Ask HN: How do you record your thoughts?

I use my iPod Touch's Notes app to jot down things I need to do, buy or remember. It's cumbersome, but since it's the device I carry around, it's the obvious choice.

The best way to record your thoughts and ideas and commit them to memory is to explain them to another person. Try it as often as the nature of your thoughts permits; it's really effective.

Depends on the season. When it's time for loose jeans, I carry around a Moleskine. I only ever write, not draw/doodle, but actually putting pen[cil] to paper makes me more likely to sit down and brainstorm out a few other ideas while I've got it out. It's also helpful in that, when you later store the thought somewhere more permanent, you have the opportunity to reinterpret and rephrase it to fit with any additions or updates you pondered to it since.

When I have fewer pockets, I make do with my iPhone. Though most of my thoughts are ideas, not plans, I find [the iPhone app] Things to be quite helpful in getting them down and sorted away, even without a correspondent Mac.

I use Quotepad on my PC

http://quotepad.info/

It's a rebranding of Notesholder Lite

screenshot:

http://notes.aklabs.com/images/notesholder-desktop-sticky-no...

When I'm within reach of my Emacs, I use org-remember to create an idea entry. Otherwise, I usually carry enough calendar sheets on whose backsides I can keep ideas fresh until I can enter them into a computer.

I use Evernote. It OCRs text out of photos I take on my iPhone. I try to take a photo of anything which gave me an idea, and usually looking at the note is enough to trigger the idea again. That text is searchable.

I take pictures of whiteboards whenever I've been doing design. It can't OCR my handwriting well, so I usually use the iPhone's text entry to tag it with a few words before I save the note.

I find myself needing short term storage for ideas ("What should I try to do today?" "What needs to go in this class?") and long term storage for ideas ("Why does the screenshot on the home page link to an image which you have to close to continue interacting with the site instead of linking into to a conversion funnel?").

Short term ideas go in cheap little $1.50 notebooks. I hang on to them because I'm a packrat but I don't ever actively search in them. (I actually tried to prevent a coffee ring on my table the other day with a notebook, and realized that it had the feature list for BCC 1.0 in it.)

Long term ideas go into searchable storage because if you can't find them you might as well not have had them. My blog works fine for my business, since I don't believe in competitively sensitive information and because explaining to 3rd parties sharpens my thinking frequently. At my day job, where they will not let me just stuff my work product on the public Internet, we use wikis. If you haven't done this before, try it for a few weeks, it will revolutionize the way you work. ("How do we set up the test server environment?" "Ask Bob." "Bob quit last year." "Awww shucks." -> "How do we set up the test server environment?" "Did you search the Wiki?" "Oh yeah. But it doesn't mention what version of the DB to use." "Well, when you find it out, Wiki it.")

I tried lots of things and nothing beats the pencil and paper method. Notes on the concepts or high-level ideas go into a notebook, notes and sketches for an ongoing stuff such as UI designs, ToDo lists, random thoughts on current project - on separate sheets of paper. Latter are not meant for keeping beyond several weeks, and so they are shredded periodically.

(edit) Vectorized UI sketches are kept of course in the graphics editor files, backed up, replicated and what not.

I've found that it's really useful for me to write down my thoughts. In the past I assumed that I would remember any worthwhile ideas, but I've found that's not the case at all.

When I'm not at my computer, I use iPhone Notes (about to switch to Simplenote) for short notes and a small notebook if possible when I want to do serious brainstorming. When I'm at my computer I usually use a personal MoinMoin wiki (MoinX). For todo lists I use Things on my iPhone and laptop.

I blog them. Seriously. Blogging is about explaining my ideas to whoever wants to read them, and thus it forces me to be clear and precise. It allows me to find flaws in my own reasoning.

