James Fallows is a fantastic blogger, and has a history of doing great reviews of software "thinking tools" like outliners and Ecco and The Brain, etc. He's back on the thinking tools warpath these past few days; pointing folks to Thinklinkr (a web-based collaborative outliner) and digging up some screenshots of GrandView, the DOS product that "many buffs consider...the best outliner ever invented.
Call it a new year's fetish, but I'm trying to get back into thinking tools. And it's depressing, because leaving aside the slew of everything buckets out there (all falling into the two- or three-paned note taking metaphor), there really hasn't been much advancement in tools that help you capture, organize and interlink random bits of data since, well, The Brain. Or am I missing something?
As a bit of a mind-tool nut myself, it seems that we've had a big analog backlash for quite a few years. A lot of us spent more time playing with tools instead of actually USING them. A batch of 3x5 cards and a nice mechanical pencil in my hip pocket at all times has done wonders for changing that tendency.
The everything buckets link is nice and I couldn't agree more. Once I discovered zero inboxing on a monthly basis and archiving my outlook email as .msg files by saving them into my file system as .msg files for desktop search to worry about, my digital life started returning to a unixy text mode and I like it.
Posted by: Jonathan-Peterson | Jan 03, 2010 at 05:54 AM