Our there are many tools that let you organize stuff. Some are for example: DEVONthink, Evernote, Nifty-Box or Yojimbo. Over the past year I probably tested 10 Anything Bucked systems but fell in love with one I already owned from day one.

What is a Anything Bucked?

Anything Bucked is a tool or App which lets you organize stuff. PDF-files, web archives, serial numbers, text, bookmarks and images. Add tags or comments to the different items, filter and search that stuff. All that in one app and if you create a structure it also is fast and logical.

Why you should bucked!

Saving all that information in your head? Probably not possible. So you need a place to save all that stuff. Doing so with a Anything bucked? Probably not!

Why not to use a Anything Bucked

Four out of five of you are nerds. On your computer exists your hobbies, your current and/or future career, and the rest of your daily life. You don’t own a snowboard, but you do have a blog, a Twitter, an RSS reader, and a pirated copy of Photoshop.

You, my friend, need an Anything Bucket.

~ Shawn Blanc
Systems like Yojimbo or one of the other tools mentioned above all have one problem. They cost money (just Nifty Box does not!). But even worth, they just let you save specific files. And who has just PDF’s, text files and bookmarks? I do not. I have Numbers, Pages, Keynotes, Doc files and Excel sheets, PHP/JavaScript or other code and of course I have some zip files. All that is not organizable by that Anything Bucked systems.

Which system to Chose

If you want to store data of differing types within a lightweight organization system, I encourage you to check out the filesystem.

~ Alex Payne

There is one Anything Bucked all of you already own. It is called your OS-File System (Operating System File System). Since I am on a Mac, that is that is HFS+. A file system with everything you need. You can add tags to a file (if you want) you can save comments and you can store the files in folders, create aliases. To search the data just use SpotLight or some other tool. Maybe look at Quicksilver, AlfredAPP or the Google QSB.

That way you can save some money. Use what you already have and will never have problems with upgrading—a problem with a Anything Bucked, what are you going to do if the software firm will stop supporting the app you used?

If you don’t want to be forever accumulating applications, store stuff as plain text on the filesystem. It’s dead reliable, you can shuffle it about however you want, and you’ll be able to search through it quickly, even without an index.

~ Alex Payne

Still

Some aspects of a Anything Bucked are positive. I do not use a fully featured Anything Bucked, but I use some things that help me structure some data. One for example is Notational Velocity together with SimpleNote and SimpleNote for iPhone. Those are the tools I use to save my todo-lists and some ideas I get while on my iPhone. Since it is over the air sync and The Hit List for now lacks an iPhone app!

Conclusion

In the end everybody needs to work out a own system. Mine is the file system + a few extra tools to get some special, related things organized.

To find that system, I encourage you to read these two pots. One is pro Anything Bucked the other is con:

• The Case Against Everything Buckets ~ Alex Payne
• Yojimbo, and The Case for Anything Buckets ~ Shawn Blanc

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