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Comment by pbowyer | Hacker News Reader

I've tried Notion (I've tried most PIMs since 2003) but it didn't fit my brain / what I wanted to do with it. Not enough structure yet too constraining.

The closest I've found is Workflowy, but it's just that bit too basic.

I store all web clippings in Evernote and hope to find what I want one day.

I bookmark heavily into an online service, and wish my tag vocabulary was better constrained (but full text search helps).

And finally I mind map on paper; none of the digital ones have quite cut it.

One day there will be a PIM to rule them all. One day.

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I'm in the same boat. I have a vision in mind for how a perfect PIM could look like: a mind-map like structure to organize everything. A pintrest-like UI to list all "cards"/"pages".

I'd love to create an ipad app with pencil support to just draw the mind-map and allow unlimited nested depth.

zenkit.com tries to combine a table/kanban/mind-map visualization, but it's not quite what I want.

It seems like we are all on a quest for a Holy Grail.

I'm a visual person, also dyslexic. I think in terms of relations between items. I also find nested lists helpful for something more 'ordered'.

The Kanban-style board a lot of people love does nothing for me unless using it for pure, strict Kanban. Sorting mixed stuff into 3-4 columns doesn't help, unless ensuring I am always progressing through those tasks. It loses the relationships between items which I see.

I plan to draw/write up my ideas this year. If you permit I'll keep in contact with you via email.

Thinking further, what I'd like is something like fractals. You can keep zooming in on your information down to the details - but also out to an overview.

Nope, no idea how that would work, other than when I'm mind mapping I would have it work like Workflowy, where you can focus on each node in turn -- so you can zoom down to a node, and have an entire mindmap off there. Zoom to one of its nodes and be in another mind map.

This appears to be aimed at the small / medium organization. I think individuals should probably just stick with Emacs / Workflowy depending on whether they're already using Emacs or not.

Personally I think individuals need to just accommodate to shifting every now and again to new tools as they become available.

I've used Workflowy since its inception (2010), but recently switched over to Notion. For my use case, it's worked perfectly and I haven't looked back.

Could you try taking a stab at explaining how your mind maps work?

I'll start by saying they're not strict mind maps; they're a cross between mind maps and spider diagrams.

If I'm listening to a talk, I'll be jotting down the key concepts in the map, just like anyone else would do with bullet points. But I'm then linking them together, where their talk jumps between ideas. Connections are the vital part.

The closest software to what my brain thinks like is https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scapple/overview. A key thing missing is representing the same information in multiple views; that's something virtually all tools miss (Coda.io et al are starting to add it - but multiple types of list-view of the same info, nothing more wild)

Realtimeboard works well for me, but ends up lacking organisation because it is totally visual and nothing structured beneath the surface.

Thanks for the overview! I will definitely try incorporating a similar approach in the future.

I can definitely see how filtering out some of that information can help focus on a specific node and immediate relationships. Comparing against other seemingly unrelated maps could be interesting as well.

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