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Using Personal Brain without making a huge mess
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Posted by Susanne
Aug 1, 2011 at 05:58 PM
Stephen Z. and Graham Rind said they would share some of their uses and organisation within Personal Brain.
While I am fascinated with the product (the tabular, hierarchical outlines just don’t do it for me right now) I am afraid that just dumping information into a brain will lead to redundancies and a big mess.
Anyone else with ideas or experience please jump in!
Thanks in advance for your ideas,
Susanne
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Aug 1, 2011 at 06:15 PM
If you’re looking for a dumping ground, then I don’t think PersonalBrain would be your best choice. For that I use Zoot.
But there are schemes for moderately using PB in this way. You can create a Thought called “In Box” and pin it to the top of the Plex, so that it is readly available. You can then dump items into the In Box as needed, but you’ll want to attend to the In Box regularly to find homes for its Child Thoughts.
Here’s a screenshot of how I’ve got “In Box” as a Jump Thought off of my Home Thought and as a pin in the upper left part of the Plex:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/155244/PB%20with%20In%20Box.jpg
You can also create a tag called “Unfiled” to identify Thoughts you don’t necessary have a place for yet—although you still have to put them somewhere.
Nevertheless, PersonalBrain definitely takes engagement with your information. As I said in my other post, I find this a plus, but it won’t be for everyone.
Steve Z.
Posted by Susanne
Aug 1, 2011 at 07:08 PM
Thanks for the wealth of information you shared!
I cannot use Zoot (which I do love) for the simple reason that I am prohibited by our great and wonderful IT department from installing software on my work notebook. Zoot won’t run on a stick, the brain will.
Being the CRIMPer that I am, of course I have both UltraRecall and MyInfo - UltraRecall is too slow copying Web information and can’t seem to get around the microsoft dll problems for displaying documents etc. MyInfo would normally be my first choice - yeah it is tabular and hierarchical but the tagging is one of the best I have seen - however, half of the web clips come over without the graphics and messed up formatting.
Also too, I am coming to prefer the ideal of associative thinking rather than linear thinking - this is much better supported by the brain or even Wikis, such as Connected Text. My only problem with the Wikis is that they seem to have this “real men code formats” attitude - is it really such a problem to have bold, bullets etc. as word-like functions? Do I really need to enter codes in front of and after the texts - that is soooo 1980’s and does not make me feel cool. - ok, sorry, rant over
Anyway, thanks again for sharing, I will certainly try out a few of these ideas as long as my trial is still going,
Susanne
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Aug 1, 2011 at 08:41 PM
I too like the idea of a personal wiki, but have yet to find one that works intuitively for me. ConnectedText is a powerful program (and can run as a portable version from a USB stick) but I’ve found it cumbersome for my work style to deal with the mark-up language. (And, also, for some reason Norton Anti-Virus decided it was a major threat on my computer and removed it… don’t know what that was about, but didn’t want to spend the time figuring it out.)
If you have any questions about PersonalBrain, I’ll be glad to try to answer them.
Steve Z.
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Aug 1, 2011 at 10:36 PM
Susanne, much as I like MyInfo, it is not a good program for dealing with web clips.
I prefer Surfulater. I’ve stopped using Evernote since I found I can sync Surfulater between two computers by way of Dropbox.
I’ve also been testing Springpad. I like, except for fact I’ve discovered it only displays a short form of urls, which is a bit of a pain if you need to cite your source.
Thanks to a Bits du Jour special I rediscovered - and bought - ClipCache this week. It does a great job of saving anything and everything by using the Windows clipboard.
And I agree with you re wikis. I tend to feel they are over-rated, but that may just because I don’t “get” them.
I am convinced I could find Connected Text useful, but its like a foreign language to me. I won’t say more about it because last time I complained about it being incomprehensible to me, one the members here whom I had especially respected, threw a hissy fit at my response to his favourite piece of software, and resigned from this list, never to be heard from again.
Oh well.
And in good CRIMPing style, I bought The Journal today at half price from Bits du Jour.
But The Brain is starting to look good - but I’m not going there, at least not today.
Cheers,
Daly
Susanne wrote:
>Thanks for the wealth of information you shared!
>
>I cannot use Zoot (which I do love)
>for the simple reason that I am prohibited by our great and wonderful IT department
>from installing software on my work notebook. Zoot won’t run on a stick, the brain
>will.
>Being the CRIMPer that I am, of course I have both UltraRecall and MyInfo -
>UltraRecall is too slow copying Web information and can’t seem to get around the
>microsoft dll problems for displaying documents etc. MyInfo would normally be my
>first choice - yeah it is tabular and hierarchical but the tagging is one of the best I
>have seen - however, half of the web clips come over without the graphics and messed up
>formatting.
>
>Also too, I am coming to prefer the ideal of associative thinking
>rather than linear thinking - this is much better supported by the brain or even Wikis,
>such as Connected Text. My only problem with the Wikis is that they seem to have this
>“real men code formats” attitude - is it really such a problem to have bold, bullets
>etc. as word-like functions? Do I really need to enter codes in front of and after the
>texts - that is soooo 1980’s and does not make me feel cool. - ok, sorry, rant
>over
>
>Anyway, thanks again for sharing, I will certainly try out a few of these ideas
>as long as my trial is still going,
>
>Susanne