Ask HN: How do you take idea notes / voice memos / reminders to yourself?
Do you use just paper, Email drafts or any special apps? And how do you remember where you have noted down some specific thought or idea?
I've tried several apps like Evernote, Trello, Asana or voice Memo apps ... Also I am maintaining like 2-3 ToDo lists on paper troughout my home. But in the end I often loose tasks, or interesting ideas come up again like 2 months later and I cant remember where I already wrote about it.
What Tools do you use?
77 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 74.3 ms ] threadI use GTD to keep on top of stuff. Once a day I go through everything that's been added to the system but not yet categorized. I move it to the appropriate to-do list or reference document where I'll know to find it later.
I have lists for things like "gift ideas for family", "potential software experiments", "active work projects", "books to read", or "to consider next year". I also have a primary list for things that actively need doing.
Remember, it's not the tool that matters. It's the process and the system.
It's just quick and easy note app and syncs with cloud with no fuss.
I dont think I could recover from the mess now.. i just live with it :-(
And depending on the note type go through them every day/week/month to see if they are still relevant. Some people like to go the whole GTD way but I like to pick just the parts that work for me.
I tried a lot of TODO and note taking apps and none of it worked for me. Once written down, I remember most of it without looking at my journal.
This makes it very clear what is and what is not a priority. If I rewrite the same thing for tenth time, maybe it's not important after all.
Before I often stressed when I couldn't recall something I knew was important or had been a cool idea. Now I still don't have time to explore 90% of the things I think about, but I don't stress about it.
Part of the trick is reviewing & refactoring the trello lists on occasion to make sure the 1-3 boards you look at the most don’t feel unwieldy. Example: I recently threw several lists of wacky ideas and things into an unsorted “someday hell” board.
I recently switched to Bear [2] and ditched all of the other apps.
If I have some important tasks and TODOs I try to put them in my google calendar with a specific date and an allotted time. That way I know when it will get done and can make sure that I don't waste too much time on it.
[1] http://happenapps.com/ [2] http://www.bear-writer.com/
It's the same thing Newt is speaking into in the movie Pacific Rim. I was tickled when I saw that. They're hard to get nowadays; the later 700 and 800 models are bigger, clunkier, and cheaper-feeling.
Tiddlywiki, because it lives locally, is insanely fast and there's nothing I think easier/faster than it for making notes and todo's are more or less just notes.
I either use an "ideas" tag in Standard Notes, or have 1 pinned note called "Ideas" or "Journal" that I constantly make updates to.
This is an app I've been building for over a year now. Benefits are encryption + cross-platform sync.
Great features but I find the pricing a bit too high (for a consumer product).
Does it have vim bindings?
It wasn't initially apparent that there seems to be both a free and (subscription?) paid version, which had me very confused while reading the 'longevity' page as to how a SaaS is going to last forever. The 'Always Free' box isn't very clear that it describes a different product version (no download button, not clearly a standalone feature list) and the text on the far left is basically background noise.
The download buttons somewhat imply it being free, but it's relatively common for crippled/time-limited versions to be offered like that.
Basically - I think you could benefit from making it more obvious that it's free (and open source), with optional extra paid stuff. Probably a clearer link to the online version as well.
Maybe I'm completely off-base, but while SN only ever see the encrypted blobs, editors often (almost always) require me to send over my plain-text to a server which then sends it back to me. That's not really end-to-end... what's the motivation behind the hosted plugins, and not downloading signed binaries/code that operate through a permissions-based API?
In the future, I could imagine for example a desktop app that runs all of the extensions locally (but would mean no web access). But the hosted architecture is not bad. The only remote connection made is when the script is first downloaded. After that, the note editing all happens locally in-frame, and the end-to-end architecture remains intact. The question really becomes, can you trust the script that's initially loaded? This will be up to the user. The editor feature is a layer of convenience that comes at a minor cost of potential privacy, but is no more untrustworthy than the SN web app you load in your browser (assuming the editor is coming from our servers and not some random link).
If I need to voice memo, then I just use the stock voice memos app.