Blog
Notes on thinking in trees
Methods, opinions, and engineering notes on outlining, memory, and attention — from the people building AnyMind.
Method ·
How to Outline Your Thinking: A Field Guide
Outlining is not formatting. It is a small set of moves — split, nest, promote, prune — applied until the structure matches what you actually believe.
Most people learned outlining as a school formality: Roman numerals first, content second. Real outlining works the other way — you write messy fragments, then reshape them with a handful of tree operations until the argument stands up. A practical guide to each move.
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Engineering ·
Local-First Notes: Why Your Second Brain Should Work Offline
Local-first software keeps the primary copy of your data on your device and treats the server as a sync peer, not a landlord. For note-taking, this is not an implementation detail — it decides latency, ownership, and whether your notes survive the company that hosts them.
Guide ·
Turn Your Notes into Flashcards with FSRS
Spaced repetition is the most evidence-backed way to remember what you learn, but copying notes into a separate flashcard app is where most people give up. Here is how FSRS works, and how to schedule reviews directly inside the outline where the note already lives.
Method ·
Capture First, Organize Later: The Inbox Method
Every organizing decision made at capture time taxes the thought itself. The inbox method separates the two jobs: write the raw thing down instantly, then structure it later in a deliberate triage pass. Here is the full workflow.
Opinion ·
Every Card System Led Me Back to the Tree
Card-based note systems organize through folders, tags, or bidirectional links — and each path leads back to the tree structure it tried to escape. After years with these tools, I believe the outline remains the most honest form of knowledge organization.
Opinion ·
Only an Outliner Carried Me Through
I tried card notes, long-form editors, Markdown, backlinks, and plugin ecosystems. In the end, what got me through a doctoral thesis was not feature theater, but the plain discipline of an outliner.