Amen! One thing I have learned all too slowly is that no software can replicate the effect of sitting attentively and somewhat anxiously with my notes and my thoughts. It is all too easy to try sewing an ever-better net rather than tossing it in the water and actually catching a fish.
I began to get much more out of Tinderbox when I began letting my documents stay “messy” – notes with similar names, the same text occurring in more than one note, attributes that used to be important but aren’t used now. It’s OK not to fix everything or hone my system for some general use case that may occur in the future. I’ve found that trying to create long-lasting structures distracts from the work of creating a structure that will be useful now, for solving whatever task I have at hand. The structure that lasts is the one that emerges from solving concrete problems, one after the other.
For finding the right note at the right time, I use “all of the above” – attributes, tags, text, links, adornments. Even the sometimes-on, sometimes-way-off “related notes” suggestions of Evernote and Devonthink. Yet after years working with these tools I have never found a software substitute for the free-associative process of contemplating some notes and seeing what thoughts and recollections they spark.
That said,
I agree. I know there are workarounds but a straightforward History would be useful, precisely because one’s most recent trail is a handy map of one’s latest conscious and unconscious thoughts.
David