How do you organize your information?
Trunk Notes has something of a learning curve. Don’t be daunted by what may appear to be an app with a daunting number of features. Trunk Notes has been designed so that you can get started very quickly and learn more as you progress.
This series of blog posts will focus on some of the more important things you should know to get the most out of Trunk Notes.
What sort of person are you?
Although Trunk Notes can be used as just another note taking app it’s real power becomes apparent when used as a personal wiki. If you aren’t sure what a personal wiki is take a look at the Wikipedia entry.
You are probably one of two types of organizer (or a mixture of both). The first type will design a structure with which to hold their information first and then populate that structure. The second type will enter lots of information and sort it out later.
The good news is that a personal wiki like Trunk Notes is great for either type of working style.
Structure up front approach
A personal wiki is great for people who want to create their own structure for information keeping. That’s probably one reason why they don’t like apps which force a particular way of doing things.
The starting point for structuring your personal wiki is the home page. In Trunk Notes you can quickly get to the home page from any place by tapping the home button.
On your home page you could include:
- links to main organisational pages. For example Meetings, Personal, WebPages, People
- summaries of information that you need to have at hand – such as all todo items
Here’s an example:
{{timestamp}}
{{numnotes}} pages in this wiki
[[Meetings]] [[Personal]] [[WebPages]] [[People]]
{{tagged ToDo}}
The above example makes use of functions. When you view the page you won’t see the text {{timestamp}} you will see the current date. Functions are a powerful feature of Trunk Notes. You can learn about all the functions in Trunk Notes by going to the Docs:Functions page in the app.
Taking the example line by line:
- {{timestamp}}: This shows the current date
- {{numnotes}}: The number of pages in your wiki will be displayed. For example the text “520 pages in this wiki”
- [[Meetings]] [[Personal]] [[WebPages]] [[People]]: This will provide you with links to four other pages in your wiki. You don’t always need to use the [[ ]] – only for non-WikiWords. Here the non-WikiWords are Meetings, Personal and People. WebPages however is a wiki word, as it is two words stuck together, each word beginning with a capital letter
- {{tagged ToDo}}. Here Trunk Notes will show a list of all pages which have the tag ToDo.
Ad hoc
Trunk Notes has something of a learning code. Don’t be daunted by what may appear to be an app with a daunting number of features. Trunk Notes has been designed so that you can get started very quickly and learn more as you progress.
You may just want to enter information and worry about structuring it later. This is where tags are great – not much effort is needed to use tags and they can assist you in creating a more explicit structure later.
As you create pages it can be helpful to tag them if there is some obvious tag which comes to mind. You might create a new page for a pasta recipe and decide to apply two tags – Recipe and Pasta. When you have more time you might then create a Recipes page and create headings for different types of food and links to the individual recipes. If you have already tagged pages then Trunk Notes can produce some of this automatically.
