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?

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.

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.)

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 .

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.)

I rely mostly on ConnectedText and Resophnotes for notes management, Workflowy for outlining and Scrivener and SublimeText for writing.
I need also a two pane outliner, for collecting more structured notes (web scrappings, tables, files). I have a license of Rightnote, but was not satisfied how it worked on my computer, so I bought Myinfo this year, which I like much better, and a new version is on the horizon.

I tried Infoqube once again, and this time I finally was able to create a working, meaningful database. However, using it on everyday basis will require a major change in my work habits and too much work.

The biggest change in my software environment was shifting from Mendeley to Zotero. I discovered also AgentRansack - finally, a desktop search application, that's fast and working on my machine.

jaslar wrote:

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?

Great questions. I find CRIMPing to be a dual-edged sword. On the one hand, every switch has some productivity cost, whether that be a learning curve or time for migration. And this is why pen and paper is sometimes needed in my life. Keep it simple and focus on getting tasks done. If you don't ever do the actual task, then you never move forward. Then again, this antidote only goes so far, especially if you are finding tasks piling up at a rapid rate. So, finding something that works and is as frictionless as possible is something that I always keep in mind and use to limit my desire to CRIMP at any deep level.

But, CRIMPing and exploring/testing new software, which I usually explore as what I am using still has some issues (i.e. friction) also pushes me to re-evaluate how I manage my tasks and information. A lot of the new software offers new features and tools, and that can open up new ways to look at how I manage my work. I recently decided to give ClickUp a spin after a long evaluation process. It offers a number of way that I can set it up to handle my projects and tasks, and that has caused me to reflect if how I am currently working could be changed or improved. Granted, one could say that this is just shuffling of the data, but the time I spent considering the options does cause me to reflect a bit more on my processes, and that is not always a bad thing. I do think there is a balance between refining and re-evaluating/improving my skills, and finding that balance is important, just like when CRIMPing. Sometimes we need to challenge ourselves with new thoughts and other times we just need to work on improving what we already know. I heard it once referred to as "a beginner's mind", and I like it at times as it keeps me fresh and from getting too set in my ways and thoughts.

--Ken

I'm happier with my writing environment than I've ever been, I think.

Devonthink handles my large document libraries. I've got one that's about 8500 documents in a hundred or so groups with about 400 tags.

Curio has been an excellent find. It's got a glitch or two, but they are not fatal and I can work around them. It serves as a brainstorming tool and as a wrapper for files created with other products. I think this year I'll finally step beyond internal company documents and put something on Amazon. My first Curio-based project is underway, a self help book I bet I can get polished enough to risk electronic self-publishing.

Happy 2020, all.

Tomasz Raburski wrote:

I tried Infoqube once again, and this time I finally was able to create a working, meaningful database. However, using it on everyday basis will require a major change in my work habits and too much work.

Hi Tomasz,

I encourage you to connect with other IQ users on the community forum. IQ is very malleable and can most likely be configured to do just what you need.


Pierre Paul Landry
IQ Designer
https://infoqubeim.com/drupal5/?q=forum

My business blew up (in a good way) and my first child was born - I realized I had no time to mess around crimping.

What did I do? I went all in on a single platform for myself and my team. In this case, office 365 was the best fit due to a balance of power, cross platform availability, multi-user support, and integration between programs.

In many ways, doing this was a way to delegate my software decisions (to Microsoft) instead of having to constantly question what to use and look for improvements/upgrades.

So instead of trying to build an ever upgrading tapestry of "perfect" tools (i.e. CRIMPing), I decided to take flexible tools and MAKE them work so I could DO MORE work.

Between OneNote and Excel (mostly just OneNote), I can basically do anything. Yes, specific tasks are not as easy as some more specialized tools, but it doesn't matter because of how much time is saved because the programs simply work and I'm no longer fiddling.

Funnily enough, in forcing myself to use these more "basic" tools - I've ended up massively refining and improving my personal information management systems & structures. Tools matter, but the systems you use matter more.

