Ask HN: How do you keep track of your ideas? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you keep track of your ideas?

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Sometimes I have a bunch of ideas that I often forget. How do you keep track of all your ideas? I was thinking that I may be able to use the GTD system for ideas, any suggestion?

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I have a 20-year-old, 37K-line todo.txt file (edited in Emacs) of all ideas I've ever had over those two decades, plus notes & some contact info. (And most of the actual to-do items are deleted when I finish them, so it's actually contained a lot more info over the that time.)

I've tried a lot of other schemes, but this still seems like the best method for collecting and organizing my thoughts.

I don't, and neither should you. :-)

If an idea is worth pursuing, it reoccurs in several ways. For instance, with my current project I can have a casual conversation with someone around a pain point and instantly see how my idea could help.

Many of my ideas seem brilliant when I first have them, but then fizzle the more I think about them. Even if they are wonderful and viable, your motivation to build them out is also a factor.

I agree that many ideas seem silly after they've sat for a bit, but I disagree that you shouldn't keep track of your ideas.

I get a lot of ideas. I keep track of them. If they fizzle, I remove them from the list.

I simply don't always have the time to jump on implementation of the ones I consider "good" when I have the idea. Also, keeping track of them means that I'll basically never have a point where I'm going "hmmm nothing to do, wish I had an idea!"

I simply don't always have the time to jump on implementation of the ones I consider "good" when I have the idea.

An idea you can't execute is worth about as much to you as no idea at all. The concept of an idea being so timeless that it will be both relevant and somehow forgotten in the future if not recorded is not one I accept.

Either your idea is so great that you'll a)make time for it or b) remember it in the future, or it probably isn't as wonderful as you initially thought after all.

hmmm nothing to do, wish I had an idea!

A person who generates so many ideas that he's considering recording them won't find themselves in this position: You'll always have more ideas than time to implement them, so don't sweat it.

Not recording ideas is both a way of validating them and focusing your mind on implementation. "Idea people" like us can easily lose ourselves in the mental masturbation that is the generation of "ideas". The last thing we should be doing is encouraging staying in that stage longer than we have to.

I'm not saying you're wrong but much of this will depend on how your life is structured. For people whose life follows broadly regular patterns this is likely to be true but for free lancers who can go from feast to famine (with their spare time going in the opposite direction) having a list of possible projects isn't a bad idea.

In terms of generating more ideas - yes you'll keep generating them but surely you want to pick up on the best ones rather than just what you happen to have come up with recently.

Besides, the way ideas work and interact aren't always straight forward. Sometimes you might be in the mood to act on something fitting a particular brief when that's not what you've come up with lately. It's like reading a book - you don't just pick up the first one you see, you look through the shelves and see what appeals.

I don't see how this is dependent on a personal lifestyle, really. Everyone values their time, and in reality it's when you have a lot of free time that you'd benefit from this more.

but surely you want to pick up on the best ones rather than just what you happen to have come up with recently

That's my point though: the best ones don't really go away; they are annoying in their persistence to be executed on. Wait long enough and the landscape that the idea lives in has changed as well; an idea from 1989 will need to be re-imagined so much that it won't even really be the same idea.

Sometimes you might be in the mood to act on something fitting a particular brief when that's not what you've come up with lately.

If you have this much of a time luxury I am truly envious, I must say. But in this case you're speaking more of hobby projects, not true business ideas. True business ideas will need to be worked on consistently regardless of your daily attitude or they will fail, unfortunately.

If that works for you, great.

For me, I jot down ideas, keep them in a file, and then implement the ones I want to when I have time to do so.

I forget shit all the time, and really -- I don't want to hear any philosophical fluff about how that must mean that the idea just wasn't all that good. It's an attribute of my memory, not the idea.

I'm not an "idea person". I'm a "getting shit done" person, who happens to have quite a few ideas, and who also happens to work full time and attend 12 credit hours a semester. I'd rather make a note of them, review them in my free time, and implement when I feel like I can, or when I choose to than rely on keeping some spark of inspiration kindled for an indefinite period of time.

