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.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGsyL9hwKq0
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.
