These are the notes in the Tinderbox section of the map. They are collected by an agent as described here.

Getting Things Down
Sunday, October 10, 2004

I've been using David Allen's Getting Things Done system for well over a year now. In my trusted systems for recording "things", I'm using Tinderbox in two interesting ways.

FIrst, this site is serving as a container for my current writing project. As I read and contemplate, I've been capturing the things I think. They're mapped out on a growing Tinderbox map, whiteboard site. For those reading this site or its feed, it presents what I expect is an odd look into the flow of my ideas. I've decided that this site is for my own use, published on the net serially. I probably owe the public an essay or two that lay the groundwork and express this better.

Second, I've given up trying to keep project lists on my Palm. I now have one big Tinderbox map for work and one for home. I keep the map at the project level, providing an easy way to get the big picture or review the details.

Section Summaries
Monday, October 11, 2004

I've created my first section summary for the site, a collation of all of the notes in the Tinderbox section of the map.

Looking at the templates that have been popping up on the net, now collected at Eastgate, I realized the task wouldn't be that hard. Here's how I did it:

1. I made sure that the notes in the map had a prototype. This was necessary for adding an Attribute called "Section" to all of the notes.

2. I created a User Attribute called section using the Attribute palette (Window: Attributes: Create...).

3. I made the Section Attribute visible in the prototype used for the notes. There's that funny box above the vertical scroll bar that looks like a double F which controls which Attributes are "key" and thus shown at the top of the note.

4. I set the Section Attribute to the name of the map section, say "Tinderbox" for all of the notes in the TInderbox area of the map. I typed it into this note. For the old notes, I created a quick stamp (Window: Quick Stamp) that let me set the attribute on a bunch of notes simultaneously.

5. I then created an agent to collect notes where section was Tinderbox.

Here is the result.

Now it would be nice for Tinderbox to be able to do part of this for me, use the map area to set an attribute, looking up the location of note relative to the decorations on the map. For now a Quick Stamp should be sufficient if I remember to keep up with it.

What's exciting is that it bridges the flat structure of a whiteboard map with a basic ability to outline and categorize.

Editing top down
Friday, January 2, 2004

As I worked on mining On Deciding . . . Better for content, I began to realize how little context I tended to provide for my writing. This is probably a common weblog fault when the unitiated stumble in. I've started editing this site hierarchically at times, reading and tweaking the Essays page, so that it flows into the rest of the content. That led me to some shuffling of the Systems Theory portion of the site. The use of Tinderbox agents make it possible to list subjects dynamically on these topic pages, a subject recently discussed by Mark Bernstein:

Mark Bernstein: A nice thing about Tinderbox agents is that they let you add a category page to an existing weblog, populate it with relevant posts, and automatically update it every day.

I've also added a Start Here link to go from the homepage to the Essays page. The Recent Essays is now sorted by modified date.

Flatter and chunkier
Tuesday, September 14, 2004

I've been readusting my use of Tinderbox during this latest spate of writing. I've been an outline user for a long time, probably back to high school. I'm a visual, analytic thinker, so I like to imagine information going into boxes. Of course I'm also a synthetic thinking, so I see links between the boxes at all levels.

Now that I'm using the Map View in Tinderbox for writing and organizing, I'm working in a flatter, broader way. I've got 40 notes in my "Working Notes" level of the Decision Tools outline, way more than I'd ever use normally. They're organized into 10 zones on the whiteboard.

It looks like at some point I'll drill down into one of the zones for more work. At that point I'll probably create a new level in the outline so the zone becomes its own map. Soon I'll also create a Someday/Maybe category for notes that don't fit into this map but that maybe the seeds of new work at some point.

Copyright 2003 by James J. Vornov