Thanks J-Mac and 40hz. I guess because I've been using Compendium and listening to stuff like David Allen's GTD, I just thought alot of what was written there were conventional advises for notetaking if not flawed in that they really didn't give you any idea how to test it.
For example, Compendium uses the IBIS methodology which lives and dies by putting any kind of notetaking problem into a structure of pros, cons, decisions, questions and answers. It didn't really matter what's bad about a certain system. It just fitted itself into a system that tells what's bad about those other systems by explaining why it doesn't fit into the IBIS paradigm as opposed to creating a bad example of a system they want to look bad to explain the flaws of said system.
http://www.touchstone.com/wp/IBIS.html40hz, I think David Allen did a better job of explaining the core differences of file cabinets and computers but this is just me assuming they both had the same idea in mind.
I think what the author of that link was saying was that computers are not file cabinets in the sense of you put stuff into it. They are brains in the sense that they're supposed to process what you put in there. Sounds similar but that's why I think Allen explains it better by not demonizing the file cabinet but explaining how to improve the file cabinet which is basically set it up like a physical real world e-mail of your notes rather than something you put stuff in and put stuff in and put stuff in.
Basically he suggests such slight modifications as:
1) Put a cabinet within short distances of where you often take your notes so that you don't need to stand to get something out or put something in.
2) Keep a hierarchy in your file cabinet. One drawer always has blank folders where you go to when wanting to start composing something. One area for every stuff that needs to go in. One area to segment. One area to get out.
Note that this isn't a word by word explanation of what he did and I hardly know what he's talking about (especially when he's referring to no hanging folders) but it does a much better job at explaining the differences between a computer and a file cabinet.
In that same sense, a computer's advantage is that it is possible to collect something and organize it rather than a file cabinet where you are forced to organize it to collect lots of things and find them easily. Ideally this is how it's supposed to work at least that's from what I gathered with that quote.
In essence the goal is to have 1 software that is easy to put stuff into and then easy to view these stuff and then start organizing them and then easy to put all these stuff in different sections of that one program so that it's easy to find them once you structured them.
...hence computer = brain, is actually computer = better at processing lots of information than relying on our own brain's memory and capacity. Psychic Ram as Allen puts it.