A good paper-only system will lead to much greater productivity than a weak system built on the hottest tech.

I've even come to embrace the slower pace of certain actions as a way to move and think more deliberately.

Anyway, that's what I've learned in 2019!

To follow up -

I've also basically stopped perusing this site since I was no longer looking for new software. And to be honest, I'm happier for it.

Looking back, while CRIMPing was definitely fun for a period and getting that dopamine spike of some new software was cool - but on the whole, CRIMPing for me was not something that actually made me feel good.

It was mostly done from a place of avoiding doing actual work and not feeling like my current setup was good enough.

In many ways my CRIMPing was an unwillingness to be humble and disciplined enough to do good things with what I had.

Not sure if this resonates with anyone, but if so, my recommendation is to find a way to settle with yourself on a set of tools that are "good enough" and then get to work.

If you've got enough free time that you are happy to let CRIMPing be a hobby, then have at it. But if you know it does you more harm than good, take the plunge and cut it out.

Wishing you all the best in 2020!

I (re)discovered that what I should prioritize for myself is cross-platform apps that are privacy-related, such that local files sync (with encryption) in the cloud to Mac/iOS, instead of using apps/services with files in a cloud that serve them back to me. That decision helped me focus and eliminate a number of apps I'd been considering, though it has kept me with some files on my desktop for the time being.

Despite loving the text/font/color customization of Ulysses, I found myself drifting back to black-on-white text processing in IA Writer.

I've given up hope that Gingko will progress - it seems permanently stalled with a web-service and a separate, incompatible desktop app, with an overworked, overburdened (and mostly absent) dev in charge.

I've realized I'm fine with subscriptions for the right apps, but that there are many free/cheap alternatives that get me maybe 80% of what I get from several of my subscriptions, which has me thinking about dropping some.

I do most of my crimping vicariously, and wish this site were more active.

New products are good to hear about, because looking at a new answer to an old question helps find better ways to work, even if I keep using the same software.

How others use software similar to mine is helpful, too. It's only in the last 18 months or so that I've come to appreciate the power of tags. i just didn't get it, before. Now I can't get along without them.

Reading posts about using tags here is what got me started with them.

Regards to all!

thouqht wrote:

To follow up -

I've also basically stopped perusing this site since I was no longer
looking for new software. And to be honest, I'm happier for it.

Thanks, all, for your thoughts. So this is basically a support group for CRIMPers!

Like others, I have narrowed down my tool set. At this point, mostly because of a greater reliance on a Chromebook (light, portable, a good fit for my lifestyle) I have migrated almost exclusively to Dynalist and Google Suite. I do share the privacy concerns some have expressed here. I haven't put in the time to build a private network and live in org-mode, although I fantasize about it.

For me, the discovery of the year was that it really matters for me to have a streamlined, unified app that lets me see annual goals (professional and personal), track a handful of projects (the left pane of Dynalist holds active projects, which move to an archive folder when done), and keep something like a bullet journal, with tags. The discipline of maintaining those files keeps me more focused and mindful. That said, the categories of my life seem a little clearer, repeating from year to year. I'm not nearly as complicated as I used to think.

jaslar wrote:

what new thing did you discover in 2019 through USING that
tool?

After having discovered the "Distraction Free Mode" Chrome extension for Google Docs, I started experimenting with using Google Docs to edit and rewrite manuscripts imported from MS Word, thus being able to keep all the rich text formatting and images, while being able to work in a WriteMonkey-like distraction-free dark theme environment.

Another advantage of doing this setup is that Google Docs saves changes automatically and also keeps track of the history of changes, so one can revert easily.

While I was editing, I also needed to remove sentences and paragraphs but keep these snippets in an organised manner, should I need to refer to them or reinsert them later.

This is where the sliding-in Google Keep side-bar comes into the picture. If you create a Keep note from within Google Doc, it inserts a link automatically into the Keep note back to that given Google Doc, so when in Keep, you can always find the original source of that Keep note.

