Thinking Aloud

I'm always interested in ways that I can think faster and more effectively, so every now and then, I try out a different technique. Well for a while now I've been "thinking aloud" to free up my thinking process. I don't mean literally babbling in my office, but writing my stream of thought down. I've used a few different tools to do this – a regular old notebook, PersonalBrain (free edition), OneNote, and Word.

I don't think any one of these is the "best" tool (although the notebook is probably the most versatile), but each one is helpful to freeing up the thinking process depending on the circumstances. Everyone is familiar with jotting notes in a notebook, so I don't really need to explain that. OneNote, if you're not familiar with it, is just a program that gives you virtual notebooks. The benefit of OneNote is that you get text search, and many notebooks to categorize and organize all of your thoughts. One major downside to anything in the computer is that it's harder to draw pictures, so I still use the notebook to do quick diagram sketches for some things. So that brings me to PersonalBrain.

PersonalBrain lets you craft a web of thoughts, and in it's most basic form, it is very easy to use – point, drag, type, done. For me, when I have some important thought that I can't tend to at the moment, simply throwing it into a text file is no good, because then I can't find it later – I need a way to categorize it so that I can sift through the data faster. I started doing this by putting tags in my notebooks, and then I moved over to OneNote, but even that wasn't enough, because many notes actually belong to multiple categories, and so you get stuck thinking of which category to put it under, what categories to make, and linking categories together with clunky hyperlinks.

That's why I like PersonalBrain so much, because you can jot down the thought, link it to some related thoughts, and then proceed with whatever you were doing. This goes beyond simply categorizing notes. Each thought can have parents, siblings, and children, so you can have a whole web of categories. And as time goes on, when you go look up some bit of info you wrote down, you get a salient picture of related information, which can help you get back in the groove on a tabled project, or help you see a relationship that you didn't notice or think of before. The Brain does a bunch more than that, but this is mainly what I use it for. I guess it gives me confidence that I've recorded the important info, and I'll be able to find it later, so I can get on with whatever else I have to do instead of worrying about whether I should deal with it right now or not.

I really love PersonalBrain, but when I'm deep in the zone on something, like when I'm hacking away at some code for instance, it is too disruptive, because I can't just keep my hands on the keyboard and think. And that brings me to Word.

You're probably familiar with Word, but if not, it's a program that lets you write documents. Really, I could use any text editor like notepad or something, but Word has some features that I like to use sometimes like formatting and lists, and I can usually whip it all up straight from my keyboard, which is important to maintain a trance-like state of thought.

With Word, I have different intentions than I do with PersonalBrain. With PersonalBrain, I want to record some info in a way that is very fast to lookup later. But when I'm streaming thought into Word, I'm doing it purely for the freeing up of thought. At first it was a little weird, but now I do it all the time, and it feels great. All I do is I type out what I'm thinking, whether it's correct or incorrect, well formatted or not, I just think. The effect is that I feel like I'm able to dive deeper into thoughts than I would be if I were just sitting there with my chin on my hand, thinking in my head. Also, there always comes a point when your thought is interrupted, maybe because you ran out of gas (short attention span), someone interrupted you (>.<), it's time to go home for the day. But now you have the thoughts all written out there, and so you can just backtrack a little into the text and pickup where you left off.

So that's how I've been doing this "thinking aloud" thing, and I think it's really great, so try it out!

Comments

[Bob Patterson]

Good thoughts from another PB user. I duplicate the use of Word in the Notes section of PB and it helps me eliminate another program and/or step.

[meowkins]

@Bob - yeah, I tried using the notes section like that too, but when I hit ALT+TAB, it catches the ALT and takes my cursor out of the text box. I could just hit ALT or TAB when I swap back, but I forget and end up activating menus by accident.

[meowkins]

Hey all, I just found out from TheBrain_Moe (twitter), that you can use F5 to focuse back into the notes window! This solves the problem of having to use the mouse, and so it's much less disruptive.

[meowkins]

And F3 sets you back in the search box.

[Daniel Smith]

Thanks for the tip on PersonalBrain, Meowkins! I'm going to try it out.