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Ask HN: Where do you keep your ideas?

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Re: Ask HN: Where do you keep your ideas?

#31

Post by andersnolsen »

anigbrowl wrote: post #7

All my best ideas are on paper. I find a pencils far more effective than any digital tools for sketching out ideas.

I carry a contractors cliboard in my bag with a stash of regular- and graph-paper (I print them - http://konigi.com/tools/graph-paper), especially like the dotted versions. I shuffle the new sketches and ideas to the back and clean them out once in a while. I do a lot of sketching as well so it's easy to add a clean sheet on top of my latest sketch and re-draw, test various poses and expressions. I've earlier used regular sketchbooks, but I find the contractors cliboard better. Gives you a solid board to put on your lap while commuting, you can easily discard a paper and start fresh, and it let's you store. Also - single sheets of paper is always avaiable.

A great point with using paper is that anyone can draw on paper. Just take out the contractors board, give your co-worker a pen and you're creating something together.

When I'm on the go and have some good ideas lying around I might shuffle them in with the other paper just to develope them further when I get a slot. The good ones get photographed and stored, the not so good I try to give a second round of thought and fresh sketches. If that fails it's straight to the bin.

I also keep a simple notebook app in my mobile which I use just for ideas. Lately I've been testing Trello and also Hollyapp.com, task tracking for nerds. I like the markup syntax of Hollyapp. Very fast to write. I like splitting my ideas to managable chunks and todos since I in the moment of the idea often have a picture on how to accomplish it. I'm writing more and more Markdown for this

A lot of credit to Mårten Agner http://angner.se/ for the sketching techniques I use daily.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you keep your ideas?

#32

Post by napoleond »

kkowalczyk wrote: post #15

Workflowy ( https://workflowy.com/ ), which is a web-based outliner. Good because it's fast.

Me too. I'll second the opinion of others and mention that paper is hard to beat, but for me paper happens at either end of the idea (jotting a quick note in my notebook/whatever paper is around, and later sketching layouts/business models/user flows/etc to flesh things out) while Workflowy happens in between.

Most good ideas happen when I'm in the middle of another project. By the time I'm able to devote any serious thought to it I've already gone through five notebooks and oodles of scrap paper, so I make a point of entering at least the basic elements of every idea into Workflowy the same day that I initially write it down on paper. Then I have a searchable record, and it's really easy to expand on various points in five-minute chunks or on sleepless nights. That way, whenever I'm looking for a new project I have a bank of ideas to pull back out onto paper.

I also use Workflowy to keep track of goals and sort of the "big picture" TODOs.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you keep your ideas?

#34

Post by mappum »

kepzorz wrote: post #11

I think a Trello board works perfectly for this. Whenever my business partner or I have one of those "WE SHOULD MAKE A GITHUB FOR BIOLOGY!" moments, we put it on a Trello card in the "Someday" pile, tag it with the appropriate categories, and write all our thoughts on the card. We've also got "soon," "doing," and "done" categories, but we mostly use the board as an idea bank for those "Somedays." We call it the "Vox…

+1 for Trello.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you keep your ideas?

#37

Post by pknight »

Ideas end up everywhere in my workspace; in my physical notebook, in a moleskin that's always in my jacket, on the whiteboard (which I sometimes take snapshots off), on index cards, in my homebrew webbased project/life tracking app (I have tons of product ideas stashed in a category), in mindmanager and onenote. Each format has it's strengths and all of them are pretty fun to use. I'm looking to add the Galaxy Note as yet another input tool.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you keep your ideas?

#38

Post by jamesmcn »

I have a stack of notebooks that goes back over two decades. Anything worth writing down goes in the notebook. No postits, scraps of paper or backs of envelopes unless I'm willing to throw the note away immediately.

One of the things I learned in high school is that taking notes helps me to organize and remember my thoughts - even if I never look at the notes again. I don't refer to my notebooks much, but writing ideas down helps me triage ideas for things worth following up on.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you keep your ideas?

#39

Post by tjbiddle »

I find paper to be the best - I keep both a personal notebook for anything I do on my own time whether it be startup ideas, shopping lists, a short TODO, etc; I also keep a work notebook for any drafting I do in the office. It's great to keep things backed up in an electronic sense, but I find it easier to expand on a thought if I just have it in front of me on paper.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you keep your ideas?

#40

Post by nedwin »

Evernote and moleskines.

My everyday todo and notes are taken in a black a5 moleskine. I go through one every 3 months and have a shelf that I keep all the old ones on, organized by date.

Fleshing out ideas happens in evernote, as well as writing blog posts and longer emails.

I have a couple of notes that I think are relevant to this discussion. 1 is the list of ideas for products or businesses that I would do if I wasn't doing what I am doing right now (and which I might do in the future) and 2 is the list of things I can do if everything ever goes to shit.

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