I blog for myself: when I re-read my old posts, I feel like a stranger to them. It's hard to load the old ideas to my brain, so to say, but the fact that I wrote them in a way that would be clear to someone else allows me to understand them. If I didn't blog my thoughts, I would instead write a quick and dirty note on paper, and 2 years later when I found it again, I would have no clue what my original thoughts were...

Drawing. I draw them and try to make them beautiful, not just throwaway squiggles. My thoughts come fast and translating them into words is like having to edit a paper at the same time as the idea is taking influence over my mind.

One day, a ladybug went to a caterpillar and said to him, "You have so many legs! How do you decide which leg goes in front of the other when you walk?"

He thought about it for a moment and told her, "Well it's easy, you just put this one in front of this one in front of this one in front of this one......." and while proudly demonstrating his abilities to her, he toppled over like a dumb ass!

Another alternative is I'll use my BlackBerry's voice notes to rattle something off and save it to make sense of later. :)

I have a text file on my desktop where I keep ideas.

When I come up with some off-the-wall idea, usually x264-development-related, I throw it into the text file; it rarely takes more than a dozen words. I'm not writing it for someone else, I'm writing it for myself--all I need is enough so that I remember what I was thinking when I have time to try the idea later.

I'll often do this when developing normally as well; I'm working on X, and my thought process with X produces some idea that applies to Y, so I throw it into the list and try it later rather than breaking my concentration on X.

I record quick thoughts with pen and paper on a small pad I carry with me everywhere.

For more intensive work I use mindmapping. Either on whiteboard, or using http://thoughtmuse.com (disclaimer: I'm the founder of ThoughtMuse)

I draw a "mindmap". It's a simple, star-like diagram, with lots of drawings. Try it out, it's worth it.

Most of the times, I use the voice recorder on my mobile phone. Vocally expressing a thought is much easier and unconfined. Writing stuff down often results in me forgetting things in between.

I usually email myself notes with some keywords attached. Since I use gmail, it's easy to search for them later.

I use jdarkroom on ubuntu/writeroom on mac.

Protip: the less you think about this the better. Bics and napkins, your editor, whatever.

I have a 1 inch binder with three dividers. There is plain paper, lined paper and graph paper with a final section with spare paper for each sections. I have 3 regular folders in there and a pouch containing a 6 inch triangle and typically a 0.5 mm mechanical pencil, occasionally 0.7mm but almost always one of these http://www.amazon.com/Pentel-P1035C-Mechanical-Pencil-Metall... . That takes care of most general ideas and architecture diagrams and mockups and such. Tasks go into bugzilla and text/source goes into files in git. I don't find anything but pencil and paper fast enough for certain things, including tablets.

If I'm in front of a computer I dump everything into OmniFocus http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnifocus/. It will sync across multiple machines so my notes are always up to date on all the different machines.

Voodoo Pad http://www.flyingmeat.com/voodoopad/ is also good for longer writing pieces - it's like a personal wiki system. It also syncs across machine.

Oh, and I always carry a little Moleskine http://www.moleskine.com/

Still forget some things though :-)

I prefer the pencil and paper route. I have a notebook in which I scribble my thoughts. It's a pain to search for something, but then there's the added advantage of finding something totally unexpected scribbled in there when you're searching for something else.

I have a personal stenographer.

Great question, thanks for asking. Once can differentiate between having sparks, thoughts, ideas and completed works.

When I was writing a blog, I built up insights and mental pictures in my mind until they became too intense to hold with integrity without written expression and publication (in the lead up, little notes may be jotted down in a text file). After publication the intelligence could integrated from the sub-conscious but without the emotion and I'd then delete the text file: from informal to formal. If one looks at ideas and thoughts as transformative, then recording and developing takes an enhanced meaning as such. Of course recording something may be as simple as some arbitrary account information without any of this framework.

The issue I was thinking was: How do you think your thoughts? If you lie in bed awake at night, are you thinking a stream of words? I used to think in words, but find my mind has changed.

I create text files and use EditPlus for writing. I then place the text files in a folder and name each file appropriately.