I made wrote this as a personal reference to help me quickly remember why I use certain tools and what they’re best at doing. Choosing the wrong way to represent something is costly in both time and the sub-optimal results you get from presenting this info in this way.

Add:

-Paul Graham on how long it takes you to download in

-Post light Paul talking about some software trying to do everything and some trying to do ONE thing well … “law of envelopment”

Brainstorming 

Winner: Mind42

This is for stuff that is complicated — like when studying a new subject. I’ve also used mind maps in software documentation, to show how functionality is organized. This helps me refresh my brain quickly. Paul Graham, when talking about the importance of flow states for programmers, has talked about how it takes 30 minutes or more for a programmer to even just re-download how a piece of software works, even if they wrote it. I think writing mind maps for this type of thing helps you re-download this faster; it’s memory accelerant.

Formerly: I  used Workflowy and Dynalist for this but these are really just easy-to-use bulleted lists and the way Mind42 shows you a full tree has proven to help me chart relationships more effectively.)

Multi-Tiered Relationship Mapping

Winner: Airtable

Documentation
Winner: Notion

Runner up: Coda.

Tracking
Winner: GoogleSheets

## Notes
Winner: Bear

## Webclips
Winner: Evernote
(I wish the open-source Joplin well in continuing to grow so it can actually replace Evernote … )

## ToDos
Winner: TickTick
(Formerly: KanbanFlow, paper planner notebook, Momento dashboard in Chrome)