Getting Started on the Right Foot

Certainly: links might be a good way to trace the parents of tasks. And this way you’re creating a nice separation between concepts: links connect tasks to reference material. Links aren’t for all types of connections between clients, projects, tasks, etc. etc. This is where the roadmap, in my mind, would get bogged down in too much information.

But you wouldn’t need to use links. You could create an attribute called “$Conversation” or something, make it a date attribute. Then every piece of information that comes out of that meeting on that date could be connected via a agent. If you have more than one meeting on a particular date, then you could make it a string attribute and use terms like “phone meeting 2/17/17 a” or whatever. Then you could query:

$Client==“Joe smith” & $Conversation==“1/17/17”

OR

$Project==“Brand x” & $Conversation==“1/17/17” & $Prototype==“phoneNotes”

Or, more complexly, you could ask to see everything within a specific date range.

Wholly depends on what you’re likely to do in practice. If you want to click a link and get right from one note to another, use links. If you want to review all the notes connected by different categories of metadata, seems to me like attributes are the way to go.

@damien I’m curious to hear about your experience with TB so far, especially how links are working for you.

@pat After this discussion, I backed-off using links quite a bit and looked for ways to use attributes instead. Thanks to some very helpful suggestions by @mwra, I am now using one agent for looking at all items for a project. I have a top level note where I change the “Project” attribute and it collects all of the related notes underneath. I do the same thing with people. It is working quite well for finding related notes without having to use many links.

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Thank you – that is one of the most useful insights I have come across in my most recent foray into using Tinderbox. Mind you, I had to process it twice. When I first saw it I realised how important it was, so I copied it. I then went away and played with the program for about two weeks, at which point I realised that hierarchies were getting in the way, then I made myself a note that said something similar to what you wrote in your post. I realised I had seen the idea before, so I came back to express my gratitude.

I think I might even manage to understand how to use the program this time. It feels different. Partly because it has grown, but I seem to be more able to see how to use it this time.

Cheers.

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Appreciate it; as I said, I went through the same mental evolution from hierarchy/outline-style thinking, which still is my natural mode for many projects, to this associative thinking. Good luck!

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What is this referring to? Composites? (I started with Tbx 7.0 a few weeks ago myself, so I’m also still deep in the learning curve.)

In short, Yes! See here.