Tag: organization (page 1 of 1)

November 5, 2025

Tot

I’ve tried all the major note-taking apps in the Apple ecosystem. For some years, starting more than a decade ago, I used Simplenote, then Drafts, then Bear. I used Ulysses for a while, though that’s really more of a text editor than a notes app. Obsidian, yep. Notion, yep. I tried Day One to take notes as well as keep a journal. I even tried Apple’s own Notes app, though I hate everything about it, starting with its ugly yellow color. Etc. (I’m not naming them all, so do not write me to ask “Have you tried … ?” Whatever it is, the answer is Yes: I have tried it.) My favorite was Notational Velocity, in its original form — I dislike all the supposedly more capable forks of it.

After a long while, I finally came to realize that what all note-taking applications have in common, what they primarily feature, is for me a bug. What they all offer is a place to store text — and in some cases images, though that starts to take us into Everything Bucket territory. And yes, I’ve tried all the Everything Bucket apps as well, starting with Evernote and then moving to Yojimbo and then DEVONThink — among others.

Anyway: the promise of the note-taking app is that you can jot down or copy bits of text, put them in folders or add tags or employ some other way to organize them, and then retrieve them later. But I didn’t retrieve them later. I dutifully tagged them and then … almost always forgot about them. If I happened to remember, then I could do a quick search and easily find them, but that was a rare event. Thus, the fact that all my little scraps of text were present and searchable did me no good at all. If I could have asked an app “Look through the hundreds of items in your database and find the five that would be of greatest interest to me right now,” and gotten a useful answer — well, then that app would have been tremendously useful to me. But technology hasn’t reached that point.

So for years I just kept on adding notes to apps and then forgetting about them. Lord knows what brilliant ideas of mine are hidden away in those now-neglected apps, because I have no idea how to search for them. I would just have to take time out to scroll through note after note after note, which of course makes the whole tagging-and-organizing thing pointless.

My search for a proper notes app ended when I realized that what virtually all notes apps do is counterproductive for me. The answer, for me, turned out to be Tot. Tot is beautiful, simple, limited in its formatting possibilities, easy of access on all my devices, and — this is the absolutely essential thing — it allows me to make seven notes. Seven. That’s it.

What that means for me is this: when I want to store a chunk of text, written by me or by others, I put it in Tot. But then, after a few days, I’ve run out of storage spots. So then I take a look at my most recent additions to Tot and ask myself: What do I want to do with this? I can put it in a micro.blog post, put it in a post for this blog, create a draft of an essay containing it, add some task associated with it to my Reminders list, or delete it. Tot’s limitations force me into that decision, and for me that’s ideal. Textual things don’t just disappear into the depths of a database: they have to be dealt with, so I deal with them. Productive resistance for the win, once again!

May 15, 2024

temporary storage

Drafts is a fantastic app, so well-designed, so capable, so powerful. For my money it’s the best “bucket” app, ideal for holding onto chunks of text.

But I have a problem: I put things into Drafts and then forget about them. Yes, I tag them, but that doesn’t help. They just disappear into the bucket.

Which is why over the past few months I’ve been using Tot. I bought Tot when it first came out, but didn’t use it much. Now it’s vital to my organizational system. Here’s why: it has a single window with seven tabs, each tab a different color. That’s it. Seven is all you get.

And that’s what I love about Tot. I put things there and they’re easy to find; and when I’ve filled all the tabs, I have to decide whether (a) to delete something or (b) to put it into an proper text file to make something useful of it — a blog post, a reminder, a note for my students, whatever.

This is yet another situation in which I’ve learned to make friction my friend. Drafts is absolutely frictionless, brilliantly so, but for whatever reason my mind doesn’t thrive in frictionless conditions. Back to the rough ground!

