I love the way that the developers of Hook are focused on managing knowledge. I am a fan of W. Edwards Deming and, I had some serious head injuries years ago in service, that I am now trying to cope with. Challenges with organization structure, as well as access to knowledge, is very important to me. I suspect that this is also a problem for many people in our modern, move as fast you can, Twitter or Treat (used to be trick or treat), world.
I find that keeping track of my organization is at least as important as my being able to stay focused within an idea. Hook is very nice for keeping me focused inside an idea. My comments of late are about how I would like to see an improvement in how to keep my Hook links organized. For me this is a big deal. I can become overwhelmed when I can’t remember where I put a thing or because there is just to much to do, to have to reengage with the organizational part of my brain when I want to stay focused on the creative, task oriented, writing part of my brain - which is after all the point of using Hook.
My current solution is to make a NVAlt stop notes record of my progress in a current project (or, project notes if you prefer) a hot key launched app that begins my day of working on my project. The problem I was starting to have is that, since Hook cannot differentiate between groups of links or with a set of links, for the duration of a project, the links all persist until you delete them. This gets quickly confusing for me as you can see in my current project.
My current project involves a six year or so time frame. Events occurred that I have to carefully document in the first four years. Then, completing that, I have to carefully document the next two years. Then completing that, I have to view the documents together and make a legal argument against all my (hopefully) well laid out evidence.
Adding to all of this, I crunch my basic ideas together in TaskPaper, call it my Grunge music phase. Then, I move it over to Scrivener and close out the TaskPaper document so I don’t edit in the wrong places. Scrivener allows adding graphics and really gets the voice of the project going. I call Scrivener my rock music phase. Then, finally, I get the project ready for a final draft and into printed output, I call this my classical music phase or, my Mozart phase.
Adding to this, I will sometimes have to create revision documents of some of these stages - mostly as I learn from past organizing mistakes.
This brings us back to my central point that, when I am working on that first stage, I am collecting links to focus on that part of my project. When I have closed out one of the steps of my project, such as taskPaper, I no longer want to see that link in my Hooks menu. On the other hand, invariably, at some point I will want to go back and make sure of something that I had written earlier as I had either forgotten that piece, written it better, or written it differently at least, earlier.
My current solution is to copy the title of the NVAlt Stop Notes document that I am using for the entire project and create a new NVAlt document with the same title adding, “archive”. Now all I have to do is to link this NVAlt archive page to my other NVAlt project page. Then, all I have to do is to migrate my Hooked links from my project document over to my archive NVAlt document, and start deleting the links in my active project document that are still there but are no longer useful to my staying focused.
None of this is meant to be a complaint. I am only trying to reveal my own processes and my own learning styles. I think it would be nice of Hook develops a little more along the lines of organizing, archiving, and naming, sets of links.
It would also be very nice if sets of links could be shared with others and reused in other projects. Imagine the boost that would give to students doing research on a paper when saved links to library research and online web pages and portals can be linked and then shared.