Ask HN: How do you keep your ideas?
I'm thinking of tackling these two problems:
(1) Ideas happen anywhere, anytime (running, in the shower, driving, etc). How to capture these ideas before they vanish?
(2) I use notebooks, but once I write down an idea chances are that I will never see it again. I have a box full of notebooks collecting dust.
I want to know how do you capture/keep your ideas (notebook, an app, eidetic memory, napkins, mails to yourself), what do you like/dislike about your current way, and what have you tried and didn't work/stick.
22 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 37.9 ms ] threadSet aside front-matter pages for indexes and update them whenever you review the contents.
Write the subject, date and page number on every page.
Throw the notebooks away when they're more than ten years old. You're a different person today and if you didn't use the idea then, that idea probably isn't going to be relevant today.
Bad ideas will decay. Good ideas will echo. The hard part of the experience is knowing that 99% of your ideas will never be done.
Every day I transcribe the notebook into the text file.
Every time I start a terminal window it gives me the top line, and rotates it to the bottom. I then review that idea and either do something about it, or just delete it from the file.
The main problem I have is the same was what the OP alludes to: I write things down, but I don't have a good system for periodically revisiting old notebooks and reviewing previously-written-down ideas.
I see the personal wiki as an evolution of the commonplace book, that was kept in the past by the likes of Darwin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book). Here are some of my notes from the book Where Good Ideas Come From
"We know much of Darwin's thinking on the development of his ideas from his extensive notebooks, which he read, and re-read and recombined. This era was the time of the 'commonplace' notebook, in which long passages of quotes from other sources and thoughts were recorded. Reading and writing were apparently quite related. These books may have struck a balance between silo'd organization, and utter chaos, allowing the development of theories beginning with hunches which could then be further developed. The key to developing a hunch into a theory appears to be writing it down "
When I'm working on a side project I tried to keep quiet about it until I get some progress going, in case the idea "exits", but maybe it's good idea to tell about it as soon as possible instead. Then if it stays it would surely be worthy.
When I'm working on a side project I tried to keep quiet about it until I get some progress going, in case the idea "exits", but maybe it's good idea to tell about it as soon as possible instead. Then if it stays it would surely be worthy.
From any app on my Mac, I can type command-space to open a spotlight search dialog, type ideas.txt and it will open the file above.
On my phone I use http://captio.co/ to send myself a quick note to my gmail account, then I copy it to ideas.txt when I'm on my laptop.
That's it.
When it is something right on the spot then I will either do a voice recording on the phone, or a quick note on scrap paper. I will get it into org-mode later.
I also have all phone recordings synced to laptop via syncthing, so even if I don't transcribe, at least it is kept somewhere safe for later.
I wrote https://mypost.io
This allows me to create single web pages in seconds complete with the ability to use HTML and CSS. Since you choose your own URL and its unique to you.. no one else can use it, so I tend not to lose those URLs. They aren't just a random jumbled bunch of letters and numbers, rather, you can either make your own, or it will grab the headline that you set.
I also implemented a feature that allows you to save all of your URLs so you can easily find them again. I've shared it with the world and many people use it. So I pretty much designed it for myself... and figured others might find a use for it too. Feel free... it's free!