A new brain for Christmas

Software isn't the kind of thing your mother buys you for Christmas, at least not in my family (I'm a first-generation geek). So to help with my new year's resolution of being more organised (those who know me might say anal retentive), I picked myself up a christmas present of a copy of Personal Brain.

A colleague showed me the brain a year or so ago, and I used it sporadically, finding it particularly useful when triaging ideas arriving rapidly and randomly, like in requirements gathering workshops. It works really well in this kind of environment, where a little bit of thought association goes a long way. But when I noticed that a new version had come out, I thought I'd get it and this time (gasp!) I actually read the manual. What a difference that makes, I must say. Now I know the hot keys to make navigation and construction easier, and I know how to make 'thoughts' refer to files, folders and web sites, I'll be darned if it isn't a fantastic way to organise your stuff. Within a day or so of mostly input, I started to get some benefit back in rapid access to whatever I was thinking about, and was surprised at how limiting and pervasive the whole hierarchical file structure we're trained in is and how much it affects my productivity.

The brain has a very simple model of parent, child and 'jump' connections between thoughts. You can have any number of each type of link (actually there is an arbitrary limit which is kind of weird, but it's enough for my purposes) and restructuring them is simple. That's really all there is to it, and like most great ideas, that's all there needs to be.

Here's a screenshot of my brain when I'm thinking about joodi. You'll see 'parent' thoughts above the central thought, 'child' thoughts below, 'jump' thoughts to the left and siblings to the right. The funky way the window reorganises itself when you move between thoughts is worth seeing, so go get it and have a play if you're interested.