Where do you put your ideas?
I am currently looking for a system which will help me execute some of my massive backlog of ideas. By “ideas” I include my hundreds and hundreds of story outlines for films with a handful of finished screenplays, but also things like: alternative income streams, or day jobs, or skills or abilities I’d like to learn/get (coding, traditional animation, dance the Tango, conversational Italian), as well as a host of other projects.
Before I get to the determining how to better pick which ideas I should pursue (Update: see my investigation of my idea choosing decision making model here), I was wondering if there was any more I could do to optimize my current idea recording method. Some of this overlaps with the GTD concept of the “Someday” bucket. But what I don’t like about that is that I’d very much like to ensure I review and act upon some of these ideas.
So how do most of you record your ideas? Where do you put them? Where do you keep them, not so in the dark as to never seen sunlight again?
I’m from a film background, so my knowledge of idea-capture is influenced by anecdotes of everyone from Vladimir Nabokov’s index cards which in the early gestational stage he describes as ”...including the accumulation of seemingly haphazard notes, the secret arrowheads of research”, Joan Rivers or Bob Hope’s archives of decade’s of accumulated jokes organized by subject, or the unfiltered and uncensored NO-NO sessions of Robert Clampett at the birth of a cartoon. To Jerry Lewis typing out between shows the screenplay the Bell-Boy, which to be fair is more of a anthology of isolated jokes than a continuous narrative?
But what about when you have an idea for an app? For research? For an algorithm? Or yes, career moves and similar choices? Where do you put that idea? How do you ensure you don’t lose it so that you can maximize the chances of doing something with it?
I use Obsidian. It’s a note taking/note making software using almost only Markdown syntax. It is very malleable to your use but mostly relies on a linking system that kinda makes it a wiki for your knowledge.
I second Obsidian. It’s free, lightning fast, local (you own you data so can’t be held hostage to a subscription fee) and the Markdown format is simple and common enough that there will always be some way to use the system you’ve set up.
There are more in depth theories about how to actually organize your notes, but obsidian can do it in a variety of ways, almost however you want.
Which theories have you found suite you best and why? How do you organize your notes?
And having captured your ideas in Obsidian, how do you go about revisiting them and ensuring that they don’t remain captured but forgotten?
I tag the important ones with #important1 through 3
And they’re tagged and linked with other semantics. You can see a visual representation of pinks or search by any combo
You mentioned there are more in depth theories, which ones do you work by? Does this influence how you decide what is an important 1 , 2 or 3?
How does the visual representation help you filter or action and actualize ideas rather than just adding them to the pile?
It sounds like you may also want a whole life organizational system. It also sounds like you’re probably in the cluster of tendencies I’m in, commonly known as ADHD. I recommend Getting Things Done, GTD, as simple and effective for my attentional style.
There are bunches of YouTube videos on all three of those topics—obsidian, notes organization, and GTD. Oh, and ADHD. It’s not a disorder, just a different tendency and ith different strengths and weaknesses. And about half of humanity is on that side of the spectrum.
I’m afraid that doesn’t even come close to answering my questions about how you rank what is important or not, nor why you think visual representations are important, nor how GTD or whatever you use helps you revisit these ideas—as I said in my original post I don’t like the “Someday” bucket of that system. Could you try have another go at explaining it to me?
I’m not familiar with that app, but could you go into more detail about how you use it with regards to storing and capturing ideas?
Like do you instantly, say when on the bus, or at the dinner table note down an idea? How much detail do you put in?
How does it integrate with your to-do list or calendar or whatever productivity system, formal or informal you have? An idea may not necessarily represent a commitment just yet, so how do you use this app to revisit ideas? How often do you revisit them?
Do you organize or store your “ideas” notes differently to other notes?
I am far from being a model user as I am not a very organized person but having everything in the same place has allowed me to actually find things much more easily because the search is quite good. Not perfect but much better than what Google offers in Docs or Keep for instance. The app itself is very versatile but there are many plugins that will allow you to tailor your experience in the exact way you need it.
I try to update or create a new note as soon as possible because I forget pretty fast. I have a few notes made exactly for the purpose of storing temporary ideas that will need to be more developped or moved somewhere else later.
There are several tools to revisit notes. The link is powerful because on every note you can see all links from but also to this note and the local graph shows you everything that is a close link (1, 2, 3 or more links away).
