Thought Types are a way to add meta-information to a Thought. This video will help you to understand the benefits. I use them extensively in my PersonalBrain.

One of the biggest advantages of Thought Types is the ability to assign a Thought Type to any Thought in your plex without needing to link it to similar Thoughts of the same type.

My Thought Types

Over the years I’ve developed a set of Thought Types that helps me navigate my PersonalBrain. They quickly group similar information together and provide a visual clue as to the nature of a Thought.

The attached diagram shows my current menu of Thought Types (Select Thought Type from any menu where you see it). Each of my Thought Types is explained further below.

Area of Responsibility

I’m an afficiando of the Getting Things Done methodology and Area of Responsibility is attached to my responsibilities. They include Father, Husband, Home Owner and Business Owner. As responsibilities come and go I assign or unassign this Thought Type.

Book

You’ll see elsewhere on this site that I try to read 50 books in a year. That adds up to a lot of books being tracked in my system.

Date

As more and more information is entered into PersonalBrain and linked together the tool will naturally clump items together. My Date structure enhances this. It gives me a quick way to see “What else happened on this date?”. I do this by creating thoughts for specific days, months, years, decades and centuries.

One of three Thought Types with children, Date brings these all together.

century, day, decade, month, year

All these are specific kinds of Date. The images below should allow you to identify the structure I use.

  • Day, formatted as 2011–08–12, has a parent of
  • Month, formatted as 2011–08, has a parent of August and
  • Year, formatted as 2011, has a parent of
  • Decade, formatted as 2010s, has a parent of
  • Century, formatted as 21st Century.

Each year, about November I load up the next year’s dates so they are available to me (cut-and-paste from an Excel spreadsheet). I also link each year or month to its previous year or month. This provides a quick way using jump points to move up or down the timeline.

Dream

Those things in life I dream about.

Event

An event such as a seminar. To the event I link the date, who I was there with, where it was, who presented.

Goal

Where I’ve managed to get more specific than a Dream.

House

A street address of somewhere I, or a member of my family, has lived.

Media

Like a Book I have need at times to track Blu-ray, CD or DVD titles.

Organisation

Any business, charity, group, network that People belong to.

Person

A person. The sub-types of this thought are used for specific people.

Quote

Quote from a book, movie etc.

Timeline

An event in my life, or a member of my family. Timeline is attached to births, deaths, school events, starting jobs, concerts attended…

Virtue

A lot of the work I do can be ultimately tied to a virtue. It’s nice to be able to see them all at a glance.