Read your wiki with great delight and picked up some very nice ideas. I would be *extremely* interested about your experience over the years. Do you still capture everything on cards? Have you ever looked on retired cards? Have you modified your habits? The reason I ask is this: I use my cards for writing. The writing gets done, so the cards do their job. But I can’t help feeling that I am missing on so many cards and so many connections between them. So I am always obsessed about hearing new ideas.

My system is even simpler than yours. My main box has room for about 2000 slips of paper. I throw everything into it, newest first. But I don’t keep them in that order: once I have pulled out some cards (a query, you might say), I keep them together and put them together in the front.

Over the years I have tried numerous note taking applications (and even created a home brew system in Emacs): powerful, searchable, tag-able and copy-and-past-able. I have also used notebooks, which are the most aesthetically pleasing (for me) and the most simple solution. But I have always returned to index cards (or rather, slips of paper), because nothing beats the flexibility: taking a pack of them anywhere, laying them out on a table, comparing and rearranging them, inserting new slips, making connections.

See Niklas Luhmann “Kommunikation mit Zettelkasten”

Mr. Hawk. I was introduced to the index card world by your posts and i’m grateful for that.

1) My system is a hybrid one: Chronological order using text files (Jedit text editor macro to timestamp each entry) and Freeplane .mm mind map xml files. I use a tagging system similar to:
Academic notes in one big text file + tag clouds | 43 Folders
http://www.43folders.com/node/48424/328538

For binary media i use chronological named folders. Using ubuntu gnome-search for binary media searching, and Jedit built-in search or custom ack-grep based scripts to search text files (also works on .mm xml ones).

2) Chronological paper based index card system just like PoIC, but with a twist. In a notetaking trail (session) only the first card of the sequence is timestamped to allow proper trail placement in the cardbox stack, the other cards follow a numerical order sequence similar to Luhmann’s zettelkasten, this arrangement allows for easy non-linear notetaking.

A running index of [2] (paper system] is kept in [1] text files. Timestamps+(numerical sequence) allows cross-referencing between [1] and [2].

Best regards,

CAGS

Hello there!

I’ve never used NotationalVelocity, yet. I’ve heard some of japanese index cards users reported “Evernote” is good for index cards-like use on computer.

Digital or analog, I’m o.k. whichever. But I think I need a flexibility of analog (paper) to build up a solid foundation of organizing things. And once I get it, I can apply it to anything else.

I’m in this thing of the index cards because of your system, and I’ve been using it but first, I don’t understand japanese (but I’m going to learn it) so maybe I’m asking something you already posted and second, I’m begginig to work all day on my laptop so I need a digital system.

This system must write and read txt files (simple as paper index card) and run on mac and linux.

Have you ever tried NotationalVelocity? do you recommend to stick on the paper method instead of digital?

thanks a lot
JD