Beck Tench recorded 45min worth of inspiring “Literature Review” video showing her current workflow with a Bullet Journal and the app Tinderbox for Mac to implement the Zettelkasten Method.

I’ve never used this hypertext writing environment called Tinderbox. In the end, I’m a proponent of the plain text approach and keeping your knowledge portable, so there wasn’t much appeal in trying out the app. But its community looks nice, the developer is a cool guy, and the app looks solid and makes people happy. Maybe it can make you happy, too.

Anyway, make sure to take a look at Beck’s blog. The posts’s illustrations are tasteful and I find the topics to be very interesting, too.

Update: Reader Russ pointed out that Tinderbox files are XML, which you could use in your own scripts or 3rd party tools. So you aren’t really locked in.

These are very sound principles, a selection of the ones by Micah Joel:

• Don’t throw anything away.
• Focus on making it easy to store things.
• Let emergence happen.
• Be part of the community.

The first three principles build on top of one another: keep stuff and make it easy to store it. Then you can reap the benefits: connections you did not anticipate. These principles are exactly what the Zettelkasten Method is about.

And the last one is why we’ve built this site: to provide a place to talk about and discover workflows. To help each other.

I’ve never used Tinderbox myself. You know we think that less is enough. But the folks using Tinderbox seem to be quite open-minded and well-organized, judging from their blogs.