How to create "records" in Dynalist

💬General
#1

I posted this before in a thread that I didn’t realise was closed.

Projects often involve individuals who are partners or clients. Sometimes these can recur across different projects. It is useful to maintain a history of this individuals, including contact details and phone records.

As a relatively flat platform, Dynalist is not structurally designed to incorporate recurring records.

These seem to be the different strategies to create a structural connection:

External link
You can include an external link to a Google Contact record, an Airtable relational database or Evernote card. These external links can be used to archive information and maintain contact details.

Internal link
If used often enough, it is possible to use the contact name as a hashtag and do a search for related items. But the search for Dynalist is awkward and difficult to navigate.

What I lean towards is to designate one item as the #contact and then link back to that item when the person is referred to elsewhere in Dynalist.

Has anyone else faced this challenge? I’m curious to know how others have dealt with it.

#2

Yes these (tag and link) are the only two ways I can think of really. Unfortunately with the link approach you might lose the capacity to search for all items related to that contract that the tag approach provides (which I use, but only for personal stuff so performance doesn’t need to be that great).

However I just tested this and if you use a tag to identify the customer in the original item then use the linking function [[ it automatically copies the title of the linked item into the square brackets, so then you have the tag for searches and the link to go back to the original item. Screenshot from phone coming …

#3

Oddly, if you click on a tag, you have to delete the space which is automatically inserted afterwards for the link tag to show up:

Screenshot_20170706-070126.png720×1280 34.8 KB

#4

It might be enough just to link back to the record without using tags (other than something like #record that signifies it as core data.

#5

Mmm, for linking purposes I agree. My thinking was that your approach however wouldn’t as easily allow you to search your whole dynalist account for every reference to this customer (perhaps it would, with quotation marks around ‘John Smith #record’, but it seems a little more messy to me and I think you couldn’t combine it with an AND or OR search). For this reason I would probably have a tag for every person like @+John-Smith, but maybe I’m missing something! :slight_smile:

#6

So this is for linking rather than searching. I think with autocomplete, “#record” would give a list of the contacts to begin with. You could use the person’s name as well.

#7

I use a totally seperate program to manage my contacts (OneNote / google contacts + phone / thunderbird)

I strictly try to avoid using dynalist as a collaboration / two way tool, I think I learned the hard way when I tried to implement team collaboration with OneNote. It was realllllly messy. Also I overdocumented too many things in evernote as well

I think whether or not you need to have @tag-person-named links is what your tracking - whose being held accountable for what - and whether the person your working with is local or remote.

For me, the most important aspect of notetaking is actually capturing the information, even if its not inherently organized.

Personally I find working with partners / clients to be inherently unorganized, so I would organize it like so:

+ Project1
+ Project2
+ Contact Sheets
+ Sprints
+ + Day30
+ + + @project1 @client1
+ + + + Phone call with client, client agreed to change XYZ, sent UX design proposal ABC, client said ok over telephone, 
+ + Day29
+ + Day28
+ + ...etc

Each + top level bulletpoint is its own document

basically, keep the project files/ contact sheets fairly clean and organized, make your daily sprints extremely messy as needed / tagging to reference. Live chat logs and phone meeting notes / minute notes should go in daily sprints

Your project1 by default is assumed to be @project1 tag

Contacts should be in its own file folder

Have Project1, Project2, Contacts, and Sprints all open in your chrome browser at same time.
Makes it extremely easy to flip between docs quickly.

I started employing multiple docs like piotr using his omnipanel script thing (The one where you can click to open a new panel here:)

and it makes things so much easier to manage information ( was using a singular doc before). I have like 5-6 folders and 30 docs now

I bound my “CTRL+O” key (the one to open docs) to “ALT+F” so its very easy for me to press that button

then type in “Contacts” (name of my contacts doc)
<enter>
“Chrome CTRL+F” → persons name
to find their contact info

That’s assuming I didn’t have that page open already

Naturally for people I call a lot I have a speed dial built into my telephone system, so I press “2” to immediately dial them

I also have have my emails contacts sheet to my thunderbird mail client so it autocompletes if I at least remember what company person worked for or their name

I also print my contacts sheet too if I can

Haven’t really implemented an airtable contacts sheet yet, I feel like I don’t get any RoI on it since I set it all up in onenote along time ago so I just update that

P.S. → Consider using CutePDF Printer and printing out your contact sheets into a PDF and placing that on your desktop, its very easy to share contacts b/w other people at work as well. Tell them to open PDF + Ctrl+F person’s name. Because sometimes I have several manufacturers with several independent companies that rep them, and one person that reps several companies, etc.

Some companies have multiple people in that department, some people have two phone numbers / extensions, others have 2 emails, different email different things in company (ordering VS service), etc. So its just Many to Many relationships everywhere

The same is true for designers / agencies / accounting / real estate / etc

point being → things in real life are super messy so my note systems account for that :stuck_out_tongue:

2 Likes
Option to Open New Tab when using CTRL+O doc/bookmark search
#8

Mmm. A separate file for contacts. I like that idea. It would combine well with @Piotr’s PowerPack auto-sort.