ConnectedText; any case studies?

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Feb 15, 2012 at 02:27 PM

Hello,

In my continuing quest to find the perfect information manager, I am once more delving seriously into ConnectedText. This move was prompted by my general dissatisfaction with the solutions I’ve come up with in the past to manage my day notes. I was especially intrigued by CT’s date topic facility. (In short, this is the ability to give a new topic a “date” name, which causes CT to treat that note differently, including giving it a navigational calendar on which each date is a wiki link.) Since I began this experiment early in January, I’ve really “connected” with CT (sorry for the pun, but it is appropriate).

I’ve tried CT several times in the past, but I never got over the mark-up hump. That is, I was never comfortable peppering my text with strange mark-up characters. Why it doesn’t bother me so much now, I can’t say, other than I’ve perhaps developed an appreciation for mark-up language, as programs like Scrivener handle Multi-Markdown.

Regardless, I’m finding CT to be fun and inspiring to use. I’ve been tracking information I always had trouble tending to in the past, mostly through simple prose. And I think that’s why I like CT so much: It is so text-based. I find it much more appealing to just write about what’s happening in CT than I have in Zoot or OneNote or PersonalBrain, three applications I greatly admire and continue to use for other aspects of information management. But my use of CT is growing, and it is possible that it will surplant one or more of these other applications at some point.

Anyway, I’m hoping to start a thread to gather information about how people use CT. So I’ll begin:

For my job I’ve created four projects (CT speak for a file or database). My primary project is my Day Book, in which I create a topic (CT speak for a note) for each work day. In each of these date topics I use a template with the following sections:

- Needs Attention
- Accomplished
- Contacts
- Notes

You can see a sample screen shot here: http://db.tt/BG03v1Ib

In this same project I’ve set up topics for key projects. It has surprised me how quickly I’ve come to find CT useful for this work.

I’ve set up projects for Agents (these are people who I work with in our field, who have been helpful and have information to share), a general Notebook for miscellaneous information (which I may move into my Day Book project and do away with the separate project), and a Catalog to keep my marketing information about our various products.

I’ve just begun learning some of the advanced features of CT, and have hardly used them yet. I do like to use categories for marking topics (categories are essentially keywords).

I would welcome reading about how others are using CT.

Thanks.

Steve Z.