Is the ZK method worth it? and how it helped you in your projects? .t3_zwgeas._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } questionI am new to ZK method and I'd like to use it for my literature review paper. Altho the method is described as simple, watching all those YT videos about the ZK and softwares make it very complex to me. I want to know how it changed your writing??

Holy mackerel, when I saw the subject line of this topic I thought about Zoot – which I have not thought about in many months, and not for many years before that. Zoot was my introduction to this sort of “everything bucket” app. I also tried Info Select – which is also on Windows and may be an answer to @Claude’s question, assuming it’s still updated – and then to DevonThink and Evernote. My introduction to Zoot was an article by journalist James Fallows, of all people. He is the former editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, and reports mainly on public policy and politics. I wonder if he is still using Zoot? Three more probable options: Microsoft OneNote will be the most accessible to most Windows users. It doesn’t get you the search and “see also” of DevonThink. Obsidian and Roam Research take a different approach to the content-organization problems than DevonThink/OneNote/Evernote do. They rely on links and backlinks, like a personal Wikipedia. But they achieve the same goal of organizing information. They have search. AFAIK there’s nothing comparable to “see also,” but users report the same kind of serendipitous connections just by following the links they themselves made in the past. Another liability of Roam and Obsidian compared with DT: DT supports pretty much any kind of document that your computer can read, whereas Obsidian only supports Markdown, PDF, and images. I’m not as familiar with Roam, but I believe it has the same limitations. P.S. Partial answer to my own question: Fallows comes up in this forum as a person who advocated DT in a 2005 NYTimes article about “everything bucket” apps.

I work primarily on Windows, but I support my kids who primarily use Mac for their college education. I have used DT on Mac, IPOS, IOS for about a year. On Windows, I have been using Kinook’s UltraRecall (UR) for the past 15 years. It is both a knowledge outliner and document manager. Built on top of a sql lite database. You can use just life DT and way way more. Of course, there is no mobile companion for UR. The MS Windows echo system in this regard is at least 12 years behind.

And the added bonus here is that Devonthink has a wonderful feature where you can take the entire contents of a folder and condense it down into a single text document. So that's how I launch myself into the actual writing of the book. I grab the first chapter folder and export it as a single text document, open it up in my word processor, and start writing. Instead of confronting a terrifying blank page, I'm looking at a document filled with quotes: from letters, from primary sources, from scholarly papers, sometimes even my own notes.

But I'm not at all confident I would have made the initial connection without the help of the software. The idea was a true collaboration, two very different kinds of intelligence playing off each other, one carbon-based, the other silicon.

(dig into his process at his personal site

I think Nvivio is far too expensive for academics. Zettelkasten interesting, but it does not recognize the url from DEVONthink and Sente (I do link to the source in each note). In addition, it is developed by a single programmer. My approach is as follows. Highlights and notes prepared in Sente or Skim are exported to DEVONthink using these scripts: https://github.com/RobTrew/tree-tools/tree/master/DevonThink% 20scripts . Then in DEVONthink I add tags to each note, and sometimes create links between them. The result is similar to Zettelkasten, but with cross-links and power of DEVONthink’ artificial intelligence (searching using a variety of Boolean operators, see and also, etc).