How do you handle notes and ideas? - The Diigo Meta page

• 04 Jul 09
  

  Graham Perrin

  Notes APP ideas unread 2009

  • I write between ten and a hundred notes each day. Sometimes I add to an existing note or document. I have trouble working with notes, documents, ideas and streams of thought. Do you recognize this? How do you handle it?<p>Do you keep notes in one place? How do you accomplish that? How do you handle physical notes and non-physical notes? Do you try to gather all notes online? Where and how?

  • I don't.

    Like you, I probably have about a thousand different ideas and streams of thought during the course of a day. Unlike you, I don't write any of them down.

    I do this because there is no way I'd get anything done if I didn't. I don't mind forgetting some key insight, because if it was important or relevant enough, it'll translate into sometime I will write down when the time is right. If not, it's probably something that I shouldn't bother wasting my time with. (That's not to suggest it isn't valuable).

    You only have so many hours in the day to work on so many things. People like us need to ignore our own brain 80% of the time to be productive. It's a curse really.

  • 14 more annotations...
  • • Org-mode is nice for two reasons: first, it gives you a way to organize projects and sub-projects and meta-projects. Second, it's a reality check -- if you gave yourself a task that in no way advances any goals you've already stated, org-mode's organization scheme means that you end up either creating a new goal or admitting that a new project isn't worth your time.
    • I wasn't happy with any of the solutions out there so we built our own.

      We treat notes as a stream and you categorize notes using hashcodes.

      We have an iPhone and Android client so you can easily include pictures in your notes.

      We aren't live yet, but will be in a few weeks. =)

      If you want me to contact you when we are live sign up below,

      https://3banana.com/doLogon.action?s=hn

      </blatant self promotion :P>

    • jott.com and reqall.com - both have iphone and blackberry apps
    • Thanks, we've looked at those before and they still seems a bit too complex. I do like their audio-text bridge.

      We are building something even simpler, a personal syslog synced across phone/web/command line.

    • Fundamentally we view notes as a stream like a log file or Twitter.

      You will have one place to easily and quickly dump everything, then be able to grep out the relevant information, and then late bind the decision on what to do with that information.

    • I have 744 "Drafts" to myself in GMail.
    • Ditto. But I manage (somehow) to loosely categorize them: there is an (ever expanding) message with Music, Movies, Books and other media that I want to look at.
    • EVERNOTE!

      I can't say enough good about this program. i use it everywhere (mac, web, macbook, iphone). it's certainly not perfect (auto indent?, the ability to copy check boxes) but it is certainly good. I use a moleskine too, but for searching and loading up data, and keeping task lists, with pictures! Evernote has made me very happy.

      this question was asked awhile back on HN and that is how I found out about. I've tried various things in the past, but evernote has worked great for me. evernote.com.

    • I second or third that. Great on the mobile phone for uploading quick notes and pictures.

      Evernote is to my memos what dropbox is to my work in progress files.

    • Onenote is great indeed. Possibly underrated because it is a MS product, but it is great for note taking and syncing those notes to pda or mobile phone.
    • Warning, Mac-centric answer:

      For task lists, I tried a bunch of things at one point, and only one that stuck was Taskpaper (http://hogbaysoftware.com/products/taskpaper). It's so simple that I actually use it. I've been using it for about a year now on a sustained basis. It has simple emacs keybindings, like other OS X text editors, so that's nice for me too.

      For ideas best expressed by complicated freehand drawings, I use pen and paper. I always carry an unruled (no lines) notebook for this purpose.

      For a while I was using a small drawing tablet and Curio (http://www.zengobi.com/products/curio/) for drawings, but it didn't stick. The GUI was a little too slow, and plugging in the tablet was too much of an extra step. A tablet Mac would solve this. (Yeah, yeah I could get a PC, but I'd rather avoid it if I can.)

      When I take notes at a meeting or a talk, I use TextEdit (again, w/ simple emacs keybindings), and depend on spotlight to help me relocate things. I prepend all filenames with the date in <2 digit year><2 digit month><2 digit day> format, so by default things sort by date across filesystems etc. This is surprisingly useful.

    • Luminotes.com or Google Notebook.

      On the go? Moleskine

    • I was in the same boat, taking at least 10 notes in a session, several times a day. I work best by blasting notes in and sorting through them when I come up for air. There wasn't anything that allowed me to work this way very effectively, so I did what any of you would have done - started a startup, of course!

      We are live, you can check us out at the link below:

      http://www.ubernote.com

    • I'm currently trying different systems, and to be honest, I'm not 100% happy with any of them.

      Started with the lovely and simple Notepad textfiles, but after a bit they are too simple and too hard to maintain, thus not good.

      Then I used Google Notebook for a long time, was easy to add stuff, but not so easy to find it later. Plus it's still too simple for my liking, can't categorize ideas too well.

      I switched recently to Evernote, which seems to be an improvement over Google Notebook, but for some reason I still don't feel comfortable with it. The fact that I can type offline and sync with different computers or read my ideas online is really welcome and handy, though.

