Here are some further resources and discussions that might be helpful for using Scrivener in a more general purpose fashion:
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Outlining vs Note Bin: overall, I wish I have more on the vast philosophical differences between traditional note-taking tools, like the ones you list, and large-scale outliners. This is one of those preferential things that may make or break a program for you. I would contend Scrivener can be used more like a traditional note-taker (with documents are the prevailing metaphor, and linking them together is essential), but it does feel a bit out of its element there, and for some people other tools may be a better fit. So here’s a bit on how Scrivener is designed to work, and how that is different from your typical everything-bucket-full-of-documents approach.
- Some basic theory on outliner software for notetaking. Using the outliner metaphor for notetaking is crucial to understanding Scrivener’s approach. While it can be used as a “document bin”, it only really starts to shine when you give it more one-liners, so to speak. Anyone that has been drawn to tools like Roam, or Logseq, will be familiar with this idea.
- Introduction to Scrivener’s outlining model. In case this whole topic is unfamiliar, and the only outlining you’ve ever done is with bullet lists in text editors, this post, the cross-links within it, and the follow-up post below it, are a good starting point.
- Tips for organic outlining. In the same vein as above, this goes into a few different concepts and ways of making Scrivener’s outliner work with you for rapid note-taking and thought building. Note the list of links in a follow-up post—if you’re still a bit foggy on how this all could be of use, there is a lot more on this topic. Much of it is written toward the perspective of writing long-form texts (naturally), but as I’ll go into greater detail in one of the links below, there is a lot overlap in the tool chest we use to take notes, and write long-form, which is part of what makes Scrivener unique in this field.
Again, anyone who has used Roam or Loseq will get this, and will get how elegent and simple a nested outline can be for taking notes. But if that’s a new idea, I’d say try this: avoid Scrivener’s text editor for a bit. Force yourself to think entirely in its Outliner view. Learn how to make it shine, see how it can describe your ideas as you come up with them. Once you’ve got that, then start writing long-form into the outline headings you’ve created, maybe using the short synopses you jotted down, as a starting point for fleshing out these ideas. You might find you don’t need as much of the text editor as you thought! And you might, at this point, see how much of a philosophical gulf there is between document(note)-bucket style programs and outliners.
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Practical techniques and methods: here are some discussions on Zettelkasten, and other more practical applications of note taking, such as a project template designed to focus the Scrivener project window on this task.
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A template that creates a project designed to be used as a note-taking tool. The idea here was to take the “Scratch Pad” feature, and make it even better, as a dedicated project. This idea demonstrates how flexible the project window is, and how we can hone it to better suit a specific purpose, such as note-taking instead of bulk writing.
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Using Scrivener as a Zettelkasten. You can skip past the first few paragraphs on how Scapple isn’t a good everything-bucket. After that, this covers some basics, with a focus on what in Scrivener works well with Zettelkasten method—but frankly the core ideas of that particular paper-based method are so simple, these techniques are universally useful. This includes a list of topics in the user manual to look at.
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Tips for efficient transcription. While also starting from a conversation on Zettelkestan, this has more to do with getting a paper-based note taking system into Scrivener efficiently. Thus less theory, and more some tips on efficient project window navigation, when transcribing notes. I would say these tips are equally useful for any form of transcription, or taking down notes in a lecture for example. Don’t skip just because you don’t use ZK, I mean to say.
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Creating a ticketing system for meta-note-taking. While this technique is a very specific method I developed to track large-scale editing in a book, the core concepts behind it are broadly applicable to any task where we might want to summarise or overview smaller pieces of information together into meta-lists. At least for how I curate my notes, the process of going back and collecting thoughts into lists-of-lists, and cross-referencing between them, is an invaluable part of the process of augmenting our memory with notes.
It’s how I got this list of links. I didn’t spend hours doing it all from scratch, I looked up my list-of-lists and found meta-lists going over years of thoughts on note-taking, linking, outlining and so forth. And now that I’ve combined these related topics together into this list, I now have another meta-list to find in the future.
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Scrivener 3’s features for note-taking. Originally formulated as a response to a v1/v2 user who felt v3 wasn’t as good for note-taking, this post serves as list of tips and tricks, on the kinds of things we added to the software to make it better for that purpose—and some of our design thoughts on why we went in the directions we did, such as the concept that there should be as little friction as possible between you creating a new note and beginning to type your thoughts.
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Integration:
- Using external folder sync to connect software together. While much has been said on the either/or equation, with Scrivener you are not limited to only using Scrivener. This post covers the broad idea, and links to more specific instructions, on how to set up Scrivener to produce a folder of files that it will maintain a two-way sync with. Most tools that can work on a folder of files will automatically benefit from this capability and work with Scrivener seamlessly. Scrivener does some things nothing else can do, other programs do things it can’t do as well; why not have both?
- Using integration for better Markdown writing. This one focuses more on Markdown-based writing. Scrivener is itself a powerful Markdown-based writing platform, but its text editor is a little lacking in what some might expect of that. This shows how you can use a more powerful text editor (like Sublime Text) with Scrivener’s outlining. If you think best, and jot down notes in Markdown (or any markup really), and find Scrivener’s bulky and complicated rich text editor approach a turn-off, this might save the rest of the software for you.
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Linking:
- Notes on using Scrivener like a wiki. This first post has some further links to follow; also scroll down for further discussion on the topic of “wiki-like” usage. This also contains some thoughts on the differences between tools like Zettlr or Obsidian, and Scrivener.
- Connecting ideas together. This dips into a broader discussion on how to link things together. We typically think of linking as a hard piece of technology (usually clickable), and while Scrivener supports that concept fully, this goes into the many softer or fuzzier ways of associating things together, some of which are rare capabilities in the note-taking genre.
- Linking text to text directly. While certainly not a task specific to note-taking vs general writing, it’s the kind of thing I tend to do a lot of in projects that are primarily meant for notes, so you might find some of this to be useful.
- On bi-directional linking. Written primarily for those familiar with dedicated note-taking tools, such as Obsidian and Logseq, this is meant to demonstrate how Scrivener works differently from them, and where it has pros where some other tools have cons.
I don’t know if you will find an actual community of Scrivener users using Scrivener less in a writing role and more in a note-taking role. Instead you’ll find a lot of discussion scattered throughout existing communities. It is a minority usage, but one that has always had a lot of interest—to the point that a lot of v3’s design improvements were made with that kind of usage in mind. It just so happens that a lot of what makes for a good note-taking tool also makes for a good writing tool, so even those things tend to be more largely talked of in the context of long-form writing.
But as you’ll see, I’m a big fan of using it that way, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that the large majority of my Scrivener projects have nothing to do with long-form writing!