Ask HN: How do you capture your thoughts and ideas? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you capture your thoughts and ideas?

14 pointsKovah11 comments

I am recently trying to organize my work more as I noticed that a lot of small pieces of knowledge have gone missing in the past years: I know I solved a certain problem but can't remember how exactly. Therefore, I would like to capture more thoughts while doing my work. I already have my notes, but it feels cumbersome to search for the right place to put some idea. How do you keep track of your thoughts, solutions and ideas?

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I dump all my stuff in a tool I made called Cras. Trello, Evernote, Calendar etc all feed it, I share into it from a browser-SPA-thing and all notes get one or more #tags - so all those tools I tried before are going away (where possible)

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Another feature is to resurface old items to be culled, reorg or just resaved. And it has some agenda rules like Anydo.

I tried loads of different tools and didn't find one that "clicked" so finally did this roll-your-own

I type and paste everything into my notes.txt file. Whenever I have an idea it goes straight into there. (I wrote a short bash program + aliases so I press one key to start typing into that file, another key to paste clipboard into it, and another to check/search the notes file with "less".) Then later I go through that and move stuff from there to various LaTeX books - one main one for the current year, then specialized ones for programming languages, my programs, maths etc.

I really wish I'd started doing that 30 years earlier than I did! I kept a diary, but most of what I was thinking about and working on is just lost and forgotten. Also, being able to include pictures is so nice – like when I'm talking about someone or their work for a paragraph or more, I put their picture next to it.

I keep ideas or notes in my phone. For more structured notes, I have a folder with graph paper in it. I sectioned it based on my different hobbies and stuff. So I have a section on beer and wine making notes and recipes, beekeeping, mushrooms, etc. I also use facebook for storing pictures of my mushroom finds since it's dated and I can write a caption.

Obsidian[0] is moving fast and doing a lot of things right. Very exciting to watch it evolve. Something about this powerful wrapper around plaintext notes is really exciting.

[0] https://obsidian.md/

After a lot of self-resistance, I decided to try Notion. I am enjoying the experience a lot. The flexibility to add all kinds of stuff and references is pretty neat.

I plan to do some data mining at some point in the future. I think Notion's API will be publicly available by then and doing my analysis should (hopefully) be pretty smooth.

.ideas text file under projects directory, or one directory per idea with info.txt as the document explaining the idea under that directory.

Just be sure nobody mistakes it for the .idea/ folder intellij products leave behind and deletes it!

To quickly capture, I use sticky note in windows and a similar lightweight note app in android. Some while later, I move all to Evernote.

I write in a book. Sometimes, I also write it on the computer, too.

In a mac so: Notes.app MindNode.app VSCode

A Notion kanban board!

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