      Everytime I fall back to my paper notebook, which is also too simple and not search friendly, but I like handwriting and for some strange reason, ideas flow much better than when I write rather than type them. The real only grudge I have with it is that there is no backspace key and no "insert a new line in the middle of the text" either :(

• 03 Jul 09
  

  Joel Liu

  Notes APP ideas

  • I write between ten and a hundred notes each day. Sometimes I add to an existing note or document. I have trouble working with notes, documents, ideas and streams of thought. Do you recognize this? How do you handle it?<p>Do you keep notes in one place? How do you accomplish that? How do you handle physical notes and non-physical notes? Do you try to gather all notes online? Where and how?

  • I don't.

    Like you, I probably have about a thousand different ideas and streams of thought during the course of a day. Unlike you, I don't write any of them down.

    I do this because there is no way I'd get anything done if I didn't. I don't mind forgetting some key insight, because if it was important or relevant enough, it'll translate into sometime I will write down when the time is right. If not, it's probably something that I shouldn't bother wasting my time with. (That's not to suggest it isn't valuable).

    You only have so many hours in the day to work on so many things. People like us need to ignore our own brain 80% of the time to be productive. It's a curse really.

  • 14 more annotations...
  • • Org-mode is nice for two reasons: first, it gives you a way to organize projects and sub-projects and meta-projects. Second, it's a reality check -- if you gave yourself a task that in no way advances any goals you've already stated, org-mode's organization scheme means that you end up either creating a new goal or admitting that a new project isn't worth your time.
    • I wasn't happy with any of the solutions out there so we built our own.

      We treat notes as a stream and you categorize notes using hashcodes.

      We have an iPhone and Android client so you can easily include pictures in your notes.

      We aren't live yet, but will be in a few weeks. =)

      If you want me to contact you when we are live sign up below,

      https://3banana.com/doLogon.action?s=hn

      </blatant self promotion :P>

    • jott.com and reqall.com - both have iphone and blackberry apps
    • Thanks, we've looked at those before and they still seems a bit too complex. I do like their audio-text bridge.

      We are building something even simpler, a personal syslog synced across phone/web/command line.

    • Fundamentally we view notes as a stream like a log file or Twitter.

      You will have one place to easily and quickly dump everything, then be able to grep out the relevant information, and then late bind the decision on what to do with that information.

    • I have 744 "Drafts" to myself in GMail.
    • Ditto. But I manage (somehow) to loosely categorize them: there is an (ever expanding) message with Music, Movies, Books and other media that I want to look at.
    • EVERNOTE!

      I can't say enough good about this program. i use it everywhere (mac, web, macbook, iphone). it's certainly not perfect (auto indent?, the ability to copy check boxes) but it is certainly good. I use a moleskine too, but for searching and loading up data, and keeping task lists, with pictures! Evernote has made me very happy.

      this question was asked awhile back on HN and that is how I found out about. I've tried various things in the past, but evernote has worked great for me. evernote.com.

    • I second or third that. Great on the mobile phone for uploading quick notes and pictures.

      Evernote is to my memos what dropbox is to my work in progress files.

    • Onenote is great indeed. Possibly underrated because it is a MS product, but it is great for note taking and syncing those notes to pda or mobile phone.
    • Warning, Mac-centric answer:

      For task lists, I tried a bunch of things at one point, and only one that stuck was Taskpaper (http://hogbaysoftware.com/products/taskpaper). It's so simple that I actually use it. I've been using it for about a year now on a sustained basis. It has simple emacs keybindings, like other OS X text editors, so that's nice for me too.

      For ideas best expressed by complicated freehand drawings, I use pen and paper. I always carry an unruled (no lines) notebook for this purpose.

      For a while I was using a small drawing tablet and Curio (http://www.zengobi.com/products/curio/) for drawings, but it didn't stick. The GUI was a little too slow, and plugging in the tablet was too much of an extra step. A tablet Mac would solve this. (Yeah, yeah I could get a PC, but I'd rather avoid it if I can.)

      When I take notes at a meeting or a talk, I use TextEdit (again, w/ simple emacs keybindings), and depend on spotlight to help me relocate things. I prepend all filenames with the date in <2 digit year><2 digit month><2 digit day> format, so by default things sort by date across filesystems etc. This is surprisingly useful.

    • Luminotes.com or Google Notebook.

      On the go? Moleskine

    • I was in the same boat, taking at least 10 notes in a session, several times a day. I work best by blasting notes in and sorting through them when I come up for air. There wasn't anything that allowed me to work this way very effectively, so I did what any of you would have done - started a startup, of course!

      We are live, you can check us out at the link below:

      http://www.ubernote.com

    • I'm currently trying different systems, and to be honest, I'm not 100% happy with any of them.

      Started with the lovely and simple Notepad textfiles, but after a bit they are too simple and too hard to maintain, thus not good.

      Then I used Google Notebook for a long time, was easy to add stuff, but not so easy to find it later. Plus it's still too simple for my liking, can't categorize ideas too well.

      I switched recently to Evernote, which seems to be an improvement over Google Notebook, but for some reason I still don't feel comfortable with it. The fact that I can type offline and sync with different computers or read my ideas online is really welcome and handy, though.

      Everytime I fall back to my paper notebook, which is also too simple and not search friendly, but I like handwriting and for some strange reason, ideas flow much better than when I write rather than type them. The real only grudge I have with it is that there is no backspace key and no "insert a new line in the middle of the text" either :(

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