Yeah, luckily I'm not talking about just sitting around thinking of ideas and not implementing them. I never sit around trying to come up with an idea, and I get no satisfaction from just having an idea, which cuts out the masturbation.

I'll agree that we shouldn't encourage people to sit around thinking of hare-brained schemes, but please don't assume that everyones lifestyle and mind are structured the way yours is.

There's no universal truth to be had about tracking ideas or todo items -- it's too subjective of a territory -- and when you talk as if there is, it makes you sound like a jackass.

If you never find yourself in the position of wanting to jot down ideas because you "remember the good ones", wonderful. Don't tell me that it's not a useful thing for me to do, because seriously -- if I don't do things like that, I do not remember them. I don't remember what's in my ideas file right now, but I guarantee you that some of those ideas I will start implementing later.

Yeah, I'll always have more ideas than time. That's fine. I'll also know that the ideas I've saved but haven't had the chance to work on are ones that I'm actually interested in -- and I'll know that I didn't just forget some bright idea that I've had.

I think you're taking way too much personal offence in my comment where none was intended. If you have a solution that you enjoy, then obviously you don't need the advice in my comment. The OP however is asking for a solution and I am assuming that he/she is open to options.

Look at the number of comments in this thread suggesting a personal favorite technique. My comment introduces the option of looking at the problem in a new way; one that removes the issue at its source.

I'm not assuming everyone has my lifestyle, certainly. However one thing I have learned in my 35 plus years is that most people overvalue their own ideas, and the concept of an "idea" in general and undervalue the execution. Not recording ideas promotes the things you do execute on over the actual ideas.

That doesn't mean you don't act on any idea, never write anything down or extend this basic model to ridiculous degrees.

The animosity towards this approach in your comment is curious.

I must have misread you, I'm sorry. I got the impression that you were trying to state that the way you think about ideas, and idea-tracking (or the lack thereof) was somehow "correct" in some more objective sense.

I got the impression that you felt that if someone had to write down an idea to remember it, or if someone wasn't immediately capable of implementing an idea, that the idea itself must not be worth saving or implementing. I didn't get the impression that you were saying "this works for me, this might work for you" -- rather, I heard (or saw) "the problem you're addressing is a non-problem. tracking ideas is a wasted effort. period.". If that's not what you meant to imply, apologies.

I don't think that your solution removes the issue at its source if the issue is remembering ideas that you want to examine or implement in the future, either. If the issue is only having those ideas on hand that you felt were good enough that you remember them no matter what, then your solution works fine. If that's not the issue, then your solution only works in the sense of repainting the issue as a non-issue, unless I'm missing something fundamental about what we've been talking about.

I don't disagree that most people overvalue their own ideas, that's pretty inarguable.

I probably overreacted a bit -- as an explanation, this is a bit of a personal topic for me. I struggle quite a bit with remembering to do things, or remembering things I want to do -- and I also don't have very much time to devote to pursuing what I think are good ideas.

Without a means for me to jot down stuff for me to think about or work on in the future, I wouldn't ever come back to scratch any of the things that were making me itch in the past -- and scratching those itches tends to be better for more than just me.

This is probably partially because I, like a lot of "hacker types" am ADD. I don't mention that as a crutch or anything, but it is something that went undiagnosed in myself for a long time, and that definitely contributes to the "problem". I can not rely on my memory alone.

I can't really express the difference in how I'm able to "be productive" when I'm medicated and have a system for idea tracking versus whenever either of those are not present. It's a big, tangible difference, and this is the case for a lot of developers I know even when you take medication and ADD out of the picture.

Perhaps another semantic thing that should be mentioned is that the vast majority of my ideas are "change functionality of library X to include Y", "write script to do Z", "little app that does this", "configure app FOO to work with input BAR". I'm not necessarily talking about larger ideas.

Anyhow, I hope that clears some stuff up.

The faintest ink is better than the best memory --- Chinese saying (allegedly)

I agree with the complete opposite of this.

I keep a smallish (3x5"?) leather-bound mead journal (the ones with graph paper) in my cargo pants and a Pilot G-2 gel pencil in my left pocket. Everything goes in said journal. Ideas, information, sketches, IP information of the schools I work in...

