I do admit to several false-starts with Tinderbox until I realized this is the key benefit Tinderbox offers that Devonthink, Curio, and Scrivener do not handle nearly as well.
It depends somewhat on if you have some experience with scripting or coding - even if it is in Turbo Pascal in the 80s, are you familiar with the concepts of variables, parameters, and functions? And do you have at least a rudimentary knowledge of HTML i.e. <p>, <a href>, <b>, <i>, <li>.
If so, then I would estimate it would take 5 days to get through the key parts of Michael Becker’s excellent recent video series and read further details in Mark Anderson’s online Tinderbox reference. Together those sources are gold.
You might not gain that much time using Tinderbox the first time, but you would have gained an immensely useful tool for future work.
I don’t have my doubts about any of these other tools not being able to compile information into new content. Certainly not Curio or Scrivener. With DevonThink, I know that the best I will have is the faster ability to find content, not any improvement to cull it to create new content. I still have to do this part myself.
And in those five days, I can, as a well-trained good ol’ dog who has honed my skill on pen+paper+notecards, get through the translations of my 100+ PDFs to annotations and dump them into a resource (perhaps Obsidian) and be on my way to creating new content using my current skill sets.
I can also put the 100+ PDFs into DevonThink and sort through to help me collect the insights that I need into Obsidian to help me make the links that I believe will help me make the new content. So, I am probably already done.
Yes I can code (having written raw HTML back in the days) … but I do not want to have to code to make something like this work for me. Better would be that you would have pointed me to a nicely designed, easy to use package developed for TBX that would do what I want already.
So, at this point, the investment of time into TBX is far too high for the projected RoI for me. If I had perhaps a dozen or more of these type of expeditions left in me, perhaps.
I appreciate the comments. Perhaps others might see from it why they should put TBX on the radar for their next five day exclusive focus session.
Me too! DT3 is integral to my workflow and I use it every day. This “personal CRM for my job” thing is strictly a TBX plan. In fact, I’ll be working with Michael Becker to get it all set up properly.
I am not going to disagree with @rkaplan 's analysis necessarily, but I think I would offer an alternative estimate: if you would otherwise use paper+pen+notecards and then transfer information from that into something like Obsidian, then I think the answer to your question could be “1 day.” And that single day would actually be the same work that you’d do with the notecards and pens.
In other words, I think that one of the key mistakes people make with TBX is deciding that they must somehow “set it up” to get it “ready.” In fact, it’s ready as soon as you open the software and create a new file. Literally just start entering notes. Every note, at its core, is just a “notecard” with a name and a text field. Just start there.
TBX is ALL ABOUT iteration and gradual organization (I’m blanking on the term-of-art here…blame the beer I’m drinking). You don’t need to spend time coding agents or anything at all in order to get value out of TBX. I’ve used it for freeform diagramming and it works great. I think the sheer power of TBX makes it far more intimidating than it actually is. Michael’s excellent videos really do break it down and make it easier.
When was the last time you used it? I have found that especially between TB7 and now, Eastgate has poured a lot of resources into making things easier and “new user friendly.” One could surmise that this is simply “competition” at work, however, I think it’s more a case of inspiration coming from all the activity in this space, as I don’t get the sense that TBX really “competes” with mass-market software anymore than many of our favorite apps that get discussed on this forum do. It’s already super niche!
In any event, you are undoubtedly correct that TBX also requires a bit of coding skill. However, TBX’s coding language is substantially simpler than the pure JavaScript + Clojure of Roam Research, and that simply feels more like it requires an actual programmer skillset. YMMV, of course.
If you might need to revise your work product in the future or revisit it a year from now or do similar projects in the future, then that would be where Tinderbox shines.