Subject: Seeking Advice on Using Tinderbox for Creative Work and Personal Projects
Hi everyone,
I’m a photographer and videographer in my mid-20s, working on film sets while also running a small personal business focused on content creation and personal projects. I recently started using Tinderbox 11 and even got The Tinderbox Waybook. I’ve also watched most of Michael Becker’s educational content and Tinderbox meetups. I feel like I have a fairly solid understanding of the software, but I’m missing concrete, real-world examples of how it could be useful for my work and daily life.
I initially discovered Tinderbox while exploring traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture. It was helpful for mapping connections between body meridians, acupuncture points, effects, and symptoms. While that worked well, I feel like I’m only scratching the surface of what Tinderbox can do, especially for managing creative projects and tasks.
A bit about my interests and workflow:
Video production from both a creative (writing/directing) and technical perspective (concept, preparation, filming, post-production/editing)
Music composition, scoring, and production
Sports, hiking, and personal projects
For context, I already use Office365, DEVONthink, OmniFocus, and RemNote in my daily work. I’m now looking for advice on how to set up Tinderbox to:
Organize tasks and workflows
Manage creative projects
Integrate into daily work in a motivating, practical way
I’d really appreciate any guidance, example setups, or strategies for leveraging Tinderbox effectively in both my professional and personal projects.
Tinderbox represents a broad range of capabilities and applications. There are probably as many ways of going about doing something in Tinderbox as there are users, so I’m afraid your request is very challenging.
I think you should pick one application and begin to apply what you know about Tinderbox to that problem. You’ll quickly bump up against the limits of your experience, and in the process begin to learn Tinderbox “in a motivating, practical way.”
Don’t expect perfection at the start, and don’t even aim for anything especially sophisticated.
Try to think about the elements of the problem you’re trying to solve, or manage. What kinds of notes capture those elements? How do they relate to one another? What essential attributes does each element possess that you need to track or account for?
Start small, put some ideas down in Map view or Outline view, depending on which way you feel most comfortable, or inspired.
As you encounter problems or questions, then use the forum and people will be happy to assist you.
Hi Niklas, and welcome to the forum. I will echo @dmrogers advice, and add only - since you refer to music composition - that one useful approach is to think of learning Tbx as you would familiarize yourself with a musical instrument. It can do many things in many different ways, so much so that the options are initially bewildering.
You can do all the things you mention - for some, you would be better suited using dedicated IMO. That said, Tinderbox does a remarkable number of things really well - and some other things uniquely - and as a one-stop app, is unparalleled. I for example visualize ideas and projects, draft and track texts, link to external resources, and do the occasional automation. Others on the group track data, assemble reports, compose/publish/manage blogs, prepare academic texts, presentations, and more.
Parts of the learning curve are steep - the rewards are commensurately immense. Of course you will mess up on occasion, or feel lost. But take heart, the community is always here to help solve problems.
Jump in and play around, see where you want to go with it first. Mastery takes time. Only cautions are to do regular backups, and try new ideas on sample data sets first!
if you can, it would be great if you could join one or more of the weekly meetups. You can explain what you’re trying to and we could help you develop your workflow.
I think Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is actually a fantastic use case for Tinderbox 11, because at its core it’s essentially a deeply interconnected knowledge map.
TCM is built on a web of relationships: meridians running through the body, connecting hundreds of acupuncture points. Layered on top of that are the Five Elements, Qi (vital energy), Yin and Yang, and various other energy types and directional flows — each with its own nature, function, and interaction pattern.
The central principle of TCM is balance. Energies can be in harmony or out of balance, which produces either a stable or an unstable state in the body. Any symptom is, by definition, a signal that something is either deficient or excessive. Treatments like acupuncture, Qigong, and herbal medicine all work by either tonifying (strengthening) or dispersing (weakening) specific energies to restore that balance.
This maps very naturally onto Tinderbox’s feature set:
Notes can represent acupuncture points, meridians, herbs, or symptoms — each carrying its own set of properties.
User-defined attributes (e.g., $Element, $EnergyDirection, $State, $Deficiency, $Excess) can encode the relational logic of TCM directly onto each note, making the invisible structure of the system visible and queryable.
Links can model the directional flows between meridians and points — Tinderbox’s typed links even let you distinguish between, say, a tonifying and a dispersing relationship.
Agents can then dynamically surface notes matching specific conditions — for example, all acupuncture points associated with a given organ, all herbs that address a Yin deficiency, or all symptoms linked to an excess of a particular element.
The Map view lets the whole system breathe visually — you’re not forcing TCM into a flat list or a rigid hierarchy, but letting the structure emerge the way TCM itself is structured: as a living, interconnected web.
You have done some deep thinking with both understanding TCM and integrating it with Tinderbox.
>you’re not forcing TCM into a flat list or a rigid hierarchy, but letting the structure emerge t
My own view of TCM and acupuncture tends to be more mechanistic. I am not sure how useful it would be to the group but I would like to see how you are using TB to deepen your understanding of TCM on a weekly meetup if you have the time;not so much as the technical aspects but rather how were you able to break down a complex topic into a visual format that was not just a collection of lists.