I know tags are used by many people for this but I have never really been able to use them much. Then there is the random note and the general graph that shows you all the notes. On it you can show notes with a color depending on some condition which helps with subjects but it also helps to find “lost” notes with no links that may have been forgotten.
The best introduction I have found is from Nick Milo, very simple but it gives right away an idea of the potential of the app: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3NaIVgSlAVLHty1-NuvPa9V0b0UwbzBd
The important ones are 1, 2, 3, 4 is really optional, 5 and 6 are useful and short. So you only really need 30 minutes at 1x speed.
Thank you for the detailed response, to be honest hearing the experience of a disorganized non-model user seems much more valuable than someone who uses it perfectly, like how you don’t find yourself using tags.
I’m use Notability, but mostly because I prefer to use hand-written notes. What I like is that I can hand write my notes, and then be able to do a text search on them later.
It started with me taking notes while playing RPGs, but turned into a daily journal.
If you don’t care about handwriting, my only real suggestion is go with something that saves files in Markdown format. If the company goes poof some years down the road you want to be able to still access your notes.
Interesting! Is that because you find that your most creative while playing RPGs? How much detail are in those notes? How often do you find you pause the game to write one (reminds me of the Mitch Hedberg joke about thinking of a joke at night, he either needs to get up, or convince himself that the joke isn’t that funny).
How often do you text search for ideas? What seems to trigger revisiting an idea?
It started with RPG notes because I was using them to help me keep track of the details. Hand writing kept me engaged. I generally didn’t have to do much pausing.
Later, as I was reading some of my notes it got me that I had a better record of what my fiction al characters did in than my own life. I realized how useful it would be to have a journal.
My level of detail varies. I tend to be more detailed when there are interesting bits than not. It also depends on how tired I am when writing, and when I’ve done it. Most of the time, I write about my day at the end of the day, but sometimes it’s the next day. When I do that, it rarely has the same level of detail.
I think that I reference my notes about every other month or so. I’m not really sure. Usually I’m looking up what I did on a particular day.
Thank you for sharing the details of how your note taking has evolved.
It is kind of interesting the whole “we can know a fictional character so well yet feel a stranger to ourselves”.
Critically, it sounds like chronology is the most important part of retrieval for you since it’s a journal, a record of what you did on a given date. I think that’s different to my purposes, because an “idea” could be important at an unknown point in the future so, or never, so I need a different organization and retrieval system than chronology. Different courses for different horses.
Yeah. I also note down ideas. Most of the time it’s just a part of my habitual writing. Since Notability allows me to search, it’s usually not too hard to find.
Recently, a friend asked me a difficult question, which I needed to consider and process before answering. My journal entry for that day included my musings.
I also realize that use it professionally too, when I’m working out a problem, or when I need to make lists. I’m a software engineer, so that’s not uncommon. For a while I was keeping a work journal, but now that’s sort of been subsumed.
I do make dedicated entries on topics too. I have a whole section for a game I run. I often reference those when we play.
Notability isn’t great for linking between notes. If you need that, I’d find another app for sure. If you’re writing out notes that you want to be able to search for later, I’d recommend it. That’s especially true for handwritten notes.
I’m curious to know what you land on.
Obsidian/LW Shortforms/Twitter for slightly different types of ideas, can’t articulate the difference though
I’m just letting you know that I’ll be speed reading your shortforms, trying to discern what patterns unify them.
The rules are not completely consistent over time though, also it is just not articulatable in 1 minute of effort lol. I’m sure I can explain 80% of the internal rule with effort
lol, if you do have the patience or can justify the time to articulate it I’d be greatly appreciative but also understand if you don’t. I said it in another comment but what I’m finding very interesting is not seeing idealized best practice, but descriptive practice—how do people actually make notes.
And as always my follow up question is: how do you go about revisiting or reviewing things? For example I see you have a few [draft] of long forms in among your shortforms that have been there fore some months. How often do you revisit and review these (no judgement if you don’t—that’s the real reason I’m asking about where people put their notes).
The most obvious thing is that I post things out when I want people to see it, and LW/Twitter is mostly about how serious I want to be.
I don’t really. Idea get revisited when I stumble on it again, but I rarely try to plan and focus on some ideas without external stimulation.