I don't bother. They're like buses: if I miss one, another will be along in a few minutes.
Ask HN: How do you keep track of your ideas?
31–40 of 61 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your ideas?
#32Scattered all over the place... scraps of papers, text files, archived emails, notebooks, margins of books... Sometimes I try to go through them and pick something to work on, a few ideas which I don't want to pursue but don't see the obvious problem with them, I post at lkozma.net/ideas .
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your ideas?
#33Evernote.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your ideas?
#34Evernote.
I'm curious how you use Evernote to keep it effective. I use Evernote as well to keep track of ideas, but I find as I start to fill out the ideas with research and notes the "parent" section - the list of ideas - becomes overwhelmed.
I ended up moving to a Google Apps Spreadsheet for a list of ideas, and then fill out info on each idea in Evernote, but would love to hear about better methods...
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your ideas?
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I simply don't always have the time to jump on implementation of the ones I consider "good" when I have the idea. An idea you can't execute is worth about as much to you as no idea at all. The concept of an idea being so timeless that it will be both relevant and somehow forgotten in the future if not recorded is not one I accept. Either your idea is so great that you'll a)make time for it or b) remember it in the fu…
If that works for you, great. For me, I jot down ideas, keep them in a file, and then implement the ones I want to when I have time to do so. I forget shit all the time, and really -- I don't want to hear any philosophical fluff about how that must mean that the idea just wasn't all that good. It's an attribute of my memory, not the idea. I'm not an "idea person". I'm a "getting shit done" person, who happens to have…
I think you're taking way too much personal offence in my comment where none was intended. If you have a solution that you enjoy, then obviously you don't need the advice in my comment. The OP however is asking for a solution and I am assuming that he/she is open to options.
Look at the number of comments in this thread suggesting a personal favorite technique. My comment introduces the option of looking at the problem in a new way; one that removes the issue at its source.
I'm not assuming everyone has my lifestyle, certainly. However one thing I have learned in my 35 plus years is that most people overvalue their own ideas, and the concept of an "idea" in general and undervalue the execution. Not recording ideas promotes the things you do execute on over the actual ideas.
That doesn't mean you don't act on any idea, never write anything down or extend this basic model to ridiculous degrees.
The animosity towards this approach in your comment is curious.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your ideas?
#36I use the built-in notes feature on my iPhone. Before that it was a notepad text file on my desktop. The only reason the iPhone wins now just because I have it with me at all times.
Usually the act of typing it in is enough to get it embedded in my mind. Occasionally I go back through and read them and delete out the ones I don't care about anymore.
If I lost the whole thing, it wouldn't be a huge loss to me. I already know what's important and when you're mind is in the creative mode, inspiration is always striking. I would find a more "structured" approach to be limiting.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your ideas?
#37I keep everything in Notational Velocity stored in plain text files, which I keep in sync between multiple computers with Dropbox. It also syncs with SimpleNote so I can view/update it from my iPhone or iPad or from the web. Simple, and I can access it from anywhere.
Within the text file, I usually group ideas by type and mark it with a '*' if I implement it, and a 'X' if I decide it's not a good idea/it's already been done/I've lost interest in it. Has worked well for me.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your ideas?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that works for you, great. For me, I jot down ideas, keep them in a file, and then implement the ones I want to when I have time to do so. I forget shit all the time, and really -- I don't want to hear any philosophical fluff about how that must mean that the idea just wasn't all that good. It's an attribute of my memory, not the idea. I'm not an "idea person". I'm a "getting shit done" person, who happens to have…
I think you're taking way too much personal offence in my comment where none was intended. If you have a solution that you enjoy, then obviously you don't need the advice in my comment. The OP however is asking for a solution and I am assuming that he/she is open to options. Look at the number of comments in this thread suggesting a personal favorite technique. My comment introduces the option of looking at the probl…
I must have misread you, I'm sorry. I got the impression that you were trying to state that the way you think about ideas, and idea-tracking (or the lack thereof) was somehow "correct" in some more objective sense.
