Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog, Organizing Data: Notetaker:

When I create an appointment, I want to have it in my calendar and be able to associate it with another store of information. Change it either place, its changed in both places. Same with email. I don’t think the problem is with Notetaker, so much as the fact that appointments and email messages don’t have URLs. Until those things are addressable in a common namespace, you can’t gather easily accomplish what I want.

He hits it on the head here. Another great observation:

I have one reservation: yet another proprietary file format that I’m giving a part of my life over to. I’ve resigned myself to having things in Word, but I’m not sure I want another.

A corollary to “adapt to me” is: work with the technologies I already have. Sure, I want to find stuff in my email and link it in with all of my other stuff (documents, contacts, calendar, etc.), but I also want to keep my email, documents, contacts, calendar, etc. accessible via IMAP, Exchange, the file system, the web, and so on so I can continue to use the tools I’m already using. I want to augment the tools and techniques I’ve already found work for me, not replace them wholesale.

See also: Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog, Organizing Data: Whence Real Integration?