It's batteries never run down.

It's memory never becomes corrupt.

I don't have to transfer the information when I perform a system upgrade.

I have access to it while in remote locations (hunting/fishing/hiking-- I have a lot of ideas in the middle of nowhere.)

It has a .5 second boot time and auto-loads notepad.

I'm very rarely without my cargo pants/shorts.

I have a really long list of business ideas in a .txt file 99.9% of which I'll never get round to implementing. An idea worth doing will stick in your head and eat away at you til you've accomplished it, a poor idea, not so much.

I do the exact same thing.

For ideas that reach the "tinker" stage, I create a folder into which I have "designs", "html", and "notes" subfolders.

I use Gmail. I have an email thread going (sent to myself) that's I reply to every time I have a project idea. It's pretty rare that I'm thinking about project ideas and also not anywhere near a computer. And if I'm not, I just remember it for a few hours until I am or write it down on a sticky note in my wallet.

I should note that I very rarely actually go back and implement these ideas--I just used to have a thing where I'd want to do something and I'd have no idea what to do. I've become a lot better at generating ideas and so it's no longer really an issue, but I still like keeping them around. It's fun to see startup ideas I've thought about appear here on HN in the form of companies and realize I'd had the same idea a while ago.

I do the same thing, but with one caveat. I have a subject prefix for different categories of ideas. Every idea email thread starts with "X idea:", where X is "Site", "Research", etc.

Google Docs spreadsheet, with the following column headers:

Idea/Elevator Pitch, Value Proposition, Target Market, Unique Selling Proposition, Revenue Model, Exit Strategy, Barriers To Entry, Competitors, Startup Costs

You're not afraid that Google will steal your ideas? ;-)

alternate: Dropbox stored spreadsheet with a strong password protected file. :-)

I use the built-in notes feature on my iPhone. Before that it was a notepad text file on my desktop. The only reason the iPhone wins now just because I have it with me at all times.

Usually the act of typing it in is enough to get it embedded in my mind. Occasionally I go back through and read them and delete out the ones I don't care about anymore.

If I lost the whole thing, it wouldn't be a huge loss to me. I already know what's important and when you're mind is in the creative mode, inspiration is always striking. I would find a more "structured" approach to be limiting.

For something new, I create a project in Omnifocus on my iPhone, then describe it.

For an existing idea, new items get added as tasks on the project.

I bought Omnifocus right when the app store opened, along with Super Monkey Ball etc., but whilst all those other programs fell by the wayside, Omnifocus recently migrated to the 'shelf' and has stayed there.

If you own a Mac, you can share sync between iPhones, iPad by simply pointing Omnifocus at a webdav folder on the Mac (easy to create by using the built-in Apache 2.0)

Each idea is noted, some evolve into a long text file. The ones I really start to flesh-out get their own folder, and their multiple text files get C-tagged together with my own Vim format and tag system.

But I do want much more. Some of these notes become to-do items, reference items, fantasy user doc or rantings to myself. As they grow, they become different things.

I would love an "actionable" tag system. That is, an editor (web/wiki-based, I don't mind) that for each article I can drop certain smart tags onto. Drop a labelled Milestone tag on it and it becomes a to-do item. Drop a Due Date onto it as well, or perhaps a Dependency tag linked to another article and there's a mini-project manager.

If I don't feel as "projecty" right now with this set of notes I might just drop some regular tags on it. "OpenGL" or "Django" and now I'm collating notes across projects. A Parent/Child tag, just to give some articles some structure, if I want.

I've tried a lot of to-do apps and note-taking apps, but none of them quite seem to match how my brain just loves to note stuff down, but only organise how and when I want to. I've got a reasonably refined list of about a dozen such smart tags that I think would suit me well. sigh Just got to find some time...

I use notecards - I keep a stack of blanks in my bag. If they're not particularly actionable, they go up on my blog for such things(http://mohrslaws.com/Lifein3x5), otherwise, they go in the to-do pocket. If they don't fit in either, I fold them into an origami frog, draw a funny face on it and leave it by the wayside. (http://tweetphoto.com/12387364) - This is also the format I use for my business cards.

