Ask HN: How do you manage and organize Ideas?
My own habit is to just quickly write down the idea in one sentence and plan to come back to it later. But the problem I am facing is I never really get back to them.
How do you manage things?
How do you manage things?
Do it immediately, even if to the detriment of you social life and sleeping patterns.
I can't put ideas down. Moment I have one I collect keywords and setup some Google Alerts. Cheapest way to taste a market. Second I would look for clients and email the directly, posing as a "consultant" or specialist, or a seller/buyer in the field. If things look warm, I get the domain name and whip out a brochure site in 2 days. Google apps for email. EveryDNS for DNS hosting. Everything on one $20 VPS.
1 idea every 2-3 months. If you do it twice you will have all the boiler-plate stuff ready to go. ~12 hours of work for a complete image.
I have been a freelance software developer for 5 years now; whenever I get a spec for a project, I have this lingering fear in the back of my head that the client might turn out to be sour and not pay me. So I take a deep breath, evaluate the idea with the intention that I might be able to sell my code, iff they don't pay me. During those hours of fear I stalk the company and learn everything I can about them, trying to imagine an entire self-sustaining business.
If it's not something new and exciting, or something challenging, or something I could easily resell, I wont take it with a cash deposit.
Fortunately, things always go well and I take on the project, but as we get to know each other better and talk for weeks, my business side comes out and I become some sort of trusted advisor to them. I ponder the possibility of me consulting with them as a firm, and reach to my contacts for previous clients and other acquaintances for similar interest, and this is when I start researching as well.
I go back to the client with my brochure website, I write down everything I remember about their business needs, and we arrange casual lunches/meetings to see what they're up to and I inform them of my new venture. I try not to explain too much, and let them tell me exactly what services they might think they need from me (I work in marketing and advertising, so the needs are almost all the same; problems customizing COTS and SaaS packages); it's important to shutup and let your client tell you how they think you might be able to help them.
So, by now I have 1day/week gig that pays for the rent. I put together the token automated billing, receipt templates, email notifications, etc. I always have a PDF "Guide Book" document. Something that explains where they can find everything; support email, API keys, setup email accounts, etc.
Then I move on to the next project.
I almost always start something by talking out of my ass first. When I meet someone powerful and influential, I have this knack of opening my mouth and offering to help them.
In the consulting business, it's more important to be reachable, warm, communicative, etc. than to be technically competent. Most people hire me as a programmer but I always end up hiring programmers for them. If you can help someone sketch out the high-level designs and put together a prototype, they're more than happy to spend more money assemble a virtual team to iron out the kinks.
It's very important that you get business. The quickest way to establish your authority is to address the problems one might face in a certain industry/market-segment. When someone tells you they're a brand-manager, or M&A attorney, or VP of sales for telecom equipment, it helps to know a little about their industry and location to say something negative about its current climate. Amateurs are always enthusiastic about business, they think it's all flights, hotels and golf courses. So be weary of anything who tries to hype you into a project or industry. The real veterans are almost always weary.
[Edit:
Once a month I go through my contacts and shoot emails to people or catch them on Skype, just to touch base. I find it fascinating to listen to them talk about their work. And sometimes it reignites our partnership.]
My 2009 new year's resolution was to never have more than 10 tabs open in Firefox. It took a few months (April IIRC), but when I hit the goal, it was the best thing I ever did for my productivity. Sadly I lost the habit and now I'm on 50+ tabs again and trying to lose them.
Scrapbook (a FF addon) is the top candidate for my tool of choice, especially as I have its storage folder in Dropbox and thus syncs with all my machines.
A pretty good sign that it was a bad idea is when I don't remember on the renewal date a year later what I registered the domain for ;)
All of the above help me to document and organise ideas as i get them.
Sound like a mess?, well yes it probably is to someone else....but documenting ideas as I get them, in the most timely method possible ensures that I capture everything and i'm not left carrying these crazy ideas in my head every night.
Don't worry about not coming back to every idea, but do force a habit of reviewing your list at least once a month, you'll be surprised by what you find in there after just a few weeks!
I do this. At any time I have more than 70 tabs opened. Last week I abused it; took it to 250. Crashed.
Read the "4 hour workweek", it give good tips about starting a business on the side. It's a bit over the top sometimes, but it motivate me working on this : http://grownsoftware.com/swiffout (just a project, not really a business, but that book help me anyway ) I think the book is great at convincing you that it's easier than you think.
Beyond that take any idea (ideas are not that important ), work on it everyday for a while and see what happens.
All this is pretty easy using rails (or Django, PHP, or grails, I imageine)
(or write some memo's, use Google desktop to index them).
The important thing is describe your business plan/Cconcept in a way that you can find it using your search terms.
My attempted solution is to blog at least a paragraph on it. This way I have a public record of it, the opportunity for feedback, and some sense of progression.
It hasn't worked very well so far, though, because I'm still much more likely to pop open an idea.org buffer and append it into a category where it will gather dust.
IMO, writing them down is good. It worked well with me if you keep them all in one place. The nearest opportunity/free time take a look and do one.
I do go through them once in a while, that hasn't helped much though.
Maybe you should solve that problem first. A tool may help you "go back to them" but it won't help you make them.