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Taking notes

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Problem

You have lots of ideas / lots of things to do, and sometimes you don't even know where to start.

My Way

For getting things done, I usually make a plan (a to-do list) of my days on a paper. When something is done, I strike it through. If everything is done by the evening, then it was a successful day :)

I also have a table calendar to help me to organize my timetable. I prefer paper calendars since they are always available (I don't need to switch on the computer) and I can simply browse them through to see what to do in one week, in one month, etc. It's important to have a full column in these calendars for a day. Actually I use two calendars: one is at home (this one contains my private plans) and the other one is at my workplace (for professional plans).

When brainstorming, the easiest and most natural way is to write everything on a sheet of paper. However, if you keep collecting your ideas on papers, after a while it becomes really difficult to manage these notes. I lost several such papers and thus those ideas are gone :( In fact, they must be somewhere here in my flat, but I have no idea where exactly…

And this leads to the next task: how to take notes in a better way. Two years ago I decided to use a software for this task. I usually use Linux and I read an article about BasKet, so I gave it a try. It was nice, very easy to use, but after a while I noticed that it was too simple. Rarely I use Windows too, so I would have liked a platform independent software.

A friend of mine suggested that I should try Mindomo. I tried Freemind before but I didn't like that, but Mindomo was much better. Its interface is intuitive, the software is platform independent, and your projects are stored in the cloud. The maps were much richer than the simple lists of BasKet. But the free version of Mindomo lacks some important features and I didn't want to pay for the full version. And unfortunately some features are completely missing from Mindomo.

And this is how I found XMind. XMind is written in Java thus it's platform independent. Its free version is very usable, I don't plan to purchase the Pro version. And combining XMind with Dropbox, my projects are stored in the cloud, thus they are available on all my machines either I use Linux or Windows. XMind is not perfect either, but we should accept that perfect softwares don't exist :) I've been playing with XMind for a few days and I find it very usable. I think it's a very nice solution for taking notes and organizing ideas.

In my opinion, the best way is to use a combination of the previous methods. If I have a new project idea, for me the easiest and fastest way is to make notes on a paper. Then I can open XMind and draw a nice mind-map using my paper notes. Later I can refine the plans, re-organize the map, etc. Or, I can still use BasKet to collect things that are related to a concept. Then, I can think it over how to organize them in XMind.

Videos

Here is a nice video about XMind that will give you an idea what it is like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9EDVmfsnyE.