If I ever find myself wanting for something to do or ponder, I just go to the to-do pile and browse.

I like the physical aspect of this system. To me, the important thing here is getting the ideas the hell out of my head - it gets kinda crazy in there, it's no place for a delicate thing like an idea. Plus having a big, unsorted stack makes them more interesting to browse.

I'm surprised no-one put a shout out for Remember The Milk. It's not perfect, but once you go through the GTD in RTM tutorial at http://blog.rememberthemilk.com/2008/05/guest-post-advanced-... , you can get something that works pretty awesomely.

I tend to write down ideas in the "someday" list, or in the project list if it's a project. It just won't get a due date, nor tagged with "next". Every week I try to go through the list, and remove ideas that I don't think are worth following up.

I also keep a research wiki where I dump links and ideas, but I haven't gone back there for a while. I think it's largely something useful to track back the genesis of an idea, and remember why you thought of it in the first place. I often remember the solutions to problems I have forgot!

I love GTD for all thing I need to get done but ideas IMHO don't really fit that "mantra".

I keep track of my ideas in a Moleskine Notebook. They are available in many formats and are able to whitstand almost anything. What I love about having a small "book" of ideas is that I can take them anywhere, scrible and brainstorm around my ideas etc. All this is possible without being restricted by a given format. Its also very easy to browse through ideas if you store them this way and I found it very easy to find ideas again once you remember you had some solution or approach to something.

If I by chance don't have my Moleskine with me I email myself the idea and as soon as I get home or start emptying my mailbox the idea gets transfered into the notebook.

Shameless plug: http://scribld.in/

I have this problem as well, and built the site for my personal use then added a few features to open it up to others. Hope you find it useful! E-mail in profile if you have any feedback.

I would use the heck out of your site if I could text ideas into it somehow (via twitter?).

Also if it recorded metadata about my location, that'd be pretty neat. (how many seconds/word I was writing, what the weather was like, astrological stuff, etc.)

The only ways I can think of making my journal.txt file better are text integration and useless metadata...because I really do want to know if I write more while Aquarius is prominent.

I have an Excel spreadsheet with various columns: rank, title, description, has-been-done, scope, etc

The rank is a number that I enter manually based on my estimate of how good the idea is. When I change that value for a given idea, the spreadsheet is set up to auto-sort the ideas.

For example: an idea may have been ranked 4th, but I find out some info that makes me think the idea is not worth pursuing that much, so I change the rank value and the spreadsheet immediately puts it in its right place (e.g. 35th).

The benefit is that ideas still stick around, but the ones that I find the most likely to succeed/worth pursuing are always listed at the top for me to see.

I don't bother. They're like buses: if I miss one, another will be along in a few minutes.

Ideas soak in your mind when written down. You will be proud as hell looking back at the ideas you have. They reflect your highest level of thought from your current mentality, and are great indicators of your growth.

Without writing them down, you give them little power to thrive and iterate. Think about how great businesses are made, or how code is made.. It's all iterative.

Write down every idea... Just try it for a few weeks and see where it goes. Like I said before, I use ActionOutline, which is a terrific program for managing all of the 'words' in your life that isn't in code.

Any text editor will do, main thing is that it's super quick to write things down. GTD-stuff is overkill for me.

I found that keeping a list of ideas will clear my head to be open for new ideas. Otherwise my brain will use a lot of memory/CPU to keep the old ideas around.

Second thing I found useful is to expand on ideas when I have some time. I simply take one and write a whole document on it, detailing design, features, purpose, value, target market etc - anything I can think of. I keep revising those randomly. The good ideas stick and turn into documented project plans over time.

I keep everything in Notational Velocity stored in plain text files, which I keep in sync between multiple computers with Dropbox. It also syncs with SimpleNote so I can view/update it from my iPhone or iPad or from the web. Simple, and I can access it from anywhere.

Within the text file, I usually group ideas by type and mark it with a '*' if I implement it, and a 'X' if I decide it's not a good idea/it's already been done/I've lost interest in it. Has worked well for me.

