Evernote - I haven't found any other program with such a good capture tool. I also regularly use Google Keep to capture small notes. But all these plaintexts ultimately go to an Emacs org file.
Ask HN: How do you take idea notes / voice memos / reminders to yourself?
61–70 of 78 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you take idea notes / voice memos / reminders to yourself?
#62I use google Keep to log new notes. Then every morning I move all new notes to a google spreadsheet. The key to a well organized spreadsheet is at least 3 columns. 1 with the date, a second with any meta, and the third with the actual note.
I may have to look into emacs org mode but the above system scales well to potentially hundreds of notes. And if somehow it didn't, I would just add another column.
Re: Ask HN: How do you take idea notes / voice memos / reminders to yourself?
#63I use pen-and-paper for my normal notes about things I want to do.
Until recently I had a section in my notebook devoted to project ideas, but it got a bit unwieldy, and I've switched to keeping those in Markdown: https://gitlab.com/lyndsysimon/ideas
Re: Ask HN: How do you take idea notes / voice memos / reminders to yourself?
#64* Ad-hoc tasks likely without immediate dates: Any.do
* Long term notes without tasks or deliverable dates: OneNote
* Short term notes pending a permanent home: Apple's IOS Notes
* Dated tasks: Google Calendar
Re: Ask HN: How do you take idea notes / voice memos / reminders to yourself?
#65I use Omnifocus because it's very customizable to whatever workflow I want. But I think the tool is basically unimportant, compared to actually in practice using it daily. Pen/paper, huge file, Evernote, they're all useless if you're not actually doing the work or actually consulting them regularly.
Yep, good point with the regularity! Still, depending on how the tool is able to match my workflow is quite critical I think. And lots of tools trying to enforce their workflow on me ;-)
Going to check out Omnifocus btw..
Re: Ask HN: How do you take idea notes / voice memos / reminders to yourself?
#66I use google Keep to log new notes. Then every morning I move all new notes to a google spreadsheet. The key to a well organized spreadsheet is at least 3 columns. 1 with the date, a second with any meta, and the third with the actual note. I may have to look into emacs org mode but the above system scales well to potentially hundreds of notes. And if somehow it didn't, I would just add another column.
Ok thanks! So if I understand it right you have a daily routine to "sort-and-review" any recent notes and all of them live in a single spreadsheet to be searchable, etc. I like the simplicity!
Re: Ask HN: How do you take idea notes / voice memos / reminders to yourself?
#67* Ad-hoc tasks likely without immediate dates: Any.do * Long term notes without tasks or deliverable dates: OneNote * Short term notes pending a permanent home: Apple's IOS Notes * Dated tasks: Google Calendar
Nice, did you have a chance to try the "assistant" mode of Any.do?
Re: Ask HN: How do you take idea notes / voice memos / reminders to yourself?
#68Trello 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.
Ha! I might need to introduce the "someday hell" board... ;-)
Re: Ask HN: How do you take idea notes / voice memos / reminders to yourself?
#69Used 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…
How do you like the tagging system of Bear?
Re: Ask HN: How do you take idea notes / voice memos / reminders to yourself?
#70This 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 co…
Great advice! I think thats the main reason I want to use a reliable tool in my process: to be able to get it out of my head without thinking: this is going to be lost ;)