Right, and I couldn’t agree more. In a lot of the discussion I see a lot of focus on the tool, what A can do and B cannot, but B can and A cannot etc etc. I personally think we should focus much more on the process, which often can be done in any app. I wrote about it in my “Next Box” post; while I “live” in Agenda and love it as my tool of choice (duh!), the workflow I have today isn’t much different from the one I originally set up in TextEdit and Simplenote. Agenda makes it (much) nicer and adds a lot of power, but the basics are the same.
My point is that I notice a lot of focus on tools while I think we can help many people much more by helping them finding ways to structure and support their thinking process. So yes, “Writing is not the outcome of thinking; Notetaking is the process when thinking takes place”. But I’d even go one step further and say this phrasing still puts too much emphasis on note taking being the end product we’re supposedly striving towards, while I’d say that it instead is the structuring of our thoughts and the empowering feeling that an organised mind gives. Helping people to find ways to do so and reach such state is much more about workflows and approaches than tools and apps.