July 13, 2023

personal organization

Here’s my one piece of advice about personal organization: (calendars, tasks, planning, tracking): Think hard about your needs, pick a system, and then do not under any circumstances change it until at least one full year has passed. When you discover that your chosen system has some flaw — which you will — you’ll be tempted to change to a different system that doesn’t have that particular flaw. But: the new system will have other flaws, because no system is perfect, and those may be worse than the one you’re dealing with now. And you can lose vast tracts of time trying to find the (inevitably nonexistent) perfect system, which will make it harder, not easier, for you to get things done.

Moreover, you’ll need several months, at a minimum, to fine-tune whatever system you’re using to meet your needs. You won’t really know its weaknesses, or its strengths, until then. After a year, even if you’re frustrated by some things, you’ll be using it well, and can make a rational decision about whether to exchange it for something else. But remember: should you change, it’ll take you a long time to learn your new system. Are you sure you want to invest that time?

Some people are sure. And there can be value in shaking up your familiar habits — I do that myself sometimes. But the better you know a system, the more accurately you can calculate the costs and benefits of abandoning it.

February 27, 2023

Re: my buddy Austin’s recent post on indexing notebooks, for most of the last decade I have used Leuchtturm notebooks, which helpfully have index pages at the beginning. And I have faithfully used those, but I have not found them especially useful. What works best for me is this: Whenever I start a new notebook I devote the first few pages to summarizing the most important ideas from the previous notebook. I also have a monthly text-file journal on my computer, and each time I start a new month I do the same: write down what seems most important from the previous month.

January 9, 2023

projects and methods

Perhaps because I write different sorts of books, one of the most important writerly skills I have developed is the ability to adapt my working methods to the project at hand. Not every project calls for the same approach, the same model of organization, or the same tools.

For instance, when I was writing The Year of Our Lord 1943, with its five protagonists, the two most essential tools for me were (a) a color-coded timeline in Excel, so that I could see what each character was doing at any given time, and (b) a set of index cards. I had five protagonists so I got cards in five colors, and gradually accumulated information. Then, laying the cards out on a table or pinning them onto a cork board, I was able to understand the relations among those different pieces of information.

However, when I was writing How to Think I didn’t need that kind of system — I needed something very different. In that book, I had a sequential argument to make, one in which each chapter or section built upon the previous one. So I used OmniOutliner to lay out the whole argument in outline format, and then fill in the details.

When I was writing Breaking Bread with the Dead neither of those two methods would work for me. I was trying to create a kind of mosaic of ways in which we can encounter the past — a task that did not require and indeed did not admit a rigid argumentative or historical sequence. I had rather a set of portraits of people engaged in the complex activity that I call breaking bread with the dead, and each of those portraits needed to be coherent, vivid and, to some extent, self-contained. So in writing that book I just kept a set of text files open on my computer. I could go back and forth among them, but I didn’t need to do that very often, because each chapter had its own integrity. And on any given day, getting whatever chapter I was working on properly shaped was my primary task.

But now I’m starting a new book. I’m not yet ready to talk about what it is, though I’ll get to that point before too much longer. For now, I’ll just say this: After fumbling around for a while to figure out how I could organize my thoughts in for this project, I realized that once again, the good old multicolored index cards were my best friends. And it’s actually been very pleasurable to go back and, for the first time in several years, build up a collection of cards and figure out how to relate them to one another. I use my own version of the Zettelkasten system, and maybe one day I’ll write a post about what that looks like.

But for now I just want to say that I think writers make a mistake when they try to use the same method, the same organizational system, for every book. The character of the project — its structure, its form, the demands it makes upon you as a writer — should determine the way you write the book. If you’re writing the same kind of book every time — like Robert Caro, for instance — then by all means use the same system. But if not, exercise your imagination!

Screenshot 2023 01 07 at 3 22 57 PM

November 23, 2018

my Zettelkasten

Over the last few years I have adopted, with increasing confidence and pleasure, a new means of organizing my research. For my most recent book and the one I’m working on now, I have developed a version of Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten system, and it it by far the best system of research-based note-taking I’ve employed.

