Organizing lots of thought snippets

Posted by Paul Korm
Jan 26, 2015 at 01:01 PM

There are plenty of solutions for capturing lots of notes. The tricky part is finding relationships among those notes. On the one hand, techniques like tagging can help—especially with those notetakers (like Evernote) that support them. But the downfall of tagging is that it takes a lot of ongoing effort and care, requires you to anticipate relationships among notes in advance, and is hard to fix retrospectively.

A better approach is software that suggests relationships. Usually by analyzing note text and context. There are far fewer software packages available for this. On the Mac, there is DEVONthink (as Steve Z mentioned) which has its “AI” feature: select a note and choose “See Also” from the menu and you’ll see a list of notes that the software calculated as being relate by examining the text. DEVONthink is pretty good at this. (There’s an essay by author Steven Berlin somewhere that discusses this feature.) DEVONthink also has a “Classify” command that will put your note in a folder with notes that the software evaluated as being related. Tinderbox (also mentioned above) will suggest related notes, also using the textual context.

On the extreme end, is software that examines the text of your note and compares it to what amounts to a library of similar terms and concepts and suggests categories—this is really expensive software beyond the scope of most.

If you’re using Evernote for note collection and tagging, I’ve found the BubbleBrowser app to be very useful in locating related notes. There is a Mac desktop version and an iPad version. The iPad version seems more accurate than the desktop version. BubbleBrowser is for analyzing your notes post hoc—it’s not for notetaking.