I’m always looking for more efficient ways to organize my thoughts and notes. The old pen and paper doesn’t do it for me any more (save the trees!) and trying to find something when you have hundreds of notes to browse through would take up much of your valuable time. It’s 2008 and by now we’ve found new ways to organize ourselves. Whether it’s through text files, Outlook or related software, or organizer software, we’ve definitely come along way. These methods are usually good for keeping you organized, but what about keeping your thoughts organized?

There’s buzz about mind mapping and, while it’s not a new technique, there is now a lot of mind mapping software making it easier to map your mind. While it definitely looks interesting, it didn’t interest me enough to learn how to use it. So I kept looking until I came across wikidPad. What is wikidPad you ask? Well, it’s like notepad on drugs. Ok, that wasn’t very helpful, so let’s quote the wikidPad website.

WikidPad is a wiki-like notebook for storing your thoughts, ideas, todo lists, contacts, or anything else you can think of to write down.

If you’ve used Wikipedia, you’ll begin to understand what wikiPad is all about. Essentially, it’s a “wikipedia” of your thoughts. You start off with a main idea, branch off to sub-ideas, ad infinitum. What you end up with is a web of ideas all linked with each other. To continue with the Wikipedia example, let’s say you look up apples. In the apples article you may have a sub article called “apple juice“. It would then be linked the sub article. Jumping from one idea to a related one is extremely simple. The same applies with wikiPad. If you have a ideas on how to develop your next application, within this section you may have sub sections such as “user system”, “post system”, etc. From there you can continue to build your linked database of thoughts. When you create new ideas (ie: a new application) you can always reuse old concepts like the user system and so on.

To give you a non-programming example, let’s take a field of study. Philosophy, since this is currently what I am studying. I can make documents for notes on the books I read, papers I write, etc. However, the idea that I can link notes, common ideas, and concepts together makes it much easier for me to find what I’m looking for when I look back at my notes.

The best way to see if the software is for you is to try it out. It is free and open source and you can download it off their homepage. If you’re using Linux, you can follow these instructions on how to install it, or simply use their windows version under Wine until they release linux binaries. The learning curve isn’t too difficult, but if you haven’t worked with any wiki software then it may take you a while to get used to wiki formatting.