Numbering these notes and pinning them in Google Keep also displays them in a reverse chronological order in a list, so I can see the order in which these changes were made. You could also give them a colour code in Keep to give them their own identity as a group of notes.

My next experiment is going to be trialling Paperpile, a reference manager for Google Doc. Currently all my refererences and linked PDFs are in EndNote and on my Windows laptop, and it is one of the reasons Windows is still my main OS for writing. But I wish I could move at least some of these processes to Google Drive, so I could do more of my writing on Chromebooks.

Over the last twelve months, in an effort to get more done, I've been trialling anti-distraction software and, following David Sparks and others, "hyper-scheduling" (all on a Mac).

As far as anti-distraction applications are concerned, I've tried Freedom, Focus, Be Focused Pro and FocusMe. So far I've found FocusMe to be the most flexible, Focus and Freedom in its pro version to be in different ways expensive, and Be Focused Pro to be inexpensive but jarring in its design. My current preference is FocusMe (although I like Focus's UI).

In hyper-scheduling trials I've tried Tick Tick and Skedpal. Skedpal was very intriguing but reminded me of similar apps with scheduling algorithms that I tried on Windows fifteen or more years ago, with immense possibilities for wasting time by tinkering. After trying Tick Tick I can understand why there are fans of it on this forum. It's a reliable and nicely designed application, and works well on both Mac and iOS. In the end however for hyper-scheduling I returned to the combination that I already owned of OmniFocus and Fantastical, and drag-and-drop (because, though slightly less pretty than Tick Tick, the combination is reasonably simple to use and in the round works almost as well as Tick Tick does).

I should add - in answer to the question at the top of this thread - that based on this experience, tools such as these do work. I'm getting more done. But I ought also to add that there's a very obvious lesson to be re-learnt here: crimp-wise, additional complexity can be more fun, but it can also undermine the productivity that tools such as these are supposed to enhance.

I've discovered that what I want is a combination of TreeSheets and workflowy and [[linking]] that idealy would use plain text / markdown / html for its format. I've been experimenting with Excel trying to create something that gets most of each but sadly lacks the best of each.

As always for me, the two most important features by far are scale (maintaining speed even under huge loads) and instant-search. Unfortunately nothing except some text editors and search engines do both (Sublime Text, EmEditor, Everything search, X1 search, Lookeen in some cases). Excel and workflowy come close. dynalist, checkvist, moo.do, etc, do not (they crawl under heavy loads). And none of the text editors do the powerful outlining, [[linking]], or freeform nested grids of treesheets.

So I defiantly continue to CRIMP!!!

I still CRIMP (very merrily), but my personal info management is now concentrated almost exclusively on NotePlan and Numbers (the latter for sketching out projects, workflows etc.) running, of course, on Mac (and iOS/iPadOS).

NotePlan is evolving quite rapidly and is one of the most impressively flexible schedulers of any, not least because of the wonderful way you can combine extensive notes with its Calendar overview (you can cause tasks in project Notes to show up in Calendar just by adding a date; you can also easily reschedule them).

It integrates with Calendar and Reminders, and it supports wiki-linking between all Notes/Calendar entries.

And Eduard is exceptionally responsive to suggestions.

Finally, the whole thing is, at bottom, text-based, so there’s no sense of proprietary lock-in.

MadaboutDana wrote:

NotePlan is evolving quite rapidly and is one of the most impressively
flexible schedulers of any, not least because of the wonderful way you
can combine extensive notes with its Calendar overview (you can cause
tasks in project Notes to show up in Calendar just by adding a date; you
can also easily reschedule them).

I enjoyed using NotePlan, which I did religiously for about 6 months. However I realised that the information I was putting in was metaphorically disappearing into the void. The app wasn’t losing it, but due to the nature of its design, whatever I typed into each day was basically lost and forgotten once the next day rolled over.

I switched to Agenda because of the way it links project notes together in a timeline/ribbon of notes. This keeps past notes at front of mind and they are easy to find. Yet everything else about Agenda is frustrating, slow and clunky.

