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

I write them down.

Now for the bit nobody will care about:

If the thought’s really worth it, I will get up, find a notebook, and spend quite a lot of time transcribing it. I’ve actually gotten pretty good at writing blind because a particularly pernicious thought keeps sleep from me at least once a month.

Every so often, I’ll read through my notebooks and try to synthesize these notes into something better. Often, the really good nuggets are lodged so deeply that I wind up remixing them durably within a few days anyway.

If I don’t record it, I’ll probably forget that I thought it soon enough, so I can only ever feel a few days’ worth of regret at any one time. And there’s still too much material to work on anyway.

Same. When at a computer, I keep it all in a single markdown file. Easy to find, edit, search, etc.

Pen/Paper as default. When on a computer, an outliner/mind-mapper. Of late, getting back to Scapple[1]. You guys should try it.

1. https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scapple/overview

I (and am sure many here) have been in the same situation. I have tried physical books (which I'm still biased towards), OneNote (my next favourite, especially on tablets with stylus), txt files, wiki etc.

Ultimately what I realised is that it is all useless if I don't have a periodic review session for these ideas.

So, what I am doing these days (not with much success due to lack of discipline) is to have 2 or 3 different sources for such ideas - notebook, onenote, email, bookmarks, Google Keep etc. But spend sometime during the weekend to organise these week's ideas into the correct container. In my case the 'source of truth' is OneNote, so I have several notebooks and sections within each notebook and I file things there.

Even though this is tedious and repetitive I find it to be absolutely necessary if anything good has to come out of those ideas. It also gives me a chance to revisit old ideas and file my new half-baked ideas into a section where it fits in with some other idea.

The other important task is that I need to plan some small action items with these ideas or else it will just accumulate there and cause lot of stress eventually.

P.S. It will be great to hear your thoughts on the tool you plan to create. Like what features you find missing and how you plan to accommodate the user's laziness in your UX

Switching to Notion from Evernote has pretty much changed my life. I tried mind maps before but the scattered nature of how I dump ideas I think requires a little more of a structured framework for me to play in. With notion the key features that really help me is having nested pages, and being able to group select things and drag them into a nested page. From there I can keep nesting if I want. The general ease of being able to organize and group things, and also create overview pages that link to several other deep dive pages, allows me to move further with ideas than I ever did with evernote. With evernote, it felt more like a scattered dump, even if I grouped things into notebooks. There was no spacial distinction or grouping of concepts, just a bunch of small random thoughts thrown together in a loosely defined notebook. And once things got out of hand it felt pretty much impossible to wrangle it back together. Evernote for me was great if I knew there was a specific piece of information I had saved, that I needed to look up through search. But it never felt like I could map out and grow and abstract idea as I slowly created it overtime. It's hard to really explain over text the workflows I can create with notion to organize my thoughts, I'd definitely recommend watching youtube videos of different workspace layouts ppl have come up with like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_mh91IRLL8

The general point being that this tool has helped me in my goal of shifting from simply aggregating lots of thoughts and ideas, towards having the structure to make that next step and actually do something with them.