digital organisation

i’ve been testing out a few products of late to improve my organisation. i have too much scattered about… in my phone, in my email, on a to-do site, in word docs, and on & on. i’d like a easier way to find info from those notes i took in a class 4 years ago that surprise surprise, might be useful now. :) or find some data from an article that i knew i’d want to refer back to.

my rough criteria:

  • mind maps would be great
  • the ability to reference/cite (site, book, audio, video, etc) and maybe pull those into a list (for when i decide i need to go back & get a PhD…)
  • an easy 1 click way of pulling that cite info into the system (info being author name, title, url, etc)
  • some tagging functionality
  • note taking (of course)
  • good search
  • portable – online & offline. computer & phone. able to export into a usable format.
  • to-do checklist

my top runners are evernote, zotero & personal brain.

personal brain wins in the visual mind map criteria. or rather visual folder/mind map combination. i’m really digging it. in a lot of ways this is my fav. or maybe i just really want it to be my fav since it’s the only visual tool that seems to work for me. unfortunately it’s pricey, doesn’t have a phone version & i can’t figure out if there’s any citing abilities. you can only export your data if you buy the high end version (holding data captive is pretty shitty brain folks). oh, and their website is fairy horrid.

zotero is focused on the academic referencing and does a good job. there’s 2 things that annoy me… the promise of sucking citation data from a page doesn’t work as well as I’d hope & the UI isn’t as responsive as I’d like. I need to use the mouse A LOT. also, it doesn’t have a phone version. otherwise it’s a great tool. and open source gets bonus points.

i’ve spent the least amount of time with evernote but i think it might take over from zotero since i’m not writing academic papers. Very easy to use, good UI, desktop, tons of phones, web, good sync’ing! and the only one of these 3 that has to-do functionality.

What tools do you use?

(other tools i looked at include SciPlore, Buzan’s mind mapping, several web2.0 mindmaps, some other referencing software that i can’t think of the name)

posted by jen at 02:41 on 26 April 2010 Monday filed in software - work | trackback | permalink | comments RSS2

2 replies to digital organisation »»


  1. smyles
    comment by smyles | 29 April 2010 at 04:11

    i use evernote. it is cross platform, can be accessed from your phone but synchronizes across all the different systems, so you have multiple local copies, plus one in the evernote “cloud”. it lets you add tags, group things into notebooks and handles stuff like pdfs and pictures.

    the one thing i feel it lacks is a way to visually play with ideas – to work with them on a canvas, to move them around. sort of like whiteboarding. i used to be able to do that with tinderbox – but that is strictly mac only (despite promises for years of a windows version). plus tinderbox is pre cloud, so it doesn’t synchronize. i use prezi for my visual thinking now, which doesn’t integrate at all with evernote or anything else, really.

  2. jen
    comment by jen | 29 April 2010 at 19:44

    the visual is exactly what i like about personal brain. they do have a cloud version but i haven’t checked into how they sync. they have lots of videos on the site to show uses so have a look at them.

    am liking evernote though…


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