Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?

#41

Post by timrichard » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 10:32 AM UTC

I was using Evernote heavily. Probably too heavily, as it’s frustratingly slow now on my iPad and Mac. In the last six months I’ve switched to Trello. Great to use it Kanban style, but it’s also a great pasteboard for image snippings from the web onto your cards. The checklists and due dates within cards is useful, but also dragging to reorder so you can rank things by importance.

For a working notebook when developing, I’ve switched to using Markdown inside Atom with a number of plugins. I used to really like mindmaps, but I find that nested bullet structures can do the same job but be captured much quicker. The plugins do nice things like partial bullet tree collapsing, instant Markdown previewing, and Vim keys which are great for me.

Might well move towards Notable backed by Google Drive, as mentioned on a thread here a few months back. Also a utility to extract my Evernote data to be included too.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?

#42

Post by pacifika » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 10:35 AM UTC

I’m using notes / Trello. but you might prefer to use imap drafts as a lower overhead solution

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?

#43

Post by drieddust » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 10:35 AM UTC

reves wrote: post #5

Commonplace notebook in emacs, several moleskine notebooks and a digital voice recorder.

Which voice recorder do you use if you don't mind sharing?

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?

#44

Post by huangc10 » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 10:36 AM UTC

If I'm working on my computer, I write use an app called Quiver. If I'm feeling more like brainstorming and just wanting to be creative, I write my thoughts in my Moleskine.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?

#45

Post by jason_slack » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 10:39 AM UTC

kristiandupont wrote: post #12

Physical notebooks started working for me when I started using them for daily planning, which I did by buying a silly $5 stamp of off AliExpress: [link redacted] On NYE I went through my books of 2018 and it was a great experience -- both reiterating all the things I've actually accomplished and refreshing various thoughts and ideas that I had stored and sort of let go. https://www.instagram.com/p/BsDWesbnkDI/

+1 for physical notebooks. I still do this. I still make notes on my laptop but most everything is still on paper!

It gives me something to show my kids someday.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?

#46

Post by 0db532a0 » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 10:40 AM UTC

Vekz wrote: post #14

I email myself and capture in emacs org-mode. I have an email address that is bound to AWS SES. SES listens for incoming emails and writes them to an S3 bucket. I then have a lambda hook which listens for writes to this bucket and processes the email content. This usually means writing an emacs org-mode record on dropbox. Which is then added to my emacs agenda.

That is a pretty good idea. Couldn’t you bypass S3, though? SES can trigger lambdas: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/receiv...

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?

#47

Post by parfamz » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 10:44 AM UTC

OneNote, am I the only one?

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?

#48

Post by demircancelebi » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 10:45 AM UTC

I am using a mix of Airtable, Notes app and Markdown files. I like organizing my thoughts in a tabular fashion, and Airtable comes very handy, since I can see different thoughts at once and compare them. If some thought needs a long text to describe, these generally go to either Notes app or Markdown files.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?

#49

Post by throw19287 » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 10:52 AM UTC

Sounds to me you've got down the routine of capture. That's pretty awesome and you're ahead of the curve.

What you haven't talked about is the routine of review. Sounds to me that's really where you want to spend your efforts.

If capture is picking fruit, review is squeezing juice out of the fruit you picked.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?

#50

Post by TeMPOraL » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 11:02 AM UTC

baruchthescribe wrote: post #32

julienreszka wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell whether this is serious or you are joking. Either way that's unusual...

Fairly normal setup. I have something similar on my own server i.e. not AWS.

I used IFTTT for email->Dropbox for some time. Ultimately, I didn't leave much notes for myself this way, as I'm almost always close to a computer with Emacs accessible locally or remotely. For the rare case I use Orgzly on my phone, or Google Keep in a pinch.