I will keep an eye on your blog because I would love to hear more about what you think on this topic. Yours is one of the best blogs I have seen to date.

“Payne’s main point is that applications create and use structure. They are better than buckets: trying to do everything in a single application leaves you doing lots of things with a versatile but second rate tool.

What Payne misses — what nearly everyone has missed in thinking about the question — is the process of finding and creating structure. Yes: you want to keep things organized. Yes: you want specialized tools for special tasks. But things don’t arrive with structure (and, when they do, they have the wrong structure!) and the kinds of structure you want are always changing.

So, Payne is wrong: you do need an everything bucket because sometimes you get a receipt or a podcast and you just want to say

‘Keep this, don’t lose it, but I’m really busy now so GET IT OUT OF MY FACE.’

And sometimes you want to say

‘I have no idea what this means, but I bet it will make sense after I learn to read Farsi.’

So, sure, keep an inbox, or a bucket. Use the file system if you like, use Yojimbo or Devon or whatever if you like. Use ’em all: you can have two separate piles of paper in your office!”

I take Bernstein to be saying that Payne’s approach is what gave rise to everything buckets in the first place – you have to know what structure everything belongs to before you put it into the file system or before you put it into the special purpose application, and life’s not (always) like that. Payne is telling you to impose structure from the top down; Bernstein is saying that too often structure has to emerge over time, from the bottom up, and until it does unstructured data has to reside someplace(s).

I don’t have a dog in this fight, but my own workflow employs an everything bucket (MacJournal, which I moved to not altogether happily from Journler [for the same reasons many of us have emigrated from Journler], which I moved to when Circus Ponies NoteBook got over-complicated and under-stable, which I moved to from OmniOutliner when…you get the idea) where things sit until they become Scrivener projects, emails, or…whatever they might become.

Perhaps Bernstein is just saying things that make me feel good about my ongoing state of semi-organization (or things that make his Tinderbox look like the ideal information management tool). Whatever the case, this an interesting discussion.

Thanks for your post.

It looks like Phil Dow (the Journler developer) is back, at least for a while, at least on the Journler boards. He seems to be actively working on the next release of the application. But even so, I think this whole experience has put me in a different place with regards to “shovel box” programs, the term of derision used by Alex Payne to describe these apps.

While I found great value in using Journler to create a lot of writing work, the vector of my development and production began to outstrip the application’s functionality. These tools really are just file system replacements that add a few functions, like…

1. Tagging

2. Immediate editing

3. Browsing

4. Advanced search

5. Wiki like links

While I miss (1) (Spotlight comments are fraught with potential problems as has been documented widely, and may now be replaced by openmeta tags), I found easy solutions for (2) and (3) using Bean and Quicklook. (pushing the spacebar really isn’t that hard) Someday I’ll have to deal with (4), but for now DEVONThink will allow me to use it’s searching capability against my OS X file system should I ever need ‘more than Spotlight can give me’ capability. (5) is replaceable with Shift CMD F, and you get a better set of results on common terms (mark any phrase you would have wiki linked in your rtf /d and Shift CMD F will find all like phrases on your Mac…cool)

I’lll also add that I‘ve learned that Scrivener, which I write my bigger works in, has a lot more functionality than just drafting and writing. It really is a fabulous binder tool and can replace many of the draft management functions for which I used Journler.

The real value I gained from Journler and the DT conversion was the process of architecting my data. They made me think about my folder structure differently and eased the process of moving everything around. I don’t think I would have done that as easily without them. Ironically they also made it easy for me to leave the applications behind.

I wrote about moving from Journler to DT here http://journler.com/community/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3925&start=15

A few more comments…

It was a pain. If you’ve imported your resources (as many academics do with their journal articles) then you’ve got to fish them out once you import everything into DT, or else you have a whole series of silly one or two item folder trees.

You loose functionality. The beauty of Journler was the idea that I could take notes ‘as if on a piece of paper on top of my pdf’s’. Like we used to do before all this fancy technology came along. No other system allows that. They all make you have your notes as a rtf/d ‘next to’ your research or writing. As an example, I added each draft of my fiction work as a resource to Journler and then, above or below the link in the entry I would write notes like “Dr so and so says this is great,” or “Publisher says, this draft will never sell with out a sex scene,” or whatever.

Moving out of DT is a breeze. DT doesn’t really do anything to your data. So once you’ve edited out the Journler folder structure (manually), you just dump exports and that’s that.

You gain freedom and scope. My data set (because that is what it becomes over time) had outgrown the tools. I was constraining them into the applications. Now they are just there. If an application can work with it there, great.

The Alex Payne article I cited above really shook me up. He went off on these apps as a category, and after thinking alot about that, and ratliff’s post on the Journler forums , I don’ think I’d ever go back to using any of these applications the same way again. I now have all my files outside of any application and I’ve found that given OS X’s basic functionality I can manage and create just fine, perhaps better than I could in DT or J.

Doug

How did you get your Journler stuff into DevonThink? A lot of people are worried about the Journler developer dropping off lately, and a description of your transition process would no doubt be a godsend to many. Thank you for your time!

Tools that hide and torture file hierarchies while totally depending on tags bother me. I reluctantly use iPhoto and iTunes because I finally gave up resisting. But that doesn’t make it any easier to move into a tool like DEVONthink.

I write in Scrivener. What a great application. I’ve heard of people who use it organize their notes as well as write. As for now I put notes into Scrivener that I “pull” from my info-manager, whatever that might be at the time. I assume that notes in Scrivener are copies and therefor can be trashed. THat way I focus on output with Scrivener.

Doug