I got the impression that you felt that if someone had to write down an idea to remember it, or if someone wasn't immediately capable of implementing an idea, that the idea itself must not be worth saving or implementing. I didn't get the impression that you were saying "this works for me, this might work for you" -- rather, I heard (or saw) "the problem you're addressing is a non-problem. tracking ideas is a wasted effort. period.". If that's not what you meant to imply, apologies.
I don't think that your solution removes the issue at its source if the issue is remembering ideas that you want to examine or implement in the future, either. If the issue is only having those ideas on hand that you felt were good enough that you remember them no matter what, then your solution works fine. If that's not the issue, then your solution only works in the sense of repainting the issue as a non-issue, unless I'm missing something fundamental about what we've been talking about.
I don't disagree that most people overvalue their own ideas, that's pretty inarguable.
I probably overreacted a bit -- as an explanation, this is a bit of a personal topic for me. I struggle quite a bit with remembering to do things, or remembering things I want to do -- and I also don't have very much time to devote to pursuing what I think are good ideas.
Without a means for me to jot down stuff for me to think about or work on in the future, I wouldn't ever come back to scratch any of the things that were making me itch in the past -- and scratching those itches tends to be better for more than just me.
This is probably partially because I, like a lot of "hacker types" am ADD. I don't mention that as a crutch or anything, but it is something that went undiagnosed in myself for a long time, and that definitely contributes to the "problem". I can not rely on my memory alone.
I can't really express the difference in how I'm able to "be productive" when I'm medicated and have a system for idea tracking versus whenever either of those are not present. It's a big, tangible difference, and this is the case for a lot of developers I know even when you take medication and ADD out of the picture.
Perhaps another semantic thing that should be mentioned is that the vast majority of my ideas are "change functionality of library X to include Y", "write script to do Z", "little app that does this", "configure app FOO to work with input BAR". I'm not necessarily talking about larger ideas.
Anyhow, I hope that clears some stuff up.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your ideas?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I simply don't always have the time to jump on implementation of the ones I consider "good" when I have the idea. An idea you can't execute is worth about as much to you as no idea at all. The concept of an idea being so timeless that it will be both relevant and somehow forgotten in the future if not recorded is not one I accept. Either your idea is so great that you'll a)make time for it or b) remember it in the fu…
I'm not saying you're wrong but much of this will depend on how your life is structured. For people whose life follows broadly regular patterns this is likely to be true but for free lancers who can go from feast to famine (with their spare time going in the opposite direction) having a list of possible projects isn't a bad idea. In terms of generating more ideas - yes you'll keep generating them but surely you want…
I don't see how this is dependent on a personal lifestyle, really. Everyone values their time, and in reality it's when you have a lot of free time that you'd benefit from this more.
but surely you want to pick up on the best ones rather than just what you happen to have come up with recently
That's my point though: the best ones don't really go away; they are annoying in their persistence to be executed on. Wait long enough and the landscape that the idea lives in has changed as well; an idea from 1989 will need to be re-imagined so much that it won't even really be the same idea.
Sometimes you might be in the mood to act on something fitting a particular brief when that's not what you've come up with lately.
If you have this much of a time luxury I am truly envious, I must say. But in this case you're speaking more of hobby projects, not true business ideas. True business ideas will need to be worked on consistently regardless of your daily attitude or they will fail, unfortunately.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your ideas?
#40I keep everything in Notational Velocity stored in plain text files, which I keep in sync between multiple computers with Dropbox. It also syncs with SimpleNote so I can view/update it from my iPhone or iPad or from the web. Simple, and I can access it from anywhere. Within the text file, I usually group ideas by type and mark it with a '*' if I implement it, and a 'X' if I decide it's not a good idea/it's already be…
People who want to try this should see the FAQ about problems using note-level syncing with file-level syncing: