Ask HN: How do you capture and manage ideas?

7 points·mjipeo··6 comments

Currently I use a Google Spreadsheet and share ideas with friends via email or over coffee. I'm wondering what tools others use to manage this process.

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Trello It's Kanban style layout allows you to see set it up so that you can see progress laid out in a column style format (ie To Do, Doing, Done - at the simplest level).

Plus it's free - the price is right!

You can also link from Trello to whatever you want - so if you have a Google Doc with more detail for example, you can just link to that from the summary in Trello.

Hope that helps. Happy to answer more questions.

In depth knowledge of the problem matters with an ideas list. ... When I was doing my PhD, I had lots of ideas, but limited knowledge of the subject (Logistics) and limited knowledge of what needs to be in a thesis. So my lists of ideas were child like. They had little value. I soon moved on. After I had done lots of reading about logistics and what people expect to find in a thesis my ideas changed. I had a list of ideas that were connected to knowledge of the problem. It was very easy to rank the ideas and work out what gets done next and throw out the rubbish. The list of ideas were not some random guess, but informed and clear. These days I try to ensure my list of ideas is based on indepth knowledge and if not, then the top item is "get some indepth knowledge". This tends to mean the other items in my list have no value a all.

I'm developing a web app that does this: https://flownote.io

You can have a tree structure of notebooks and share your notes via email.

I've tried a few systems and apps, but time and again I find myself coming back to a notebook and a pen.

Hackpad is pretty sweet.

Notes app

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