
Ask HN: How do you keep your ideas? - cucho
I&#x27;m thinking of tackling these two problems:
(1) Ideas happen anywhere, anytime (running, in the shower, driving, etc). How to capture these ideas before they vanish?<p>(2) I use notebooks, but once I write down an idea chances are that I will never see it again. I have a box full of notebooks collecting dust.<p>I want to know how do you capture&#x2F;keep your ideas (notebook, an app, eidetic memory, napkins, mails to yourself), what do you like&#x2F;dislike about your current way, and what have you tried and didn&#x27;t work&#x2F;stick.
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b_emery
To solve (1), just any old scrap of paper, which is then (2) transferred to a
personal wiki that lives in dropbox. I use this one (tiddlywiki.com), but
anything with tagging and search would work. I appreciate the organization by
time, tag, or list, and also the latex and markup support, but these are not
essential. Semantic search would be even better. Ive used this to capture
ideas, notes, code, writings and lists. It has been essential for my
work/dissertation.

I see the personal wiki as an evolution of the commonplace book, that was kept
in the past by the likes of Darwin
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book)).
Here are some of my notes from the book _Where Good Ideas Come From_

"We know much of Darwin's thinking on the development of his ideas from his
extensive notebooks, which he read, and re-read and recombined. This era was
the time of the 'commonplace' notebook, in which long passages of quotes from
other sources and thoughts were recorded. Reading and writing were apparently
quite related. These books may have struck a balance between silo'd
organization, and utter chaos, allowing the development of theories beginning
with hunches which could then be further developed. The key to developing a
hunch into a theory appears to be writing it down "

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lwlml
Use the same size notebook.

Set aside front-matter pages for indexes and update them whenever you review
the contents.

Write the subject, date and page number on every page.

Throw the notebooks away when they're more than ten years old. You're a
different person today and if you didn't use the idea then, that idea probably
isn't going to be relevant today.

Bad ideas will decay. Good ideas will echo. The hard part of the experience is
knowing that 99% of your ideas will never be done.

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mattbgates
I designed a program to do it for me.

I wrote [https://mypost.io](https://mypost.io)

This allows me to create single web pages in seconds complete with the ability
to use HTML and CSS. Since you choose your own URL and its unique to you.. no
one else can use it, so I tend not to lose those URLs. They aren't just a
random jumbled bunch of letters and numbers, rather, you can either make your
own, or it will grab the headline that you set.

I also implemented a feature that allows you to save all of your URLs so you
can easily find them again. I've shared it with the world and many people use
it. So I pretty much designed it for myself... and figured others might find a
use for it too. Feel free... it's free!

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ColinWright
A plain text file and a notebook.

Every day I transcribe the notebook into the text file.

Every time I start a terminal window it gives me the top line, and rotates it
to the bottom. I then review that idea and either do something about it, or
just delete it from the file.

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mindcrime
I carry a notebook with me most places, and usually have one close enough that
if an idea comes to mind, I can get to a notebook and write it down before the
idea vanishes. I also run a self-hosted Mediawiki instance for Fogbeam Labs
and for any ideas that are Fogbeam related (and most of mine are) I will
sometimes roll it up to a page there, add related links, flesh it out further,
etc.

The main problem I have is the same was what the OP alludes to: I write things
down, but I don't have a good system for periodically revisiting old notebooks
and reviewing previously-written-down ideas.

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jfaucett
I just tell them to myself and think about them. Then as soon as I can I
explain them to someone else and see if I can get them exited about it (and me
too). That's it. IMHO if an idea is good enough that you and others would be
passionate to build it and the world needs it, then it will stick with you,
all the other stuff is garbage anyway, you can just let it go. This is the
method I use for writing and storytelling as well as for my software projects
and it is by far the best way I've found of keeping a currated high quality
list of my ideas.

~~~
meric
That's interesting.

When I'm working on a side project I tried to keep quiet about it until I get
some progress going, in case the idea "exits", but maybe it's good idea to
tell about it as soon as possible instead. Then if it stays it would surely be
worthy.

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baccredited
Dropbox/ideas/ideas.txt

From any app on my Mac, I can type command-space to open a spotlight search
dialog, type ideas.txt and it will open the file above.

On my phone I use [http://captio.co/](http://captio.co/) to send myself a
quick note to my gmail account, then I copy it to ideas.txt when I'm on my
laptop.

That's it.

~~~
cucho
Thanks! How many ideas do you have in ideas.txt. How often do you read them?

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neilsimp1
I have a Trello board titled simply "Ideas", and a Card for each idea.
Sometimes a description, sometimes not.

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psyc
OneNote. I used to use Evernote, but one too many glitches pushed me over the
edge one day. OneNote has been wonderful.

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kingbirdy
I put them in a google keep list, and whenever I feel bored or lazy I open
that and pick something to work on.

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sd_sangit
I use evernote mobile app and it certainly helps me note down and organize my
ideas bad or good.

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tmaly
I keep them in a program like google keep, but I also transcribe them into a
Idea notebook.

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Meltdown
OneNote - the Windows Key + N will pop open a new quick-note - all synced by
OneNote

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pklausler
A "Quo Vadis" brand notebook with unruled pages and a fountain pen.

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ekr
Org-mode ~/ideas.org.

~~~
vv111y
+1 org-mode.

When it is something right on the spot then I will either do a voice recording
on the phone, or a quick note on scrap paper. I will get it into org-mode
later.

I also have all phone recordings synced to laptop via syncthing, so even if I
don't transcribe, at least it is kept somewhere safe for later.

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pranitkothari
I find One Note really handy.

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rtcoms
Google Keep

