The best solution I ever found for creating and organizing information was The Brain. However, I couldn’t keep up with payments, and I ended up making multiple installations across multiple machines that I couldn’t combine. It was a mess.
But I love mind-mapping. It is a great way to organize and spur creation of new information and ideas. I hadn’t found a good replacement for keeping track of notes in an orderly enough way to keep track, and yet have the structure loose enough that I could jump from topic to topic as I came up with ideas.
At work, I’ve started using OneNote to organize my notes¹. It came installed on my machine and I can’t install anything else. Leila Gharani’s “How to Use OneNote Effectively” was key to helping me get oriented with the program.
At home, though, my options are totally open.
- I could have yet another go at The Brain and have yet another install on yet another machine. No thank you.
- I could have gone with OneNote again, but it is too ordered for what I was looking for.
- I tried an old friend, Evernote. I re-downloaded it and found my notes from 2013 were still there (!)². However, it (still) lacks the ability to re-order notes or notebooks (which I had forgotten). Notes are either organized by name, date created, or date updated. That’s it. Ugh. I needed more flexibility.
- I looked around at some other options and ended up with Obsidian, a flexible and simple markdown-based notes tool that saves your information on your own hard drive. And while you can’t manually change the order of the notes in the nodes pane, the mind-mapping view offers plenty of flexibility.³
There notes pane that may get clunky long term with a lot of content, but after a single day, its text box and mind-map features feel pretty good. I am learning now how to do text formatting.
Lists in Obsidian have been the biggest hidden feature.
- To create an ordered or numbered list, start the list with “1.”, and when you hit return, it will automatically give you a 2., 3., and so on until you do a double space to exit the list.
- An unordered list can be created with a dash and a space. Start your list with “- “, and, as with ordered lists, a new item–it turns into a bullet–appears when you hit return. And so on until you double space to exit.
- A check box list–also known as a to do list–can be created with a dash and brackets: “- [ ] “. Same functionality as above with extending the list. And when I view the list in “view” mode, I can check off the boxes, or in editing mode, I can put an x inside the bracket to show I’m done.
Chuck Palahniuk’s Fiction list from _Consider This_
¹ I apologize for the transition. I did not mean to imply that OneNote is anywhere close to being a mind-mapping software.
² Told you it was an old friend.
³ Sadly, nothing as good as The Brain’s with its simple parent-child relationship. Man, that was a good piece of software.