Imagine if you had a notetaking tool that perfectly supported your creative process. It would make it easy to capture the seeds of ideas, nurture them and leverage serendipity to help you build them into something really valuable.
Sounds amazing, right?
This tool actually exists today. It’s been in beta testing and is officially being launched at the end of March. It’s called Sublime.
With most notetaking tools, it’s easy to get lost trying to organize your thoughts – tags, folders and sophisticated workspaces that let you do just about everything you could imagine. But somehow, creativity gets lost in the process.
The developer of Sublime, Sari Azout, started with a different paradigm: Helping creative people explore, capture ideas and develop them in a friction-free, minimalist workspace that doesn’t get in the way of your creative muse (check out my interview with her here).
In this review, we’ll take a closer look at what makes Sublime unique and why it’s a must-have tool for creatives!
Minimalist user interface
Sublime is the brainchild of Sari Azout. Her vision for this tool was less information factory and more artist’s studio. Sublime’s minimalistic interface is a refreshing change from the usual cluttered PKM tools you may be familiar with.
A simple toolbar with only three buttons, displayed unobtrusively in the lower left corner of the Sublime workspace, enables you to accomplish common tasks:
- Explore: Displays staff picks, which you can use as idea-starters for your library,
- Home: Returns you to the main view of your library of ideas, and
- Plus icon: Enables you to add new ideas to your Sublime library.
You can add almost any type of media to Sublime, including plain text, markup, PDFs, videos and links.
The building blocks of Sublime
Cards, the atomic unit of ideas in Sublime, are displayed simply, without frames or ornamentation.
Cards can be grouped into collections. These are similar to folders in PKMs, but Azout encourages users to think of them as loose groupings of ideas, concepts and information. They can be used to collect information related to your passions, ideas for future projects, goals, things you’ve been thinking about or anything else you may want to bring into the world.
My collections in Sublime are focused on visual thinking, creativity and thought-provoking ideas. To understand how Sublime works, I copied and pasted about 50 of my quotes about these topics into Sublime and added them to appropriate collections. The process was easy and quick, both in the browser and iOS versions of Sublime.
Building upon your ideas – with serendipity
Selecting a single card in your Sublime workspace immediately displays related ideas beneath it – both from your Sublime cards and from other users who have made their cards public. Ideas from others have a small palette icon above them and are displayed with the name of the collection from whence they came.
These related ideas tend to be of a different quality than if you conduct a Google search. Why? Because they are other people’s ideas and inspirations, which are often a more raw or undeveloped form. They are also qualitatively different than those you would obtain from an AI query, which delivers lists of ideas or fully-formed summaries of topics.
For someone like me, who highly values serendipity, having instant access to a whole stream of related ideas from other minds was a fascinating experience,
Related ideas can be sorted by multiple criteria, by type or you can force it to display only related ideas from your own library.
You can add any one of these related ideas to your library by clicking a plus icon below it. If you want to add context to an idea you’ve curated, you have the option of adding a note to it.
Shuffle your ideas to surface new connections
One way to increase the odds of finding useful connections and inspiration is to randomly shuffle your ideas. It’s uncommon to find this feature in any type of software, but it’s vital to forming new connections between ideas.
I’m pleased to report that Sublime makes this easy. When you’re viewing a collection or a list of related ideas, you can click on an icon with two intertwined arrows above it. This randomizes the list and reveals new inspirations to you.
Extending inspiration to your browser
Sublime makes it possible to collect inspiring thoughts from anywhere. I installed the Sublime Chrome browser plugin to see how it works. I visited a page of creativity quotes on the web and was easily able to highlight one of them and either right-click on it or click on the Sublime icon in the toolbar to add it to one of my collections. Nice!
Canvas view – visualizing your ideas in relation to each other
At any time, you can switch from a list view of your cards to Sublime’s canvas view, which displays them in visual relationship with each other.
You can easily drag and drop related ideas until they’re adjacent to each other. But you can’t connect them to each other, at least not yet. Perhaps this is coming in a future iteration of Sublime.
Canvas view gives you a full set of tools to embellish your cards. You can add text, notes, images, shapes and arrows to its canvas. One practical use is to create rectangular frames to group related ideas together.
Serendipity is just a click away in canvas view. If you select a card and click the palette icon above it, Sublime will display a set of related notes in a vertical pane to the right of the canvas. You can then drag and drop relevant ideas into your canvas. The process is easy, quick and fun.
Conclusion
I’m pleased to see that someone has decided to innovate the personal knowledge management space by developing a tool like Sublime that places ideas front and center, not as an afterthought. Its core value isn’t about collecting information – its focus is on nurturing and transforming what you’ve captured into fully-formed, valuable insights and ideas.
I love how Sublime offers multiple ways to court serendipity. From giving you access to other users’ public ideas to its canvas view, this application is uniquely powerful in its ability to supercharge your creative mind.
If your job or avocation involves developing and sharing ideas with other people, then Sublime is a must-have tool.
I can’t wait to see what’s next from Sari Azout and her small but mighty team at Sublime.
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