You can’t know in advance just what you’ll want to know later. You can’t do this the right way, you can’t do it optimally. As your needs and insights change, you’re bound to wish you’d recorded things you didn’t, and you’re likely to find many of the things you did record to be obvious, banal, and dull. (Don’t worry about that: you, or your biographer, might find those very things precious someday)

Some things are unpredictable: you’ll describe those in text. There’s no alternative. Nobody could have expected that to happen, and so you’ll have to start from the beginning.

But other things are more predictable, and you might want to have a regular slot in which to file the information you’ll record in every update. These slots offer you several advantages:

Tinderbox is a tool for notes, a personal content assistant. The Tinderbox Way takes a close look at Tinderbox and its underlying ideas, exploring not just the program's mechanics but also its design and its spirit.

From the elements of writing more effective notes to the frontiers of information farming, from the classroom and conference hall to the research laboratory, The Tinderbox Way explores a new approach to working with and representing interlinked ideas.

From Chapter One:

Tinderbox is designed to help you write things down, find them, think about them, and share them. Tinderbox is an assistant. Its meant to help, to facilitate. Its not a methodology or a code. Its a way to write things down, link them up, and share them. Its a chisel, guided by your hand and your intelligence.

Tinderbox is personal in another sense, as well; unlike most corporate software today, Tinderbox was designed and implemented by a person not by a committee, a corporation, or a focus group. That person is me: Mark Bernstein. I designed Tinderbox, and wrote just about every line of the tens of thousands of lines that make Tinderbox run. Tinderbox is the product of an individual vision. It wasnt written to meet requirements or specs or to adhere to business rules. Along the way, there have been thousands of decisions engineering decisions, artistic decisions, operational decisions. In the end, I made the choices.

This site collects ideas about making, analyzing, organizing, and sharing notes.

The First Principle of making better notes is simple: make notes. Write it down.