Persistent Thoughts
03 April 2011
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about capturing thoughts as they happen.
Last year during Rocktober, thanks to Andy and Antony, I developed a crippling addiction to index cards, post-it-notes and Sharpie pens.
While we worked, ideas were written on post-it-notes and stuck on the desk next to our keyboards. Once we’d collected a few related ideas, or observed a theme emerging among the notes, we’d write that theme on an index card, stick the related post-it-notes to the card and stick the whole thing onto an ‘Idea Wall’ behind us.
Over the course of the month we collected dozens of cards and hundreds of post-it-notes. From afar, the Idea Wall looked like a sort of city street, covered in flyers, posters and assorted graffiti. Looking closer revealed the story of dozens of conversations, thoughts, ideas and moments of inspiration.
Motivated by this I’ve since abandoned electronic note-taking tools and exclusively use notebooks, index cards and post-it-notes to capture and organise my thoughts.
Among the many great advantages of paper, cards and pens are immediacy and flexibility. Whatever I’m doing, wherever I am, ideas can be captured without breaking my concentration on the task at hand. I can organise and arrange the post-it-notes and index cards using any system; prioritise lists, annotate diagrams and construct complex threads of thought. I can write text notes or draw pictures. It’s a really versatile medium.
Lately I’ve run into some limitations of my system. The chaotic nature of many hundreds of notes, cards and scraps of paper is becoming a problem. They can’t be searched, or easily retrieved later. They don’t remember their context or when they were created in relation to other notes. They have to be manually maintained, kept up to date, edited, destroyed and recreated as the situation changes. They aren’t easily portable or shareable.
The system doesn’t scale.
In the past I’ve tried different electronic tools for ubiquitous capture and while there are excellent examples out there, they all create friction with the way I work and none of them solve all of the important problems I have.
Inspired by Marco Arment on The Build and Analyze podcast this week, I’ve decided to build my own system.
I want this system to be as fun to use as paper and pens; so maintaining the immediacy and malleability of physical tools is really important. At the same time I also want to make it elegant, powerful, and useful by solving some of the problems I outlined earlier.
Being a part-time project, for now, expect updates to follow sporadically.
Time to get started. Wish me luck.