A standard electronic toolchain:
thought –> interface –> software –> {recipients, repositories} –> thoughts
I use simply threaded email programs for an amazing amount of interface & software, and simple web forms [with almost no interesting resultant structure] for 90% of the rest. I’m not proud of this — and occasionally I know of a unique way to access something I need (a piece of information, a view of past conversations I want to show someone else), and pay dearly for this simplicity of structure in lost time.
The way I think without focusing (directed, perhaps, by having grown up writing on flat pieces of paper and typing [o|i]nto similarly-shaped textareas), my thoughts come out a cluster at a time. I figure out a second later whether that cluster is full of continuations and illustrations of a preceding train of thought, related free-association, new thoughts wholly unrelated to recent trains, a cusp of connections to be followed, more rarely an epiphany about a surrounding concept or related abstraction, etc.
If I want to stimulate this kind of thought, I pace. It’s amazing how different my thought process is when pacing then when focusing on a theme (e.g., while writing a post like this).
The most efficient way I know of to lay such thoughts out, without losing anything, frequently shifting gears (between unrelated clusters), layering ideas as they take shape, involves pen and paper — a few different colors of pen and large sheets of paper. Nothing I do electronically can come even close, no matter that I type 10X faster than I write, or that emacs effectively doubles this rate, letting me reuse and restructure things I’ve written in moments.
Many wonderful things happen on paper. I automatically differentiate different clusters with whitespace, borders, text direction, font and style and color; I use all manner of unusual images and symbols which come in no fontset and cross lines and clusters — long arrows and bars and diagrams and icons in the middle of text. Tufte uses an example from a paper of Galileo’s in which he embeds a perfect description of a celestial observation in the space of three characters by drawing it.
Also the smallest analog nuances of writing style reflect what kinds of thoughts I was having, allowing myself a day or month later to pick up on subtleties that the text alone wouldn’t convey. But this is a quite different and delicate issue, difficult to overcome with crude input devices — even a too-thick or balky pen can obscure these details.
Other interfaces, word processors and email programs and blogging software, try to facilitate expression by making it easier and faster to write, edit, direct (mailing lists, RSS feeds) and interconnect (categorization, hypertext, blogrolls) one’s different clusters of thought. The aspect they have a hard time with is capturing the original interconnectedness of ideas which are serialized, both for lack of non-serial interfaces, and for piecemeal consumption by others.