Using Personal Brain without making a huge mess

Posted by Graham Rhind
Aug 2, 2011 at 07:00 AM

Just to reiterate my findings about Personal Brain from the other thread:

- Having a lot of thoughts does not have any significant effect on performance that I have noticed. I have a glossary, for example, with >6500 thoughts, without any noticeable slowing down.
- Where there is a limit is in the size of the notes within each thought. In one of my brains I have notes which may contain >30 graphic-heavy pages. Working with these, and saving them, grinds to a halt at a certain point. For those chapters I have to use the data as an attachment instead of putting it into a note.

and to add:

- The number of brains you use is dependent upon why you’re using Personal Brain. Unlike Stephen I find more brains better because I am using one brain per web resource being created. (An example is the free Data Quality glossary at http://www.dqglossary.com).
- As Stephen said, you can’t just dump information into the Brain. You need to have some idea of a structure before you start. But if your structure is not working for you it can be changed, and the search function is very strong. I have my customer database unstructured in The Brain because I can find what I’m looking for just using the search.

The main reasons why I use Personal Brain mainly for web sites and not for information management is that the Brain provides notes and links to other resources (such as spreadsheets and web pages) which need to be opened in their native programs to be viewed. I like to see everything at once, so I use OneNote where I can print everything into it and rarely need to add a link to an external resource. I have tried to use The Brain for other things, but I reached the point some years ago that I stopped looking for a one programme fits all and used many programs, each to its own strength.

That’s it, really!

Graham