I've created https://mediatag.io just for this goal. It makes it easy to add a page, a note, an image. Just with a single click if you're in a rush. Or if you have a tiny bit more time, you can add tags to organise what you've just saved.
Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
51–60 of 285 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#52Since I use Things for todo management anyway, I tend to write down creative thoughts there as task items under a "miscellaneous" project. Bigger ideas sometimes get promoted into their own projects with several tasks.
Things synchronizes between iPhone and macOS so it's pretty convenient for short textual notes. More complicated drawings and plans I put in Google G Suite.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#53Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#54Physical 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.
Yes, for me physical notebooks are the best solution as well. A notebook and a pen goes everywhere with me (e.g. I don't leave it in the office). It's not that inconvenient. No battery to keep charged, worrying about breaking the screen, etc.
For the rare occasions I don't happen to have it at hand, it's easy to scavenge a scrap of paper to scribble things down and then later glue into the notebook.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#55OneNote, am I the only one?
No, surprised not to see it higher on this list honestly!
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#56Mindmap works great for me especially for creative process. My personal choice is Freemind. It's easy to automate anything with freemind files because it's simple XML. I have a few scripts that allow me extract necessary information from big mindmaps: https://github.com/mrjazz/freemind-tools-python
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#57Sounds 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.
Thanks for your advice! I agree with you that reviewing is important. I do iterate over a few alternatives before I begin using a private Github repo to organize my ideas that worth picking up. Github wiki/issues/milestones/projects work amazingly good.
On the other hand, I am not very happy with my current random ideas picking strategy. It is really nice to see there are many alternatives in this thread.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#58When I was using an iPhone & mac as my primary tools I had siri create reminders "write a tool which does.." which were synced to caldav & regulary auto-imported into my GTD inbox (omnifocus). I really liked this solution since it was reliable. The synced entries were deleted from my phone automatically so I did not have to worry about an endless list of tasks on my phone.
Using Siri is really neat, you don't even have to unlock your phone I assume. :)
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#59I use a combination of a physical notebook for graphical stuff and elaborating things, Google Keep for any kind of random thoughts and ideas, and actually use the dm-yourself thing for collecting/bookmarking links I wanna revisit.
I tried Google keep for a while (a few months I think). But later I find dm-yourself is faster than Google keep so I abandon using.
I think the law of least effort applied to me.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#60I use vimwiki to keep notes. It's not synced out of the box, but as it's just a directory with text files, you could make it so. If I'm not with my laptop, I just make a note in Google Keep.
Thanks, I use vimwiki for a while a year ago as well. I think it is more suitable for idea organizing. Later I replaced it with a private github repo using issues/wiki/projects.