Zim - A Desktop Wiki
Lists Organizer or Outliner
One way to think about note taking and organization is this: "Everything is a List".
Your open tasks? A ToDo List.
Thinks you want to remeber? A list.
Books you have read? A list.
And so on, and so on.
Outliners are a specific class of software programs that allow you to edit notes as a hierarchical list. Zim is not an outliner, but it can be used in a similar fashion. However Zim does not enforce strict hierarchy and allows free-form mixing of lists with other context.
There are mulltiple ways to keep a list in Zim:
You can simply type a bullet or checkbox list in a page.
- You can use headings in a page and look at the table of contents as a list (see the Table Of Contents plugin)
- And you can create a hierarchy of pages and look at the page index as a list
Typically all of these ways of organizing would be mixed in a real notebook and should compliment each other.
One way of working that works well in Zim is to start with a bullet list and then in each item create a link to a sub-page. This sub-page then can be filled in with more information. For example that list of books that you read can start as a bullet list with just titles and the date you finished them. Later you turn the title into a link to a sub-page (use a "+" prefix, see Help:Links) and in that sub-page you can add some comments about the book or further information on the author, links to reviews, etc.
Another way of working is to look at the organization of your work. E.g. if you run a lot of projects with customers, probably your notes fall naturally in a hierarchy where you create a section per customer and than a page per project for that customer. Each project page then contains lists of things to do, or lists of dates with minutes of meetings.