Simplify, simplify

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Oct 23, 2007 at 05:57 PM

I greatly enjoy our discussions of the fine points of outliners/PIMs/wikis, but sometimes I ask myself if I’m overthinking the whole subject.

I suspect that were any of us forced to live with even the most fundamental of PIMs, we would make do. I think back to my college days, before the personal computer existed, when I typed my papers on an old Royal manual typewriter. I would have enjoyed writing and researching my papers so much more if I’d had access to a laptop computer, a word processor and a simple program like Treepad Lite.

My point, I guess is that, even as I look for the perfect PIM, I have to acknowledge that any of them (at least those that are not flawed with bugs and glitches) can be made to be very useful. Going back to my example of Treepad Lite, it has all the features one really needs:

- It is reliable.
- It is accessible when needed.
- It allows for categorization/organization of notes.
- It has an effective search function.
- It has hyperlinks from note to note (and to external files, though I’m not sure that is necessary).
- It provides export of notes into a format easily used by any word processor.

Of course, other features and functions are nice (e.g. text formatting, keywording), but are they necessary? As I implied, Treepad Lite as is would have seemed the height of convenience and power just 30 years ago. Sometimes I am tempted to ditch all my other tools (oh, boy are there a lot of them) and just use Treepad Lite or a simple wiki like Notebook.

But where is the fun in that?

Steve Z.