Hi all!

What's your best system to organize lots of snippets of thoughts?

I've been using Workflowy exclusively for a while now.

The good news is that I've stuck with Workflowy, and it's a great repository of all my ideas.
The bad news is that there are so many snippets, it takes a lot of time to piece everything together to get insights.

I capture a lot of ideas. And they are roughly organized into categories.

But sometimes thoughts overlap categories, or don't belong in any.
So now I have tons of snippets strewn throughout the outline.

Once in a while, I go back to clean up and reorganize.
But this is a pain.

I'd like to discover insights shared by snippets of thoughts.
And have an easy way to quickly put ideas into categories/tags as I'm capturing the ideas.

Would love to hear your latest and best ideas!

PS - there was a German filing system mentioned here a while back, where each note is tagged with an ID number?... I don't remember the name. Wondering if this would help?

tradercclee wrote:

Hi all!

What's your best system to organize lots of snippets of thoughts?

Tinderbox: see this description: http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/forum//YaBB.cgi?num=1421254289 and this recent thread: http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/5711/0/what-is-tinderbox-interesting-summary
On the Mac platform. Here's another, simpler Mac programme I've used in the distant past: http://www.boswell.com/quotes.html However I fear that Boswell is no longer being updated and may not work with recent OS X versions.

I've been using Workflowy exclusively for a while now.

The good news is that I've stuck with Workflowy, and it's a great
repository of all my ideas.
The bad news is that there are so many snippets, it takes a lot of time
to piece everything together to get insights.

I capture a lot of ideas. And they are roughly organized into
categories.

But sometimes thoughts overlap categories, or don't belong in any.
So now I have tons of snippets strewn throughout the outline.

Once in a while, I go back to clean up and reorganize.
But this is a pain.

I'd like to discover insights shared by snippets of thoughts.
And have an easy way to quickly put ideas into categories/tags as I'm
capturing the ideas.

Would love to hear your latest and best ideas!

PS - there was a German filing system mentioned here a while back, where
each note is tagged with an ID number?... I don't remember the name.
Wondering if this would help?

Probably Zettelkasten. Here's a website devoted to it: http://zettelkasten.de which has been created by Christian Tietze, a member of this forum. A search of the forum for "zettelkasten" will turn up his and others' postings on the subject, including suggestions for zettelkasten-suitable software on the Windows platform.

Apologies - the final link above absorbed the comma that follows. The correct link is: http://zettelkasten.de

You might be thinking of a Zettelkasten.

You could read Manfred Kuehn's discussion of Zettelkastens at

http://takingnotenow.blogspot.co.uk/2007/12/luhmanns-zettelkasten.html

or Dr. Kuehn's translation of Niklas Luhmann essay (Luhmann is credited as the "inventor" of the Zettlekasten technique)

http://scriptogr.am/kuehnm/post/title-communicating-with

or browse Christian Tietze's blog on the topic of Zettelkastens

http://zettelkasten.de

or experiment with Daniel Luedekke's Zkn3 software

http://zettelkasten.danielluedecke.de/en/index.php

PS - there was a German filing system mentioned here a while back,

where each note is tagged with an ID number?...
I don’t remember the name. Wondering if this would help?

Your dilemma reminds me of my own problems using a straight outline system to manage a lot of notes. It works great at first, but soon the spreading hierarchy gets overwhelming to me. For random, non-project-related notes, I use Evernote, mostly due to its ubiquity on all the devices I use.

Anything with a smart folder type feature should help you make sense of your snippets. DevonThink on a Mac, Zoot in Windows. Evernote if you need cross platform. Just a few ideas.

Steve Z.

One other neat little Mac application that I've used in the past for this purpose is ShoveBox. Apparently it hasn't been updated in yonks, but it's still available on MacUpdate. I've just checked whether it works on Yosemite, and it appears to do so.

There are plenty of solutions for capturing lots of notes. The tricky part is finding relationships among those notes. On the one hand, techniques like tagging can help -- especially with those notetakers (like Evernote) that support them. But the downfall of tagging is that it takes a lot of ongoing effort and care, requires you to anticipate relationships among notes in advance, and is hard to fix retrospectively.

A better approach is software that suggests relationships. Usually by analyzing note text and context. There are far fewer software packages available for this. On the Mac, there is DEVONthink (as Steve Z mentioned) which has its "AI" feature: select a note and choose "See Also" from the menu and you'll see a list of notes that the software calculated as being relate by examining the text. DEVONthink is pretty good at this. (There's an essay by author Steven Berlin somewhere that discusses this feature.) DEVONthink also has a "Classify" command that will put your note in a folder with notes that the software evaluated as being related. Tinderbox (also mentioned above) will suggest related notes, also using the textual context.

On the extreme end, is software that examines the text of your note and compares it to what amounts to a library of similar terms and concepts and suggests categories -- this is really expensive software beyond the scope of most.

