Tip of the Week: Create an Idea Bank
Angela Booth suggests that experienced writers can use journals as their idea banks:
If you’ve been writing for a few years, your journal acts as your idea bank. It’s best to maintain several journals: one for ideas, another for essays, as well as a journal for a long project like a book.
If you’re writing a novel, for example, your journal will keep you “in” the novel, even if you have to leave the project for a week or two.
An idea bank would be helpful for anyone who works with information and ideas. You don’t have to use a paper journal, because there are lots of desktop or online solutions too. You could use a wiki, a note-taking application, a desktop information manager like DevonThink or PersonalBrain, a password-protected blog (to keep your ideas under wraps while they’re gestating), or text files.
How do you capture your ideas?
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“How do you capture your ideas?”
old fashioned white board next to my desk, the easiest way for me to capture ideas on the fly
OneNote, for quick thoughts.
Next, perhaps… Freemind it.
Notes all over the place and the drafts feature in Gmail.
Note pad, whiteboard and my favorite any time…Olympus Digital voice recorder.
Would definitely recommend PersonalBrain for that. Create an extra thought called “ideas” and have those notes link to that (in addition to permanent links their more formal category thoughts.) If the idea turns into something more than an idea, it could drop the link to the idea thought and instead be linked to something called “projects” or “campaigns” or whatever.
I may be biased, but I swear by Backpack.
I’m a big proponent of using Wikis for organizing just about anything these days. However, I’ve found that Journler for the Mac is really growing on me. You’re not just limited to having to type in your idea – you can record audio, video or take a snapshot with just a click. I’ve recorded conversations and taken snapshots of things I’d scribbled elsewhere and find it’s remarkably useful.
For capturing random ideas and rough sketches, I use a paper notebook. Any time I have an idea that’s more than a fleeting thought, it goes in there. It’s hard to beat the simplicity of paper for just doodling.
Once an idea moves beyond the conceptual stage, I tend to use Backpack to organize that. Each idea gets it’s own page. I use the body of the page for the overall vision and “elevator pitch”, the lists to capture high level features, and Writeboards for in-depth writing. It’s not a perfect tool, but it’s the best I’ve found so far. Wikis are good, but lack some of the flexibility and organization that Backpack provides.
All this to say: Jason is certainly biased, but he’s also right :)
Several cool collaboration platform are popping up on the web – I’ve alpha-tested ThinkFold (http://www.thinkfold.com/) – an outliner with lots of nice features as well as MindMeister (http://www.mindmeister.com/) – a mindmapper with MindManager/Freemind compatibility.
I use Destiny Goals (http://www.destinygoals.com) it’s simple and its FREE!