As followers of this weblog may know, I've been interested in ways to manage my thoughts. For immediate use: the "what do I need to do to get these tasks done?"; for future use: "this is a good idea, I should write it down"; and for historical use: "Why did we do that? HOW did we do that?"
At present, I'm using a pair of tools on Mac OS X. For very rapid thinking / outlining / organizing, OmniOutliner cannot be beat. It's very lean and fast while remaining fairly flexible. But it's big advantages are: lean and fast. It's excellent for thinking through your to-do items: not only what you have to do at the high level, but to start thinking through them. It's also excellent for just thinking through a development proposal. But, it doesn't scale well to managing large documents as they start to grow over time. The software stays fast, but one starts to desire a higher level of organization.
I've found that higher level of organization in AquaMinds' NoteTaker. NoteTaker implements the full notebook paradigm, with custom window decorations (binder rings, section tabs). NoteTaker is composed of Sections and Pages, and each page can be an outline. This works well for moving outlines into larger structures. For example, I'm starting to keep an outline per project. With one project, I made a section for the next revision we were to deliver to a customer. In that section, I made a page representing each major change request. Then each page had not only the customers request, but outlines representing various implementation strategies that were thought out, or just tasks to do and how they were done. NoteTaker can also contain any file type, so a personal task such as "import this CSV file into the membership database" can contain a CSV file that was e-mailed to you. NoteTaker documents are NeXT style file system objects, where what looks like a document to Mac OS X applications is really a directory on disk, which contains many smaller files (and 'embedded' files).
NoteTaker also has the concept of "libraries" which let you open and navigate other notebooks that you specify (a library is a folder on the file system with notebooks inside of it). This aids in managing information that crosses multiple notebooks, and turns the collection of notebooks into a small database system.
NoteTaker also has an interesting "to-do" management system you can add to a notebook. When you add the special to-do section, a new page is created daily. Unfinished items from previous days are brought forward, in the same outline structure, while finished items from previous days (or leaf items not marked as "to-do") do not. This not only gives a record of activity on previous days, but helps in tracking what still needs to be done. A to-do page can be structured as an outline so that tasks that have to be done for different projects remain in that structure.
There's another level one would like to get to, wherein this data is self organizing, and sharable with a workgroup. In an upcoming entry, I plan to visit that issue.
* Note: There is an alternative to NoteTaker on Mac OS X that is very similar, which is Circus Ponies NoteBook. Ted Goranson compares the two products in his About This Particular Outliner column in the May 2004 edition of About This Particular Macintosh.