After watching Adam Savage's most recent TED talk, the thing i found most interesting was his method of sorting all his data. Basically he is using a folder full of folders, which is a very old fashioned construct based on the storage of physical objects. This method is primitive at best, and leaves a lot to be desired as far as searching and categorizing. Not to mention the disk requirements, and the need to keep a decent backup.
I tried using this method again after seeing his video, but found it just too limiting and cumbersome, requiring too much work on the frontend for me to actually keep it up for more than a week.
Then i realized i had the tool i needed already installed, Evernote. Evernote is a free, cross-platform notebook/information capturing tool. It is both Web and client based, making it available from anywhere (except my Nokia Phone :( ). Before seeing Adam's ted talk, i was using Evernote much like i was using google notebook; Start with a project, add data, subdata, etc, and then end up with some sort of "finished product". What i realized is that Evernote functions really well as an idea farm, i stick in some random data: a picture, a bit of text, a quote, etc and save it, but the saving is not the important part, the TAGGING is.
Finding data is easy. Anyone with a bit of google-fu will be able to locate a specific piece of data with only a little effort. It is the associations you make with the data, and how it fits in with other pieces of data you have that is the important bit. Take for example the ADD link above. I remember reading this years ago (the link above is a copy/paste from somewhere else, anyone who knows the original source, email me), i also remember that i used the information in that article to promote my strong points at a salary negotiation, and that the context i found it in was "benefits of ADD in Technology".
This is where the Folder system starts to break down. What folder do you put this in? Health? Self Improvement? Job? You can either make a snap judgement and put it in the "best" folder, or make multiple copies of the data, one in each folder. Neither one of these is ideal, multiple copies are ineffecient, and the "best fit" loses its associations. This is where Evernote's (and Gmail's too!) tag system starts to make a lot of sense. Since you can have multiple tags associated to one piece of information, you can have that information available in any of the contexts you have associated with it. As an example, here is a screenshot of some broccoli i added to Evernote:
Note that there are several tags for this image, going from very definitive (Picture) to whimsical (Yum), and i dont have to ruin a folder structure to accomodate my weirdness. Additionally, Evernote has some great OCR functionality, allowing you to search for text within documents and pictures.By dumping all of my thoughts and random finds into Evernote, i am able to brainstorm based on the tags, and follow the trail of my thoughts through my various notes. The tagging system allows my chaotic brain to act naturally, without forcing any strange constructs on it, while still allowing me to follow my train of thought backwards and not forget the information or the context in which i encountered it.
How do you organize your thoughts?