Pura Vida

Nice overview of solutions to this dilema! I'm a big Evernotes user as the price (free) so fits my budget.

I could also relate to not want to be like my mother for many reasons. In her later independent days the entire floor next to her bed was covered with post-it notes.

I'm trying now to also let some electronic information go. And with gmail much is archived and retrievable, so that is now my safety net.

You are quite right, gmail is wonderful and I use it so much that I take it for granted. Many experts suggest backing up your gmail files if they are your work tool on something like backupify, also free.
The combination of Evernote and Gmail is certainly a great value, and very helpful.

The problem is information overload. Right now in my Papers Library, I have 450 pdf files, each of which I should read, annotate, and order. Each time I open a pdf, it has more links that I end up adding. My data is metastatic. Options like Scrivener and Tinderbox provide an alternative meta-library, where notes are stored by topic and relevance, and hopefully that will allow me to actually do some independent creative thinking!
Some scholars say that the human race is at a stage right now where there is simply too much information even for sophisticated mathematics to process. DNA sequencing and financial analysis, for example, both generate so much data that current software is barely keeping up. Thank goodness I'm just trying to learn and organize ideas and words, not numbers, but the problems are similar.
I would really like to learn more tricks, especially from my fellow bloggers, about how you organize stuff for very long manuscripts. Thanks for writing!

It's not clear from your article if you know this, so forgive me if you do...

Scrivener:

If your notes are in a single Word document, then you might find it easier to import the doc directly into Scrivener, then go through it splitting the thoughts into individual Scrivener documents.

Put the cursor where you want the selection to occur and press cmd-K. The new document will have the title of the previous one plus "-1" etc. However if you highlight a selection before you make the split and press opt-cmd-K instead the new document will automatically be given the title from your selection.

As an even quicker alternative: if you arrange your Word document so that each note starts with a standard identifier - the default is # between sections - and choose File > Import > Import and Split, your doc will be split automatically into separate Scrivener documents, with the first few words of the section used as a title.

Tinderbox:

Tinderbox can do something similar, although as usual with TBX, because of its unique combination of power and idiosyncrasy, it can be a little more complicated to get exactly the effect you're looking for. It's very powerful, though.

The simplest way I've found is to highlight all your text in Word and copy it into the text box of a tinderbox note. Close the note and highlight it the outline, then choose Note > Explode... This will give you a dialogue box allowing to select how the document will be split, and where the title comes from. The split notes are created in a sub-container of the original.

For advanced geeks, you can set up rules which strip out elements of the text to populate attributes -- for example, if your notes in Word always have entries for , etc (i.e. the information is always presented in the same format), Tinderbox can enter this into the new note's Author and Page attributes, assuming you've created them. This can be really useful...

Hope this helps...

David

It's not clear from your article if you know this, so forgive me if you do...

Scrivener:

If your notes are in a single Word document, then you might find it easier to import the doc directly into Scrivener, then go through it splitting the thoughts into individual Scrivener documents.

Put the cursor where you want the selection to occur and press cmd-K. The new document will have the title of the previous one plus "-1" etc. However if you highlight a selection before you make the split and press opt-cmd-K instead the new document will automatically be given the title from your selection.

As an even quicker alternative: if you arrange your Word document so that each note starts with a standard identifier - the default is # between sections - and choose File > Import > Import and Split, your doc will be split automatically into separate Scrivener documents, with the first few words of the section used as a title.

Tinderbox:

Tinderbox can do something similar, although as usual with TBX, because of its unique combination of power and idiosyncrasy, it can be a little more complicated to get exactly the effect you're looking for. It's very powerful, though.

The simplest way I've found is to highlight all your text in Word and copy it into the text box of a tinderbox note. Close the note and highlight it the outline, then choose Note > Explode... This will give you a dialogue box allowing to select how the document will be split, and where the title comes from. The split notes are created in a sub-container of the original.

For advanced geeks, you can set up rules which strip out elements of the text to populate attributes -- for example, if your notes in Word always have entries for , etc (i.e. the information is always presented in the same format), Tinderbox can enter this into the new note's Author and Page attributes, assuming you've created them. This can be really useful...

Hope this helps...

David

David, thank you so much! I can't really call myself a geek at all, or maybe a beginner geek. I did not know the tricks you suggest. I really appreciate your comments, and wish you would add a little more for people who don't know these tools at all.
It is hard to learn new software, but my sense is that it will have a huge payoff for the future. If one is over 60, its even harder! I'll take any help I can get!

Judith,

No problem -- glad it helps.

Scrivener is an absolutely brilliant program for writers of any type -- it's definitely not just a word processor substitute but a selection of very useful organisation and drafting tools, amongst many other things.

For example, as well as the ability that you describe to 'chunk' ideas and move them around in a virtual cork board , you can identify these chunks with a status and / or with bespoke coloured labels and keywords, which can be easily view in the outline as a whole. For example, you can see the entire outline of your book, in a table, with each document marked per status -- the defaults are "To Do", "Rough Draft", "Final Draft" etc, but you can changed these easily -- coloured by label and with a target and actual word count per document and per chapter, if you want.

You can also pull together all documents meeting these criteria - for example, all documents with the Keyword "Aristotle" and them in such a table.

But more than that, you can select all the Aristotle documents and see their entire text as though it were one long file, while not affecting the underlying structure. In other words, you can view and edit your entire argument about Aristotle in one go, even if in the final work that argument is dotted around several chapters.

When it's time to print out, you can 'compile' the project into one of a large number of different forms, from the basics such as PDF, Word RTF, through to ebook formats such as Kindle and EPub, without having to change the underlying text. It even caters for Multimarkdown either on its own or as an intermediate step to Latex, for those who need that.

It doesn't do (isn't meant to do) absolutely everything that a writer might need: for example, while the standard academic use of footnotes is included (and there is integration with Bookends and Sente amongst others), if your needs are anything beyond the simple, you're probably going to want to export to Word or Nisus Writer Pro or Mellel. In fact, one of the expectations of the program is that you probably will want to export to a word processor to do the final polishing anyway, although if your needs are relatively straightforward (e.g. submission of a novel manuscript in doc format), you may never need to do this.

Many people find Scrivener enough for all their research needs (you can include PDFs, MP3s, web pages etc within the same project as your notes), but if you're got a huge amount of research, you're probably better off with a dedicated tool. I use Devonthink Pro for storing all my research, Tinderbox for visual brainstorming, and Scrivener for the final outlining and the actual outlining.

I would encourage any writer to check Scrivener out -- it will run on Windows as well as the Mac, although the former version is new and is missing a few features of the Mac version for the time being (feature parity is on the roadmap). Download it and try the interactive tutorial -- I've missed out a lot. (Did I mention the Screenwriting mode?)

(I'm not affiliated to the developer, by the way: just a very happy user...)

Thank you! I'll have to look at Devonthink Pro, and expand what I ask of Scrivener.
I know that Vladimir Nabokov wrote all of his many books on 3x5 note cards which he carried around, scribbled on, and then read out loud to his wife Vera. Who knows how Joyce wrote? Clearly, keeping notes is a small part of the struggle, and the danger is to get involved in the new technology rather than doing the writing itself and doing good thinking. Nevertheless, I am grateful to the developers who make these tools and to people like David who really understand them and can teach them.