If you're using Evernote for note collection and tagging, I've found the BubbleBrowser app to be very useful in locating related notes. There is a Mac desktop version and an iPad version. The iPad version seems more accurate than the desktop version. BubbleBrowser is for analyzing your notes post hoc -- it's not for notetaking.

tradercclee wrote:

I'd like to discover insights shared by snippets of thoughts.
And have an easy way to quickly put ideas into categories/tags as I'm
capturing the ideas.

Here're some quotes from someone else this time (fresh off the press), just to show that it's not just me ;)

"Such a problem might be writing up some research or the writing of a thesis which by its nature it is an exploration of new ideas and new research. Most discoveries are not made whilst performing the experiments, they are made during the organising and writing up of the notes, this is where ideas come together in ways which produce flashes of insight which were not apparent from the raw data. Imposing a structure too early might mean that you miss something significant later.

In my opinion this is where ConnectedText is at its best. You can just dump all the raw data in there and classify it organise it and re-organise it, because you can have the same data represented in many different ways simultaneously and just switch between the different views.

ConnectedText has very powerful facilities for classifying things. Pages can have category, attribute and property commands embedded in the markup language. (...) Assigning categories, properties and attributes is only half the story. Once you have a set of pages classified like this you can write queries to select the pages you want to see. Each category has an automatically generated virtual page which contains links to all the pages in that category. (...)

Pages can include other pages (either the whole page or just a part of the page) so a page can be a patchwork of parts of other pages, if any of the source pages change then any pages which include that page also change."

The rest of the review is worth reading as well:

https://pauljmiller.wordpress.com/2015/01/25/long-term-usage-review-of-connectedtext/

Another interesting software that can display all snippets from a category is Piggydb (though I've never actually tried it):
http://piggydb.net/about/

Paul Korm wrote:

On the Mac, there is DEVONthink (as Steve Z
mentioned) which has its "AI" feature: select a note and choose "See
Also" from the menu and you'll see a list of notes that the software
calculated as being relate by examining the text. DEVONthink is pretty
good at this. (There's an essay by author Steven Berlin somewhere that
discusses this feature.) DEVONthink also has a "Classify" command that
will put your note in a folder with notes that the software evaluated as
being related.

Devonthink can be very useful although personally I think that the Steven Berlin essay you referred to is sometimes taken way too...religiously.

Tinderbox (also mentioned above) will suggest related
notes, also using the textual context.

Or more precisely: Tinderbox used to do that, it seems that the feature disappeared during the transition to version 6 and still has not reappeared. It will hopefully do so but for anyone looking for this feature now, Tbx is not the way to go. Or perhaps I am overlooking it?

Prion wrote:

>Steven Berlin essay you referred to is sometimes taken way
too...religiously.

OK. Interesting approach. Though, I didn't suggest Berlin is the gospel, he's just yet another guy with an opinion.

Or more precisely: Tinderbox used to do that, it seems that the feature
disappeared during the transition to version 6

Should have specified, but I've been using 5, mainly -- it's still available for download, BTW:

http://www.eastgate.com/download/tbx5122.dmg

Hi Paul
it's all good, I wasn't referring to you personally. Besides, it was just *my* opinion because I sometimes find it surprising how some articles stay around for ages while some others are forgotten almost instantly. BJ recommends splitting everything into chunks of 500 or 1000 words (don't remember precisely) in order to aid the artificial intelligence inside Devonthink. Even if it was automated, I wonder who would actually do this? To be fair, I always thought it was suggested more like a thought experiment rather than an actual practical advice.
Prion

I agree that a single outline hierarchy can become unwieldy. However, I still prefer Workflowy for this because of the power of filtering the outline at a granular level. If I have multiple lists of thought snippets, each paragraph or even word (in single-word lists) becomes its own independent item. I find that this does facilitate combinatory thinking if you're willing to think about the search terms a bit. I've gotten in the habit of searching for almost any random word or phrase that comes to mind just to see what thoughts and collected snippets I may have on the topic, however vague the topic may be. I suppose that's the power of keeping everything in one application, not just Workflowy, but I think the granularity can help prevent overwhelm; plus, I prefer seeing the actual, combined contents based on my search rather than just getting a list of each item with hits that I then have to go through one by one.

Also, tagging at the paragraph level is another way to "collect" seemingly unrelated snippets into some conceptual grouping, regardless of outline location.

And if you hoist before doing either of the above you can then work only within a certain region of your outline if needed.

I've probably evangelised SBJ methods in the past, and I don't apologise for that. His composing method of a few years ago - in my mind summarised as "First, develop your outline; second, drag carefully selected pieces of evidence/research into your outline at the appropriate nodes; third, write your essay/paper/article around the pieces of evidence/research" - has always seemed to me to be a useful response to the not-infrequent DT or Scrivener forum question "How do I compose a factual article/essay using DevonThink/Scrivener/both?".

