Ask HN: What do you do to make sense of your thoughts over time? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you do to make sense of your thoughts over time?

13 pointsIgorCarron20 comments

A generic question that comes back often is how to put one's thought in consignment somewhere so as to not let this potential "big idea".

My question is further down the road: once all the ideas have been streaming and been written or stored somewhere: how do you assembled them together ? how do you review this product several months later ? Are you happy that you have been mindmapping your thoughts correctly ? has this had an influence on how you conducted your "business" ?

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I don't even bother trying. Hoarding "ideas" doesn't make any sense to me.

I will always have ideas. The Halfbakery website is full of people's ideas. My mom has ideas. Everyone has ideas. Someone's probably had the very same idea already.

Ideas are so cheap and common, they're almost worthless by themselves.

I put far more value into execution. Actually making an idea happen, that's where the value is. In order to make ideas happen, I need resources, so what I need to concentrate on right now is developing lots and lots of resources.

Whenever I need an analogy, I think of ideas as being seeds. You can go to just about any store these days and pick up a little packet of seeds for real cheap. Each one of those seeds has the potential to become something beautiful, but only if you give it soil and water and sunshine and a place to grow.

So before I go trying to figure out where to store all my piles of packets of seeds, I should figure out how I'm going to get the farmland I need to grow them all in the first place.

To carry on your analogy, I believe the original question was more similar to: I have farmland that's currently completely saturated with a variety of bountiful crops, but every day I'm finding these new seeds that seem like they would make for even better crops, and that seem like genuinely fun things to plant. However, as excited as I am about planting them, I don't have the resources—my farmland is full. How do I store the seeds in a way that will persist the level of excitement I had about them, so that when I reap one of my crops, I can pick the next idea to follow from my piles of packets?

Ideas have value. Most good ideas are a result of the unique perspective of the person who has them. Many years of life experience (working in an industry, talking to others, etc) usually go into coming up with a new idea, not to mention research and detailed thought about specific problems.

Ideas are very common, every person has them. But good ideas are rare. Consistently coming up with good ideas is difficult, and it might be worth it to give some thought to the process.

I am of the opinion that good ideas are generally the sum of worthwhile but small ideas and that there is in fact the need for "coagulate" these together to have something worth it.

Storing your ideas is very different from hoarding them. You can't give your ideas way if you never retain them longer than they fleet in your mind.

Storing, remembering them, and evaluating ideas is a real concern for me.

I wrote a little cl script called 'do'. It requests a name, description, and tag list for anything I think I might like to 'do' in the future. For instance:

  Name: Gideon Series
  Do a series of new-primitivism photos, Goldsworthy 
  pieces, except environment is cheap motel room. Bible, 
  towels, bad art, curtains, etc.
  Tags: art, medium, moderate

Then I can forget the idea. When I feel the need to begina new piece, I can ask for ideas about art:

  > do art

And one will appear for my perusal. 'Medium' and 'moderate' refer to difficulty and time required.

  > do short easy

Helps to fill spare moments, when I don't have much attention to spare.

Have you open-sourced that? I'd like to use that.

I don't worry about that. It's the process of writing down ideas that matters to me. Writing it down forces you to think clearly; gives your idea structure. If the idea is still good when you read it to yourself: great. You'll be able to reconstruct the idea at a later time if you need it. If the idea doesn't sound that good anymore, just forget about it. So I don't file ideas anywhere. I often don't even bother to save the files with all my ideas when I reboot my PC. Saving stuff I'm not going to look at later isn't worth it.

You write ideas down so they don't distract you while you're trying to work. Ideas interrupt your train of thought: they're harmful. Write them down clears your mind -- and a clear mind is far more valuable than any single idea.

Nice solution, writing the thought or blogging about it is definitely a good way to anchor it in one's memory for future reuse.

The process of collecting the ideas is super easy for me. I use the all-time-and-devises-compatible .txt file. I am attached to 5 different machines. My laptop (Linux) , office PC (WinXP), Home server (Linux), Pocket PC (Wm6) and the work UNIX servers (HP-UX x 4). Whenever I have an idea I fire the minimalist text editor I have. Usually [ ~> vi idea_description.txt ] then I write whatever on my mind. I don't care that much about the writing; just a mind stream. Considering me as a media carrier, the 5 devises are in some kind of a network. Every couple of days I collect the ideas from the different machines into single directory called [IN BASKET] in my laptop. Usually through the FTP, email and/or bluetooth.

I don't care that much about making the ideas real. If they are worth living they will occupy my mind a great deal. Which means the .txt file will get bigger and bigger over the time. At the end I will naturally make them happen. By just executing the .txt file in the life environment :P.

Thanks. Once again it looks like one cannot be sophisticatged neither in the thought collection mode nor in the eventual growth of certain ideas.

Right now, I'm using the "Someday" slot in Things to represent concepts, ideas, and other things that don't have an immediate "plan" attached. It works well enough for storage and search, but that "assembling together" process has brought up another idea for something that would work better: basically, a program that shows you all your ideas as little fridge-magnets, allows you to move them around and draw relationships between them, and group them together under "named entities" (e.g. for a novel, character traits could be moved around and grouped to form characters.)

This is what mindmapper like freemind allow you to do. I am very much interested in hearing about the next step. When one has one or several mindmaps, how do these grow old ? do we see a larger mindmap of the smaller ones, something else ?

Two things:

1) I use an iPhone todo app (http://www.appigo.com/todo) to jot down ideas as I get them in a "Projects" category. This lets me quickly browse through them at a later time. You can add notes too if your ideas are elaborate and you want to jot them down too.

2) Keep a journal. Write down what you're thinking. There's nothing quite like reading something you read six months ago and wondering, "What was I thinking?"

I have re-do the whole thing - that helps me coagulate everything and throw out the redundancy and unnecessary.

Nice solution. But in that process you don't really have a history or version control of this document.

It's really simple for me...

1. I write everything down in an unlined spiral notebook with perforated detachable pages.

2. I file every page into a labeled green file folder in a file cabinet.

3. I keep all of it.

I've been doing this for 30 years. I have everything I ever wrote. If fills 3 two drawer file cabinets.

I don't print and save anything which is already stored digitally. I hardly save much else.

About once a month I pull out a folder a go through it. Obviously, there's a lot of stuff that appears to be of little use now, but I never fail to find something of value.

I give away or donate any that is replaceable (which includes all books). But not my own writings. I don't remember how I handled that issue 12 years ago, but I do know that I can find all my notes on it pretty quickly. This way I don't have to remember every detail, but I always have my younger self and much of my experience as a resource at my disposal.

once a month you go through that month's folder, once the folder has been viewed what do you do with it ? do you put in the drawer file cabinet never to be seen again ?

I almost wrote you a detailed response but then I realized you didn't even proofread your post. :(

It's a shame.

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