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Ask HN: Where do you keep your ideas?

42 points| laurencer | 13 years ago | reply

Where do you keep all of the ideas you come up with - and if you decide to work on an idea where do you keep everything related to it?

Right now I email everything to myself and have a GMail label, but I'm sure there are much better strategies out there. I'm keen to see how HNers keep there ideas (e.g. writing them in a moleskin, using Evernote, etc), and how they work on side-projects/ideas (e.g. if you decide to start researching one of your ideas where do you keep it all).

62 comments

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[+] zrail|13 years ago|reply
I literally wrote an entire app just for this exact use case.

https://www.marginalia.io

There's a REST api and an email API. You email ideas to a special address and it creates notes for you. You can append further refinements when it replies with a note-unique email address.

You can sort notes into projects, add tags, search, sort, and export to plain HTML or PDF.

[+] waxjar|13 years ago|reply
I recommend putting at least a screenshot on your landing page. Whenever I'm looking for software, I'd like a quick look at the UI to decide I want to try or not.

If there are a lot of competing services, I tend to pick one that has UI previews to save time.

[+] kkowalczyk|13 years ago|reply
Workflowy (https://workflowy.com/), which is a web-based outliner. Good because it's fast.
[+] napoleond|13 years ago|reply
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.

[+] eik3_de|13 years ago|reply
I've been using WorkFlowy for almost a year now, and it has soon become one of my "Pinned Tabs" because I use it every day. It's the most flexible tool I have found to literally organize my brain. Since there are no predefined rules how to organize your stuff in WorkFlowy, you can use it just as individually as your thinking works. The great mobile version of the website is useful for using it on the go.

I love those products that look minimalistic and trivial on first sight but that are feature-packed underneath for power users: full keyboard use, sharing, search & tags, copies/templates, "hidden" timestamps, ...

[+] anigbrowl|13 years ago|reply
All my best ideas are on paper. I find a pencils far more effective than any digital tools for sketching out ideas.
[+] po|13 years ago|reply
I agree. Paper is under-rated by geeks. I use a Muji A6 dotted paper notebook because the grid helps me draw boxes but is light enough to also let me ignore them when I feel like it. Some of them come with an elastic band on the cover to help keep it closed. The paper is cheap enough that I don't feel like the ideas have to be important to write down. I find that I am a bit reluctant to write in a super nice notebook.

http://www.muji.us/store/stationery/notebooks/pp-cover-doubl...

I keep a Frixion erasable pen hooked in the spiral part of the notebook.

http://www.pilotpen.us/Brands/FriXion.aspx

The only downside I have found is that if you freeze the notebook your erased writing will come back! I thought that the friction from rubbing destroys the ink, but it seems like it just transforms it into a new stable state. It's a really interesting fluid.

[+] andersnolsen|13 years ago|reply
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.

[+] kepzorz|13 years ago|reply
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 Industries Ingenuity Bin."

[+] saulrh|13 years ago|reply
Emacs, org-mode, org-capture, and a global keyboard shortcut that pops up an org-capture buffer when I have an idea. I just type it in, hit a few keys, and it goes into a nicely-formatted file with all my other ideas. Hitting slightly different keys will capture appointments, todos, read-this-later links, book recommendations, and the like.
[+] timfrietas|13 years ago|reply
Honestly, and sadly, MS Word.

I have a template for startup ideas that is many questions long. It is still easiest to fire up that document and go, where everything is set up with well-laid formatting and bullet points. I am probably biased from many years spent in word processing programs coming from a writing heavy non-technical background originally, but that template gets everything out of the way for me so I can just write. Maybe eventually I'll write a Rails app for myself but I don't think I'd gain much over the current process except version control.

Nothing else works as well locally, which is a lot of the problem. Gmail is getting closer to being able to serve purpose as a general idea store for me, but I am not always online, and the migration cost at this point is not worth switching for, even if Gmail worked flawlessly offline.

[+] zengr|13 years ago|reply
"I have a template for startup ideas that is many questions long."

Just curious, can you share that?

[+] pirateking|13 years ago|reply
Paper or plain text files. If neither is available, then I email myself using my phone.

Paper is the best option because of the limitless possibilities. I can use pencil, pen, color pencil, watercolor, scotch tape bits of junk to it, rip it out, fold it up, and burn it.

[+] mark_l_watson|13 years ago|reply
I don't use a notebook anymore. Now I start with a small document containing what need the project is supposed to solve, some design notes, and I use omniGraffle to sketch out diagrams. One tip: I save copies of all of my "idea diagrams" in a folder and I often start by grabbing an old file and copying parts of it. I find that using a diagramming tool is almost as fast as sketching with pencil and paper.

I also rely on Evernote (happy paying customer) for storing resources, random thoughts, photos taken with my cellphone of receipts, etc. I don't use Evernote for project materials however, just general resources and a history of what I have found interesting and useful.

[+] egypturnash|13 years ago|reply
Evernote and sketchbooks. (I'm a graphic novelist.)

Sometimes big projects end up with a sketchbook pretty much devoted to them. More often they just sprawl across all the books I use during the course of the project.

Also there's a pile of index cards with a core dump of one story I've been carrying around for a long time. I made it shortly after losing a bunch of sketchbooks in a hurricane because I wanted to preserve every bit of that story I could.

Also my advice is to avoid Moleskines, I find them overpriced and the paper sucks for the way I like to draw. I like the similar form factor books from Hand*book. And softcover books from Cachet. And of course the classic black hardcovers.

[+] chubot|13 years ago|reply
I use a wiki I wrote for the purpose. I'm surprised that so many people are talking about text files and outliners. Hyperlinking is really important! Ideas are naturally hyperlinked.

I just looked at workflowy, and I don't see a good way to link from one place to another. That seems to put it more in the realm of TODO list rather than a place for real ideas.

Compare to paper (which I used to use), the wiki has the drawback that you can't draw pictures easily. But it has the advantage of being searchable.

I have 1300+ wiki pages from the last 8 years or so. It's been one of the more useful things I've done since it's allowed me to tackle bigger and bigger projects.

[+] waxjar|13 years ago|reply
I keep a lot of notes, recipes, code snippets, lists, ideas, etc in Notational Velocity. I keep them in a folder on my Dropbox. That means I've always got access to them, provided I have access to a computer with internet and a simple text editor.

Notational Velocity has an amazingly simple interface. And it's fast. It deals just with text, which is all I need.

To ease online access, I've dived into my first Ember.js adventure and am writing a simple web application that mimics Notational Velocity. It accesses files trough the Dropbox API. It's not done yet, but it's on its way :)

Linky: http://notational.net/

[+] knockonthedoor|13 years ago|reply
I created a notebook called Projects in Evernote and I keep one note to all the ideas that I could summarize in a sentence. For more mature idea I create a separate note to keep all links and notes related to the project there.
[+] nedwin|13 years ago|reply
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.

[+] jamesmcn|13 years ago|reply
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.

[+] Link-|13 years ago|reply
I keep a moleskine notebook with me all the time where i sketch and write my ideas on the spot. I use mindjet's mindmapping software to elaborate on those ideas and store the files in a brainstorming folder on my portable harddrive and laptop. A copy of that folder is also in Google Drive to have access to the files and documents whenever i need them. I frequently use evernote and flava and sync them both, especially when i take snapshots with my mobile.
[+] pknight|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] tjbiddle|13 years ago|reply
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.