People who want to try this should see the FAQ about problems using note-level syncing with file-level syncing:

http://wiki.github.com/scrod/nv/faq-synchronization

I don't believe any idea is wholly worthless. Great ideas are on time, good ideas only feel late, and bad ideas are simply too early. For years I've kept two folders.

One I fill with concepts (if they can be called that) I plan to test, and the other is for those I think are too early. The good ideas have kept me afloat; the bad ideas however, have led to great things.

Always write it down. Circling ideas are an omen you're mastering the science but not the art.

I use an emacs org-mode file that is in my github repo of configuration files and other things that go on all the machines I use. Org mode has a bit of a learning curve, but it's powerful and flexible. That's another way of saying it's a mature emacs library ;)

http://members.optusnet.com.au/~charles57/GTD/orgmode.html <-- article on using org-mode for GTD.

Text file. Write it down and move onto something useful. Don't waste time trying to find a better way to do this. GTD, in particular, is way too much for just this.

A hierarchical notes manager is great for this. My favorite is Zim Wiki.

Zim Wiki - http://zim-wiki.org

I'm one of the few active users of Google Wave. I'm all about the tracking of history so I can see how an idea evolved. I used to use local text files, but I didn't like that they weren't available on the web and could easily be buried on my desktop/documents folder. Wave also has rich formatting and supports inline attachments. One caveat - you can't really export out of wave easily.

I have a bound notebook, which I call my ideas book. Whenever I get an idea, I write it on the notebook, one idea per page. The rest of the page goes for details like features, implementation ideas etc.

Whenever I have some time to hack away on personal projects, I just flip through the notebook, choose an idea and go with it.

This has worked out well for me as well but mine has grid ruled pages for sketching out UI ideas and diagrams.

Scattered all over the place... scraps of papers, text files, archived emails, notebooks, margins of books... Sometimes I try to go through them and pick something to work on, a few ideas which I don't want to pursue but don't see the obvious problem with them, I post at lkozma.net/ideas .

Notational Velocity - http://notational.net, mainly because it's very easy to add a note in a few seconds using only the keyboard. I've tried a lot of note taking software, and this just stays out of your way. Also, it's open source.

I've liked the idea of a delicious style app for plain text notes, I'm working on an open source HTML5 app that stores tagged notes as JSON and can be saved in local storage which can be upload to a couchDB instance. I'll upload to gitHub if anyone is interested?

Freemind (http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page) is awesome. It helps me see patterns and sometimes combine ideas # 132 + 245 together.

Google docs. I keep a list of one-line ideas in a document. When those ideas grow, they get their own document.

I appreciate Google docs because it's easy to share my ideas with my collaborators by dropping docs into shared folders.

Shameless plug: http://www.ppcsoft.com/iknow.asp

Before this I used plain text files as many others.

Email threads. Start an email with the subject heading of the idea. Add replies as it evolves. Use a gmail label to track them so they don't fill up your inbox

That's actually a pretty good idea. Chronological and everything. I may steal it :)

Most of the general ideas I will forget, but I take the ideas I am really interested in and store them in google docs in a bullet list.

Sometimes I find myself thinking about the same idea I had in the past because I don't remember why it was a "bad" idea.

Evernote. In a bulleted list, with sub bullets if necessary or as inspiration comes so I can fill out the idea.

Evernote as well.

I have a notebook about possible projects. There, every page gets its own ideas.

I use my mobile, EverNote, GMail, whatever I have available to capture the idea.

I don't. Anything good will stick around all by itself.

OneNote + DropBox.

For the minimalists out there:

text files + dropbox

Evernote.

I'm curious how you use Evernote to keep it effective. I use Evernote as well to keep track of ideas, but I find as I start to fill out the ideas with research and notes the "parent" section - the list of ideas - becomes overwhelmed.

I ended up moving to a Google Apps Spreadsheet for a list of ideas, and then fill out info on each idea in Evernote, but would love to hear about better methods...

I use a bulleted list first, add sub bullets as ideas come, and when I'm ready to work on it, I make it into a full blown note with all my details in it.

ActionOutline

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