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2019 reflection question
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Posted by jaslar
Dec 31, 2019 at 05:54 AM
Fellow CRIMPers,
My question is not, or not chiefly, which tools did you use this past year, but what new thing did you discover in 2019 through USING that tool? That is, are we just shuffling our data around, or did any of us actually learn something from our software spelunking, something meaningful?
Posted by Listerene
Dec 31, 2019 at 07:34 AM
If you suspect that you’re wasting your time, you probably are.
You’re also doing it wrong. That’s because it’s not always about “learning things”, it’s also using software to tell others what they don’t know.
That’s why folks, you know, pay us.
Posted by Paul Korm
Dec 31, 2019 at 12:26 PM
What I learned from CRIMPing in 2019 is to do less of it. Learning a few “softwares” well is more interesting than quantity.
It’s still fun to pick up a new shiny bauble and look at it for a while, but not compelling.
(It might be because there are fewer interesting baubles to CRIMP with—every new web-based thingy mentioned here begins to look like every other one, with a ridiculous subscription fee attached and vague privacy promises. If 2020 became a year of flight-from-the-cloud it would spark my interest—but I doubt it would happen.)
Posted by Skywatcher
Dec 31, 2019 at 03:52 PM
I would say that what i learned mostly, is that CRIMPING is quite unproductive. While there seems to be no cure for this disease, it can and should be managed tightly. I think that the more your data is spread among various tools, the less you’re able to have a global vision of all of it. You end up with a fragmented vision, instead of looking at it from above and having an “Aha !” moment, where it all suddenly makes sense.
I’ve been trying very hardly to reduce the number of tools I’m using, alas the fantasy of the tool to rule them all will probably remain a fantasy. All tools have serious limitations in one area or another.
In the end , I’ve settled principally on the combination of Curio, Tinderbox, and Devonthink.
- Curio is mostly where i do my brainstorming. I’m in a creative job, and Curio handles any visuals you throw at it without complaining. I usually use it for specific projects.
- Tinderbox is where i do my general thinking and brainstorming, for both professional and personal. Is a dauntingly complex tool, despite having made great strides in user-friendliness recently. If it handled images as elegantly as Curio, i would use it probably more, but that’s not the case, it is really a note oriented tool. I don’t use it for specific projects, more like a mega-brain where i try to make sense of all sorts of seemingly unrelated ideas.
- Devonthink is mostly like a super vacuum cleaner for data. It is where i archive all sorts of articles, webpages, documents, etc.. I don’t do any sort of thinking in there. It is really just like a super long-term librarian, and that’s it. I link to to the data in there from Tinderbox and Curio, where the “thinking” is mostly done.
- The Brain , i have a sort of love-hate relationship with it. I let my subscriptions die for a number of years, then i subscribed again, and I’m kind of regretting it a bit. I alway found it very awkward, and actually quite restrictive under its free flowing idea connectivity appearance. I mostly use it now as a sort of short-term memory for various articles i find online, until they get processed and either end up in Devonthink, or in Tinderbox as a note, or just discarded. The main reason why i still stick with it is that it has an iPad/iPhone version, that is quite basic, but still handy nevertheless.
- For more granularity in executing the projects, I’m now using a combo of TickTick and ClickUp. I’ve probably owned and used every ToDo app existing for Apple devices, and I found TickTick to just “tick” all the right boxes for me. It has the right combination of a clean UI with lots of features, its integrated calendar works very well, the iOS apps are every bit as functional as the Mac version. It only lacks one thing im a complete sucker for : Gantt charts, and ClickUp has them. I’m a very visual person, and Gantt charts really help me clearly see if the successive and parallel tasks I’m trying to achieve in the time allocated is actually realistic or not. I used Omiplanner previously for this but it was a bit overkill for me. I’m now moving more and more of my professional tasks into Clickup instead of TickTick, but the latter is still very useful for handling all the tasks that don’t specifically fit a project, as well as all the personal tasks. ClickUp is not perfect either, it has a somewhat clunky interface, it’s IOS versions still need a lot of work On the UI and are quite difficult to use .
Posted by JDS
Dec 31, 2019 at 10:23 PM
I agree with the comment about the sameness of the new products. The most elegant products that have existed over the last few decades have also been complex to learn and challenged one to think hard about the best processes to manage information. I think of Zoot, ConnectedText and Infoqube as examples in the Windows ecosystem. Of these it seems that IQ is the only with any momentum at this point, and I have not seen anything new that comes close to these in a long time. Has the heyday of CRIMPING past?
Paul Korm wrote:
>(It might be because there are fewer interesting baubles to CRIMP with
>—every new web-based thingy mentioned here begins to look like every
>other one, with a ridiculous subscription fee attached and vague privacy
>promises. If 2020 became a year of flight-from-the-cloud it would spark
>my interest—but I doubt it would happen.)