Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?
In order of descendance, I prefer to:<p>write down by hand → type on physical keyboard → type on virtual keyboard<p>I used to have physical notebooks to write things down in. Loved the idea, never stuck with the process: too slow, can&#x27;t do much on the go¹, can&#x27;t do it with one hand.<p>¹ I often take long walks around town, which is when I get a lot of good ideas<p>Nowadays, I spend a lot of time behind the table, at home. The table is wide enough to comfortably host the laptop and a wide² yellow sticky paper stack. If I have a quick idea and am near the table, I would write it down on a sticky, take it off the stack, and stick it to the top of the table, by the stickies.<p>² I find wide stickies better for writing and&#x2F;or jotting down quick design<p>For outlining and quickly jotting down a complex idea – a character, a description of a design – or a list of ideas I use [Indigrid](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;innovationdilation.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;innovationdilation.com&#x2F;</a>). It&#x27;s a quick, minimalist outliner ready for full-keyboard control, developed by a friend of mine. There, I have several categories for long-term items I keep track of:<p>* writing (plot, characters, details etc.)
* worldbuilding
* web game design
* forum RPGs planning
* major projects
* non-fiction books
* various notes (eating &amp; dieting, songs of the year etc.) &amp; ideas
* thoughts (things that crop up on my mind)
* questions (things about life I want to find the answer to)<p>For to-do, I use [Dynalist](<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dynalist.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dynalist.io</a>). It&#x27;s slow for my taste³, but the workflow is very useful for my kind of tracking: mostly-linear, mostly-checkbox, what-to-do and what-needs-doing. I&#x27;ve also been looking into moving to [Notion](<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;notion.so" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;notion.so</a>), which is equally slow to load⁴, but provides a wider range of functions – something I find myself needing sometimes, when the thoughts move beyond linear structures.<p>³ it takes several seconds to load, so I keep it open constantly<p>⁴ both Notion and Dynalist being Electron-based apps, which takes very long to load for such small apps<p>I take the iPhone wherever I go, so it seemed appropriate to find a notetaking app for it as well. I scribe down ideas on the go, one-handed, onto Better (which is a bitch to find now; its icon is a yellow square sticky; no clue if there&#x27;s an Android app). My criteria were:<p>* quick to access,
* simple design,
* easy to write things down<p>Better satisfies all three. It&#x27;s like Google Keep, only even slicker-looking and fast.<p>I used to use Google Keep for on-laptop notetaking. It proved to be too slow, though I&#x27;d used it for a while and had accumulated a sizable stack of disparate notes.<p>I&#x27;d also used OneNote for a long time, and it was okay. I did, however, find myself having to navigate what ends up a maze of notes when you&#x27;re in a hurry to jot one down, so I didn&#x27;t stick. Evernote was no good, either, for similar reasons. (Notable, a notetaking app trending on GitHub for the last week, is like Evernote, but slicker, so if you like Evernote, check it out.)<p>Long texts – like published worldbuilding – I write in Markdown, in [Caret Editor](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;caret.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;caret.io&#x2F;</a>). It&#x27;s simple, straightforward, a bit slow (Electron, eh), but exactly what I want from a .MD editor otherwise. I love that it uses inline Markdown highlighting⁵ – it fits my mental model of a Markdown document well. It&#x27;s effectively free-to-use, as long as you can tolerate the pop-up that asks you to buy the license. [Beta releases](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;careteditor&#x2F;releases-beta&#x2F;releases" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;careteditor&#x2F;releases-beta&#x2F;releases</a>) – stable as a hyppo, far as I can tell – are free, though.<p>⁵ if you wrap some text in asterisks, it becomes oblique while still showing the surrounding asterisks, and so on<p>For life stuff, I have plain-text files for written stuff (journalling, dream-logging, quotes, and some scattered thoughts) and a big, overarching Excel table (tracking: habits, weight, exercise, finances).<p>Overall, I use Notepad for cases where I need to write down a thought quickly. My main criterium is ease of use, centered around swiftness of response. Notepad is the quickest so far, with Indigrid close second.<p>On a related note: there was a mention of a guy with a brilliant, if sophisticated, method of notetaking on a podcast (could be Wireframe). He&#x27;s carried around glasses with an in-built projector (a la Google Glass, but hand-made), and a one-hand keyboard. When he had a thought to write down, he&#x27;d switch the whole device on (no idea how, exactly) and type it down. When he needed to find a previous note, he&#x27;d switch modes and type out the text he&#x27;s searching for. It&#x27;s been a while for him and his experiment, so he has <i>a lot</i> of notes stored – about people, about fields of science, about himself etc.<p>I&#x27;d <i>love</i> something like that. Even typing – I type quickly – is slow, and I don&#x27;t like the sound of my voice enough to tape it. If I ever get an advanced prosthetic arm, I could program it so, after a certain gesture, it would react to &quot;muscle&quot; movement for keypresses, and store text either on a connected device or internally, and project the results onto a lens⁶, so I could see what I&#x27;m typing.<p>⁶ I mean, I&#x27;m already assuming being able to program a prosthetic arm for use as a keyboard, so <i>of course</i> it&#x27;s gonna connect to digital lenses wirelessly.<p>Alternatively, AR keyboard on my biological arm.