but I rely on Brainstorm for organising textual information within a creative project. The result is an UltraRecall tree of projects, where the first node in any project branch is a “Project Notes” Brainstorm file. UltraRecall’s advantage is that it can maintain the Brainstorm files, which are very space efficient, as attachments” within its single database file.

Project branches also contain other information such as contacts, budgets, contracts, main documents etc., but it is the Brainstorm files that seem to grow the fastest, as i note down ideas and work on deliverables, reports etc.

I am very happy with this arrangement which has contributed to my having easy access to my project context information virtually everywhere.

alx