one idea, one fact - taking note blog post

Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 21, 2013 at 09:43 PM

jimspoon wrote:
>This is why I don’t want to put my notes into some RTF pane, I want my
>notes to be “in the tree”. Stated otherwise, the tree shouldn’t hold
>just titles, but the notes themselves. Even relatively short notes
>(paragraphs) lend themselves to being put into an outline structure.
>One sentence per item?

Interesting topic. Doesn’t WorkFlowy does this already? It’s a single giant outline with inline note capability.

>I would reserve the “lengthy material” pane for content that needs to be
>kept together for some reason - for example, a captured web page, a PDF
>file, some reference material - you would naturally want to be able to
>see it in the form in which you obtained it. Even then it could be
>useful to make small sections of it into separate items - with a link
>back to the original so that you could see it in its original context.

In fact MK was kind enough to write an AutoHotkey script for me that does exactly that with CT (create a new note with the selected text and include a link back to the original):
http://drandus.wordpress.com/2013/01/10/academic-writing-workflow-with-connectedtext-freeplane-and-outline-4d/

However, I have to say I didn’t end up using that feature in the end all that much (even though it’s very clever). In fact I’m doing wikis “all wrong,” because I’m keeping my notes in long documents in CT. Why?

For one, it just feels tidier to have a smaller number of documents than a huge number of them.

Secondly, I find it time-consuming to create new documents (give them titles, categories, templates, icons etc.)

But the main reason is that CT’s powerful search capabilities obviate the need for breaking long documents up. There are searches for the entire database, incremental searches within a note, and some other searches I don’t even understand how to use :)

But my point is, if you have a good search engine, you don’t need to waste your time breaking things up and annotating things, when you find anything every time anyway… My 2 cents…