For a long time I hesitated to try the Zettelkasten system because I believed that Luhmann depended on a single system, a single collection of cards that ramified and extended indefinitely. Now, that may not be strictly true, but it was certainly his ideal. And I felt that I had come upon the Zettelkasten model too late in life to adopt it. It would have been wonderful if I had learned about it when I was 30, or even 40, but in my fifties? Too late.

So I thought. But ultimately, when I was working on The Year of Our Lord 1943, I realized that the demands of my research — trying to track the thought and writing of five figures working in complete isolation from one another — called for something like a Zettelkasten system. (It would take a long time to explain why, but it had to do with cross-referencing ideas that were related to one another in a variety of ways: by author, by date, by theme.) Well, I thought, why not have a collection of Zettel that is based not on a lifetime of research but on a single project? So I tried that. And it worked wonderfully.

Now I’m back to work on another book, and again I’m finding Zettel the best way to keep track of quotes and ideas. Don’t Zettel for less than the best, is what I say!

Ahem.

Just a random note before I go further, from Wiktionary:

Early Modern High German zeddel, zedel, from Middle High German zedele, zedel, a loan from Italian cedola, from Medieval Latin cedula, schedula, the diminutive of scheda, scida (“strip of papyrus”), ultimately from Ancient Greek σχίδη (skhídē, “splinter, fragment”).

That’s an interesting history, no?

One of the best things about making Zettel is the ability to go back to an old card and add related cards. So if I make a note about Barbara Tuchman’s idea of history as a distant mirror, I can make a note on that, and label it BBD26. (BBD because this project is called Breaking Bread with the Dead.) And then when I come upon a fascinating essay by Daniel Mendelsohn that treats the Aeneid as a kind of “distant mirror” of our own time, I can add a card to that effect and label it BBD26a. And if later still I have a further thought about Mendelsohn’s essay I can add another card and label it BBD26a1; or, if I want to return to the “distant mirror” theme but with reference to a different text, I can label that card BBD26b. And then if I realize that some other card already in my stack treats a similar theme, I can add cross-references at the bottom or on the back of the relevant cards. (This is not quite how Luhmann numbered his cards but it’s what I like to do.)

I could of course use any number of apps to build a digital Zettelkasten, and indeed I have tried, but paper cards work much better for me. I like keeping my text editor in full screen mode in front of me and then arranging the relevant cards around the computer. I like sifting through the pack and being reminded of things I wasn’t looking for (Luhmann thought this proximity to serendipity one of the most important features of his system.) I enjoy “building a deck,” as it were.

And then, when I’m done with this project, I can put all the cards in a box with my other cards, most of which, by the way, are about the books I teach rather than those I write. (Whenever I am preparing for class I make notes about the themes and passages I want to explore on index cards.) By the time I retire, from teaching and writing alike, I’ll have a pretty interesting collection of cards. Nothing like Luhmann’s, but interesting. Something to look over between sips of my well-earned single malt….

September 14, 2018

the tools to survive

I’m an edge case. I want an untangled web. I want everything I do to copy back to a single place, so I have one searchable log for each day’s thoughts, images, notes and activities. This is apparently Weird and Hermetic if not Hermitic.

I am building my monastery walls in preparation for the Collapse and the Dark Ages, damnit. Stop enabling networked lightbulbs and give me the tools to survive your zombie planet.

— Warren Ellis. I think about this All. The. Time.

February 23, 2018

text three ways

When my buddy Austin Kleon posted his notebook turducken I realized that I have a three-part system too, though a somewhat different one:

I use a small Moleskine planner for my calendar and tasks, a Leuchtturm notebook for ideas and drafts, and index cards for reading notes (including notes I make for the books I teach). It would of course be possible to put all of this in one notebook, but such simplification would come at too high a price. For instance, with my current system I have a place where I keep track of my events and tasks for an entire year, but if I did that in the notebook where I also write drafts, then when that notebook was full I’d have to make a new calendar no matter what point in the year I’m at — and then lose ready access to the old calendar. Similarly, when I have reading notes on index cards, I can spread them out and look at them as I’m writing drafts, which is much better than having to turn back and forth to multiple pages in multiple notebooks.