Emacs org mode
Love org-mode once I finally had the courage to give it a look and a week facetime/learning. my org-mode file has everything from general knowledge to ideas to everything that can be written in text in between.
Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
231–240 of 285 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#232I use Trello and have a specific list for ideas. It works for me because Trello is always “with me” as an app on my phone, on my desktop, or via a browser. I tend to have creative thoughts while out running and use speech to text to add a new card through the iPhone app without stopping.
I use speech-to-text on my iPhone inside a gmail draft notes on the go as well. I'll keep adding to the draft then email it to myself. I'll also use VoiceRecorder app that can do speech-to-text after the fact.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#233I swear by Workflowy.
I am not an artist; if you need to be sketching things, you will have to keep looking.
Workflowy is a near-perfect outliner aka list of lists that consciously avoids adding features that aren't absolutely necessary. Complaints people have are always things like "but I can't assign dates" or "but I can't assign a task to someone on my team". The correct answer is, "exactly".
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#234I use Trello. I have a board called Ideas for collecting. Usually I just put the thought in the card title. From there more details can be added in the description, and eventually the card can be moved into its own list or board for further expansion. Since I'm on Android, I have the Add Card shortcut on my home screen, which means there's very little friction to adding new ideas.
I use Google Keep, Google Docs and Trello.
- Google Keep for quickly jotting down new ideas on the go (usually just a line or two so I can remember). This is my temporary record.
- Then, when I have time at the end of day, I add to to my document in Google Drive with more details, description, etc. This is my permanent record.
- When I'm ready to work on something, I add it to Trello with specific tasks, deadlines and reminders. This is my task manager.
One thing I'm failing to consistently do is to revisit old ideas periodically and remove the old ones I no longer deem worthy exploring.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#235We've created a dedicated app for this purpose - to keep track of our ideas. Maybe you'll find it helpful for you too :) You can check it at https://idee.mindhouse.io
It's basically a note app dedicated for ideas so you can get back to them in the future.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#236I use Simplenote[0] for this since I always get random creative ideas and thoughts throughout the day; SN being cross-platform allows me to jot them down mostly on my phone and then reorganize/expand later on the desktop client.
It's also open source, and from a company that won't go bankrupt anytime soon.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#237It's apple notes for me.
1. Syncs with my Mac
2. Will be probably be around for a while.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#238Use a spaced memory repetition app, like Anki https://apps.ankiweb.net/ or SuperMemo. (I am most familiar with Anki, which is free and easily syncs across phone and PC and web). You can easily take notes and then there's a built in reminder system which is most efficient for keeping things in your brain's long-term memory. I notice the reminder system also ends up making me much more creative, since I can more easily…
Do you have some examples of how you store these creative ideas in Anki? I have used Anki in the past for memorizing things but not as a note taking memorization system.
Part of the value is just to be reminded of ideas I've had. But Anki can be used to support creativity in other ways as well:
- "Card browser" lets you view the cards in various sorting orders. Alphabetical, time of creation, last reviewed, next reviewed, etc. This is already better for going through cards than the Memo app on my phone.
- You can tag cards and sort by tags. (I think doing this also creates a memorization deck for each tag, too. I just don't use this feature...)
- I like to put "elements" into Anki which I think could potentially become a part of a creative idea. Being reminded of those things makes it easier to think up new ways to combine things, different ways to do things, etc.
- Like Michael Nielsen (who works for Y Combinator), I believe in putting everything into just a single deck. So I see a lot of random seemingly unrelated cards one after the other. I feel like this helps my brain to make unusual connections and relationships. (Nielsen's writings about Anki and spaced memory repetition- https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/8xi9r4/augmenting_lon... https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/95776322945477427... )
- Cards can be starred or suspended.
- Visually, the design and flow of the Anki app is fantastic, in my opinion. I genuinely enjoy using it. Tons of user controlled settings, and nice Anki forums.
- Use of shared decks can be fun (publicly available decks).
Really though, the most important thing is getting the reminders, and having control over when I see Anki cards next. By keeping everything "alive" and stronger in my brain, it just makes it easier to remember things, think of things, see different possibilities, etc.
And you can put literally anything in there. I put in literally everything I think is worth reminding myself about. Attitudes, knowledge, quotes, tasks, task elements, ideas, notes about the people in my life, things that are fun, memories from my life, exercise ideas, foods, supplements, etc. etc.etc.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#239I email myself and capture in emacs org-mode. I have an email address that is bound to AWS SES. SES listens for incoming emails and writes them to an S3 bucket. I then have a lambda hook which listens for writes to this bucket and processes the email content. This usually means writing an emacs org-mode record on dropbox. Which is then added to my emacs agenda.
That is a pretty good idea. Couldn’t you bypass S3, though? SES can trigger lambdas: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/receiv...
At the time I wrote it, The SES -> lambda hooks did not give you the body content of the email and required a write to S3 first. This might still be the case.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
#240I email myself and capture in emacs org-mode. I have an email address that is bound to AWS SES. SES listens for incoming emails and writes them to an S3 bucket. I then have a lambda hook which listens for writes to this bucket and processes the email content. This usually means writing an emacs org-mode record on dropbox. Which is then added to my emacs agenda.
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 y…
I definitely used it as an exercise to learn lambda. I don't have an android phone for orgzly and at the time of creation, there weren't any solid iPhone org-mode apps.
I use org-brain on the backend and the lambda function does some processing to automatically categorize and such.