Against Everything Buckets

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Feb 10, 2009 at 04:00 AM

Interesting and provocative, but ultimately I think the author is wrong. Not entirely of course. I think most of us have come to the conclusion that there isn’t a holy grail application, one that handles all our information management needs. But the best of these applications do things that make information gathering and organizing much more efficient than the system described by the author of the article. First, they help us clip and collect information quickly and efficiently. How many steps would it take to capture this paragraph by the method the author suggests? Several—copy the block of text, open your text editor, create a new document, and save the file after you’ve navigated the file system to find the proper folder. With Zoot, for instance, I can clip this paragraph and save it in an appropriate Zoot database in less than 10 seconds—and even more quickly on my MacBook using Yojimbo.

The best of these programs allow you to view your data in different ways. Again, talking about Zoot, I can see my information as a table sorted on various attributes, and I can view individual entries.

There are efficiencies with multipurpose applications as well. With Zoot I can clip an e-mail message, add it to a project database and assign a tickler alarm to it so I do not forget to attend to it. You can’t do that using the file system.

I also think his basic premise is wrong. That is, he implies that applications like DevonThink, Yojimbo, etc… promise to handle all your information, and I don’t believe that’s true. Just today I was reading the forum for Curio, and the developer encouraged people to use OmniOutliner for long lists and outlines. In fact, I rarely see any developer claim that you can put everything in their application without need of other programs.

Steve Z.