I looked at my doc today and realized that the same half-dozen apps are almost always open. I thought I’d write a little about how I’ve been using each of them lately.
NovaMind
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NovaMind is a pure, lovely, and feature-rich mind mapping tool. After reading a few books and creating dozens of maps however, I’m using NovaMind less and less. It’s a great app, but I’m finding that the single largest benefit of mind mapping for me is the spacial organization. I know that Buzan would be disappointed, but most of the “proper” techniques are lost on me. For simple spatial organization, combined with the ability to organize notes and create content, I find Tinderbox suits me better.
Tinderbox
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Tinderbox is an enigma. I first downloaded the demo a couple years ago and completely hated it. It looked funny and I had no idea what I was supposed to do with it. Trashed it. A few positive reviews can go a long way, so about a year ago I tried again. This time I was much more successful. As I’m known to do, I dove right in – creating agents and workflows and outlines and maps and prototypes and on and on. Things got complicated so quickly I became overwhelmed and eventually abandoned it for DevonTHINK out of panic more than anything else.
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Used For
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- Brainstorming. I love Mind Maps, but Buzan-esque maps (such as those created using NovaMind) are limited as to how much actual information they contain. Tinderbox’s map view is a nice compromise: spacial orientation with the ability to nest and collect vast amounts of information all within a single document.
- “Deep” outlining. For outlines which are all about hierarchy, OmniOutliner rules. However, deeper outlines containing boatloads of text and notes are better served with Tinderbox. It’s a better writing tool.
- Notetaking. Using a map view and a couple keys (Enter and Space) I can hammer out dozens of individual notes in no time. Then, they can be easily organized, rearranged, nested later.
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This time around I’m only going to use Agents and other “advanced” features when I need them. Keep it simple, stupid. And I love the fact that there’s no toolbar.
DevonTHINK
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DevonTHINK is the best information-hoarding-and-organizing tool there is. I don’t use it as a content creation tool, but instead as an information gathering tool. It easily grabs anything I throw at it – text, web pages, images – and makes searching through it later a joy by autoclassifying and linking similar bits together. Pretty sweet.
OmniOutliner
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OmniOutliner is one of those things that never clicked with me. I love outliners, but always considered OmniOutliner to be a little too much – too, I don’t know, fidgety.
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So there I was, happily plodding along with Hog Bay Notebook and that’s that. Along comes the Kinkless GTD System, which is basically an OmniOutliner Pro document with a few AppleScripts thrown in. Since I pretty much live for Getting Things Done, I thought I’d give it a whirl. One hour later I’d ordered a copy of OOP and haven’t looked back since. Actually using it for real work helped me to get past what I hadn’t liked previously. Now, I think I “get it.” OOP is a great outlining app, and Kinkless is the best GTD implementation I’ve tried (and I’ve tried a lot of them).
Circus Ponies Notebook
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Circus Ponies Notebook has become my primary project documentation app. I keep a separate notebook for each project. Within each, are sections such as…
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- Log – for documenting and keeping a date-based history of each project
- Files – Dragging PDFs, MindMaps, Word docs and others into a notebook copies the document and stores it inside the notebook. Makes it easier to find than using the filesystem or, God forbid, Spotlight.
- Documentation – Project documentation and notes.
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I also keep a Journal notebook around for when the fountain pen runs out of ink. It’s cool because I can drop a photo from the day into an entry as a visual reminder of whatever I’m writing about.
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So there you have it. The right tool for each task.
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