I’d be interested to hear your views of NotePlan in the context I’ve described - perhaps there is another way to structure notes in NotePlan that I didn’t figure out? It is a beautiful and functional app, and I would be happy to return if I could make it work for me.

Yes, I know exactly what you mean. But NotePlan has evolved in ways that mean your problem can be solved relatively easily. Depending, of course, on precisely how you use NotePlan.

The solution I would propose is tagging. NotePlan now supports nested tags, which it handles in exactly the same way as Bear. This means that at various levels of a tag hierarchy, you can view all the entries on lower/inferior levels of the hierarchy. There are many ways you could use this to keep close track of notes, whether they’re in the Notes or Calendar component; the wonderful thing about NotePlan is that it doesn’t differentiate between the two. If you have a tag like, say, #marketing/meeting2019-11, you can use that in a Note that summarises the agenda and outcome of the meeting, but also in the Calendar note for a specific day on which that meeting was held.

You could also use the tagging system to keep more precise track of stuff by date, so e.g. #marketing/meeting/2019/11/12 - this would produce much the same effect as Agenda.

NotePlan also supports smart searches, in much the same way as Agenda. So you can put together smart filters and then save them as custom searches. This is another way to optimise your use of NotePlan - by creating smart searches that key to particular date ranges, for example, or limiting searches to one or more of Notes, Calendar, Events or Reminders. This feature is enormously promising. It’s still not as sophisticated as the Agenda equivalent, but it’s already powerful.

Personally, I use a combination of all these methods to keep track of stuff. With one caveat: I rarely put valuable information in the notes for individual Calendar days (except for my general journal). I store valuable information in the Notes section, then add tasks (with scheduled dates) in the relevant Notes so that they show up in the Calendar. This means I can keep extensive notes on major projects (if they’re very, very extensive notes I happily create more notes with wiki-links and tags, so I can swap from one note to another at high speed) in a single repository.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that you can use external search engines or even text/markdown editors to manipulate NotePlan files, which are simply text files held in ordered folders. In this sense, NotePlan is vastly superior to Agenda (and much, much faster - although it doesn’t yet support images). Another point of superiority is that you can open individual NotePlan notes in separate windows, which despite many, many user requests, Agenda is still unable to do.

Finally, NotePlan’s excellent search engine means that I’ve stopped worrying about losing stuff in there. I can usually find it if I need it. But I hope the above ideas are helpful if you want to take a more structured approach to your personal knowledge management!

Cheers,
Bill

A modern TreeSheets with linking, tagging, transclusion, markdown, and fast search would be gold.

yosemite wrote:

I've discovered that what I want is a combination of TreeSheets and
workflowy and [[linking]] that idealy would use plain text / markdown /
html for its format. I've been experimenting with Excel trying to
create something that gets most of each but sadly lacks the best of
each.

As always for me, the two most important features by far are scale
(maintaining speed even under huge loads) and instant-search.
Unfortunately nothing except some text editors and search engines do
both (Sublime Text, EmEditor, Everything search, X1 search, Lookeen in
some cases). Excel and workflowy come close. dynalist, checkvist,
moo.do, etc, do not (they crawl under heavy loads). And none of the
text editors do the powerful outlining, [[linking]], or freeform nested
grids of treesheets.

So I defiantly continue to CRIMP!!!

I have been trying to simplify down to the apple stock apps.

However Devonthink is my mainstay for storage.

I have discovered this year Curio, which I am using as brainstorming and planning software. You can add reminders that sync with apple reminders.

https://www.google.com/search?q=apple+fans&hl=en&tbm=isch

jaslar wrote:

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?

I already knew my data was more important than the latest snazzy jazzy apps.
But I realized more important yet, was my data structures.

And i am not just talking about the apps' or digital data structures, that is the outer circle.

But also my mental data structuring for new ideas. These are symbiotic with the digital data structures, influence is both ways.
Because these mental data structures, which go largely unnoticed, shape my data, my ideas.
These are the inner circles.
Even then, there are more important factors than these mere surface mental mechanics.