But I must admit that "mini-chunking" has never been part of my credo.

Hugh wrote:

summarised as "First, develop your outline; second, drag carefully
selected pieces of evidence/research into your outline at the
appropriate nodes; third, write your essay/paper/article around the
pieces of evidence/research"

These steps seem more relevant for the final stage of writing up. However, I think the OP's question concerns the processes of organisation, analysis and synthesis that precede this final stage. How to "carefully select pieces of evidence/research"? This is what hierarchical outliners are not equipped to do (indeed, they are entirely the wrong tool for the job, at least for large data sets).

Hence the need for a Zettelkasten type tool that allows one to gather stuff (and resist the temptation to start sticking it into a fixed position within a hierarchy too soon), rearrange in many different ways, discover new relationships between data (based on some initial tagging), annotate them further, and then only at the very end start doing the outlining for a piece of writing (well, OK, interim writing can also be helpful, but it's not outline-driven).

I am correcting one detail of what I previously said: The "find similar notes" feature has returned to Tinderbox in the meantime but is located in a very different place (the "get info" popover).



Prion wrote:

Or more precisely: Tinderbox used to do that, it seems that the feature
disappeared during the transition to version 6 and still has not
reappeared. It will hopefully do so but for anyone looking for this
feature now, Tbx is not the way to go. Or perhaps I am overlooking it?

Hey,

Prion wrote:

BJ recommends splitting everything into chunks of 500 or 1000
words (don't remember precisely) in order to aid the artificial
intelligence inside Devonthink. Even if it was automated, I wonder who
would actually do this? To be fair, I always thought it was suggested
more like a thought experiment rather than an actual practical advice.

I concur: it's crucial to keep the notes small-ish enough so you can handle them well. If a note becomes too complex, or almost a short essay in itself, it's hard to link to it when you think it contains a particularly interesting thought. Because it's internally complex, you'd have to create a link like "confer note X, section Y, where I talk about author Z" or something. If, on the other hand, you've got a bunch of notes on topic Y for various authors, you can link to each author's take individually and also create a compilation. This compilation would replace the more complex note.

Apart from being more atomar and thus more link-friendly, focussed notes are usually easier to re-use in writing projects because they depend less on a context. (This is analytical: if something is part of an essay, the essay is its context, and you'd have to put some effort into its extraction when you need it without all the rest.)

This makes DEVONthink do its magic pretty well. I don't know what effect splitting up an essay-like note into smaller notes has when it comes to suggesting relevant stuff in your database. Will the results be less surprising? Will they be boring, like a regular full-text search? I wouldn't know :)

Anyway, this approach works great with Evernote and a Wiki and a folder full of plain text files, too. It's easier to give things a name and to find them again.

The method of having a Zettelkasten pretty much boils down to this. You don't need fancy equipment. You only need notes concise enough to suit the way you think so you can form and find connections.

Working with a (deeply nested) outline is a good way to see note hierarchies and relationships at a glance. I understand it's not ideal to *keep* the notes. Outlines don't replace a database. (I'm talking about 3000 notes in my case.) Outlines are great to give an exemplary view into your archive. Writing a book yourself will have the same effect. You can say outlines are intermediary texts: texts you *would* write if you took the time. Caring for the connections between notes manually will yield similar results: you learn a lot. Collecting notes only doesn't, though. That's why I think DEVONthink's AI is great for discovery, but it won't replace the work you have to do anyway, that is to add links between notes.

Specifically, Johnson wrote

I don't want the software to tell me that an entire book is related to my query. I want the software to tell me that these five separate paragraphs from this book are relevant

and

Most of the entries are in a sweet spot where length is concerned: between 50 and 500 words. If I had whole eBooks in there, instead of little clips of text, the tool would be useless.

The chunk size depends on how useful DEVONthink is with its suggested matches.

Forgot the link

http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000230.html

Mac users might like to check out Outlinely in this respect.

Outlinely is a very straightforward outliner, with Workflowy-like support for rich text, the ability to add notes to outline items, and a nice search function (with search and replace, too).

But it also supports tags – not immediately obvious, when you start using it.

If you click on a tag, it generates a very nice view of all items with that tag - in a separate window. What a good idea! This makes it very easy to rapidly correlate different pieces of info.

For example: I'm currently translating a magazine using Outlinely. I'm adding a tag to each paragraph (@draft1, @draft2, @final). If I select one of these tags and click it, I can immediately see - in a separate window - which bits of text are still at draft1 stage, or which are at draft2. By selecting @final, I can list all finalised texts and easily copy them for input into the client's DTP system. At the same time, I don't have to disrupt or move away from what I'm currently working on, because the 'tag tree' appears in a separate window.

It's one of the simplest but neatest tagging solutions I've seen in an outliner.