

Ask HN: Which tool do you use to jot down your project idea / creating stories? - jagira

Hi,&#60;p&#62;I have been using pen and notepad since the beginning but it is very unorganized and some of the notes even got lost. I would like to know whether there are any tools in cloud which I can use for this specific purpose.&#60;p&#62;I can think of using a combination of basecamp + pivotal tracker. Is there a better tool out there?
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fooandbarify
It depends what I'm doing. I've fallen in love with Workflowy for capturing
ideas and keeping track of what needs to be done in my various projects. Free
and easy - I've grown to like it enough that I'd happily pay a bit to keep
using it (that's a hint to the Workflowy guys if they're around). For
_writing_ longer things, whatever the purpose, I still have enormous
collections of txt's and rtf's hidden peppering my hard drive and many many
saved drafts in various blogs. When it comes to creative writing I enjoy using
pen and paper, but since it often needs to end up in digital form at one point
or another I sometimes skip that step.

When it comes to _diagrams_ , though, nothing beats pen and paper. I have long
given up any hope of finding them later, though - all but the most important
diagrams are destined for the recycling bin from the get-go. That's an
approach I picked up from the 37signals blog or one of their presentations
somewhere, and I highly recommend it. I no longer worry about making it
legible or easy to understand, I just dump my ideas onto the page. For
extremely important diagrams, I suppose I could then scan it before throwing
the hard copy away, but I can't remember ever doing that. In the context of
web development, sketched diagrams have always been a short term intermediate
step for me - my code may not be as clear or well-documented as it should be
(I try!) but it's still more obvious and less hassle than my chicken-scratch
diagrams.

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dholowiski
Pen/paper - extremely simple user interface, never crashes, and no monthly
fee.

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spooneybarger
My paper comes in handy little moleskin notebooks. Hardcover for longer term.
Softcover for short term. I agree, it is hard to beat pen and paper.

EDIT: just in case i wasn't clear for those who don't know what a moleskin
notebook is... it is rather hard to lose an individual piece of paper from
one.

~~~
dholowiski
I use the same paper. I absolutley love the softcover grid books. The cover is
not quite paper- it's more like leather.

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dools
I have a notebook for jotting down notes whilst I'm talking on the phone.

When I want to schedule or prioritise tasks or when I have lots of hashing out
to do in my head prior to entering data into a more structured online task
management system I use a whiteboard and index cards:

<http://workingsoftware.com.au/indexcards.jpg>

