Writer+ on android
For software related ideas on a project, a notes file in the project folder
For ideas I don't really intend to revisit, I write them in any piece of paper I can find and leave it around
Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
121–130 of 285 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#122I always keep a stack of index cards with me, bound with a large clip. Every idea gets a blank card, and I don’t feel bad ripping them up. I store them in a box I made, and they’re easy to flip through and sort. I also have a nice notebook with dotted grid paper that I use when I’m feeling more precise with my thoughts and want to capture them more permanently, or just more elegantly. Other than that I’ll use TextEdi…
I have the notebook layer and the App layer. A box of Index cards sounds to be a solid staging layer to add to my system. Thank you.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#123I (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 dif…
The problem with OneNote is that its file format is proprietary (though documented). I have random notes that are 20 years old. Notes I take today need to be readable 20 years from now. Will OneNote be around 20 years from now? I prefer to store my notes in plain text because it is guaranteed to be readable decades from now.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#124You can start a chat with yourself in WhatsApp: https://messageyourself.com
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#125I wrote custom software for this. It changed my life. Give me an email address if you want to try it.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#126I bought a Surface Go with the pen for that exact purpose and use OneNote to take my notes and keep everything in sync between the tablet, my PCs and my Android phone.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#127How about using plain files?
With files, you have the entire operating system at your disposal to manage them.
You can organize them however you see fit with folders. If you are using links, you can also create additional hierarchies.
If you are looking for old ideas, you can use grep or ag (silversurfer) to look for keywords.
The operating system keeps track of access times so you can restrict your search to a time frame.
If you use git, you have a full history of your versions.
With some discipline, e.g. you can use the first paragraph for a summary, you can easily extract content for meta documents like todo or priority lists.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#128Same as my shopping list, use IFTTT to add a Trello card using Google Assistant or similar. It's the fastest way to get those thoughts stored, and I always have my phone on me these days.
hey lordnacho, how to contact you directly?
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#129Physical notebooks started working for me when I started using them for daily planning, which I did by buying a silly $5 stamp of off AliExpress: [link redacted] On NYE I went through my books of 2018 and it was a great experience -- both reiterating all the things I've actually accomplished and refreshing various thoughts and ideas that I had stored and sort of let go. https://www.instagram.com/p/BsDWesbnkDI/
Just dropped everything and bought that stamp! I'm an artist so a sketchbook is just part of the job, but I have tried and failed for years to keep a proper planner. I like this, though, it's so easy and less overwhelming.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#130I (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 dif…
The problem with OneNote is that its file format is proprietary (though documented). I have random notes that are 20 years old. Notes I take today need to be readable 20 years from now. Will OneNote be around 20 years from now? I prefer to store my notes in plain text because it is guaranteed to be readable decades from now.
Do you intend to restore today's backup of your OneNote files with a copy of OneNote 2039? It might work or might not.
But if you keep using OneNote for the next 20 years, I can guarantee that it won't suddenly implode and suddently make all your notes unreadable by anything else.
Also the format is open and documented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_OneNote#File_format