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Organizing lots of thought snippets
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Posted by tradercclee
Jan 26, 2015 at 03:14 AM
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?
Posted by Hugh
Jan 26, 2015 at 11:25 AM
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 However I fear that Boswell is no longer being updated and may not work with recent OS X versions.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.
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>
>
Posted by Hugh
Jan 26, 2015 at 11:30 AM
Apologies - the final link above absorbed the comma that follows. The correct link is: http://zettelkasten.de
Posted by Paul Korm
Jan 26, 2015 at 11:38 AM
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
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?
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jan 26, 2015 at 12:09 PM
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.