short time memory and outliner software

Posted by Graham Rhind
Mar 25, 2008 at 01:13 PM

Hi Guido,

I’m not sure I grasp what you’re getting it. Isn’t the whole point of outliners and other information management systems to be able to dump information out of the brain so that no information gets lost due to our poor in-built memories and processing systems?

We have short attention spans and small short-term memories, so I understand why marketing messages to the public or, maybe in your case, points for the jury, need to be short, make impact and be “sound-bite”-like; but I can’t see how this would need to translate into limitations in, or optimal numbers of, nodes in outliners.

If you need to memorise lists, that, I would imagine, is another matter!

Mind you, I confess to rarely using pure outliners - I use Flying Logic sometimes to sort out rambing thoughts. I don’t notice any more or fewers problems in finding my way around software by number of nodes.

Graham