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Ask HN: How do you take idea notes / voice memos / reminders to yourself?
11–20 of 78 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you take idea notes / voice memos / reminders to yourself?
#12org-mode. More concretely, using org-capture and org-protocol.
Re: Ask HN: How do you take idea notes / voice memos / reminders to yourself?
#13This is what I've been doing for a while, with good results. Step one: get it out of my head. Short reminder sentence in e-mail to myself, or google keep, napkin whatever. Step two: get it out of my head. Periodically (same day, same week) I triage these notes into a single continuously growing brain dump google doc, or a dedicated google doc per subject in a folder if its warranted.
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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you take idea notes / voice memos / reminders to yourself?
#14Trello for todo/project items, simplenote/nvalt & pinboard for other notes.
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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you take idea notes / voice memos / reminders to yourself?
#15Used to use a mix of google drive, keep and quiver notebook [1] but it was a pain to manage. Drive and Keep are slow to boot, the search sucks and there's no support for tags. Quiver was nice for programming notes and markdown editing but the mobile client doesn't support editing.
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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you take idea notes / voice memos / reminders to yourself?
#16I usually brainstorm / take notes with OneNote, which lets me type, record voice notes, attach files, and draw when I need to draw (even on my laptop thanks to touchscreens). Once finished I'll go through those notes and turn them into categorized to-dos in the Microsoft To-Do app, adding due dates, reminders and little notes where necessary.
I've been using OneNote too but its grown into a godawful mess.
I dont think I could recover from the mess now.. i just live with it :-(
Re: Ask HN: How do you take idea notes / voice memos / reminders to yourself?
#17Olympus WS-600 dictation device. It's a slim thing about the size of a cigarette lighter, but it has actual physical buttons, and a built-in USB connector to dump it to my laptop. I review it every morning, and depending on the nature of the note, it goes into (a) Google Calendar, (b) a hand-written notebook, (c) an Emacs Org Wiki which I sync between my devices with Syncthing, or (d) the Notes folder for any of my specific projects.
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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you take idea notes / voice memos / reminders to yourself?
#18I use mnemonics like memory pegs when I need reminders. I like to be freeform so I also have several small paper notebooks going at once. Daily journal entries and longer stuff goes in markdown files in folders on Dropbox. I like Regexxer or Grep or ag for searching those. Google Keep for longer notes if on my phone. Hi-Q MP3 Recorder for Android if I need to do voice recordings. I don't like transcribing those voice notes later but the recorder software is really nice.
Re: Ask HN: How do you take idea notes / voice memos / reminders to yourself?
#19Olympus WS-600 dictation device. It's a slim thing about the size of a cigarette lighter, but it has actual physical buttons, and a built-in USB connector to dump it to my laptop. I review it every morning, and depending on the nature of the note, it goes into (a) Google Calendar, (b) a hand-written notebook, (c) an Emacs Org Wiki which I sync between my devices with Syncthing, or (d) the Notes folder for any of my s…
Have you had any reliability issues? My wife does transcription work and has had multiple models of the Sony and Olympus recorders fail on her. She has her client use his laptop and Audacity right now because of the persistent threat of data loss.
Re: Ask HN: How do you take idea notes / voice memos / reminders to yourself?
#20Reminders are a combination of calendar, alarm clock, or task items in my mobile and tasks in either Thunderbird for my private life or Outlook at work.