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

I use Dynalist as well and I really enjoy it. I've been using it for about 2 years now.

I use Notion.so. I have a page where I put all my thoughts no matter what they may be. Then I review it weekly to see what can be tackled next.

Unfortunately, Notion does not have a browser extension yet so you always have to open the website or app to jot down something, but I hope this will come soon.

If you want to add notes without opening an app, you can try Google Keep. It has a Chrome extension that works really well.

That sounds really complicated. Wouldn't you just use something like Syncthing to synchronize your org mode files across devices? I use Orgzly and Syncthing in my phone and it's good enough.

If you use it for general email stuff, just have a Cron job pulling your email down and append new stuff to a file that gets synchronized.

I don't really get why AWS, S3, or lambda are involved, unless you just wanted to see if you could do it.

I have been unhappily using evernote. It's not terrible but there's small things that add friction to notes that I just want to get out of my head. I used to have a quick launch shortcut on my phone that opens a new note but it took longer than I would like to load and requires more input than I think is necessary. You have to enter a title, description then hit save. What I would really like is something like a todist interface to evernote where you can do something like: "This is a creative idea #ideas" and then it would tag the note and send it to evernote with hopefully very little lag. Or even better: "Note title" "Description #tags" And it automatically saves.

What I have started using which is better than the default evernote quick note interface is the IFTTT note to evernote shortcut. Its way faster than evernote but it doesn't support tagging so if it could do that it would be pretty much perfect for me, I think.

I don't really have a cohesive overarching system, but I probably should. Quite often, if I have a paper notebook nearby, I write ideas in one of those. Unfortunately I have several such notebooks and stuff gets spread around, and there's obviously no indexing / search capability except manually scanning through all that stuff, which limits its utility for finding stuff later. Truthfully, it's close to being "Write Only Memory" at this point.

If I'm not writing in a paper notebook, I often just email stuff to myself. In theory I could put some kind of special tag or annotation in these emails and then set up some kind of system to programmatically process them and build an index or promote them to a wiki or something, but I have yet to get around to doing that. I can at least search my email for messages from myself though, and quickly find them.