This is quite extreme: you absolutely can and will lose amazing ideas unless you can find them later written down. This comes up in interviews with great creative people all the time.
Just listen to David Lynch:
"I write [ideas] down so I don't commit suicide later having forgotten the idea. I've forgotten probably two or three major ideas, and it'll make you sick, just horrible. Write the idea down. You'll say: I'll never forget this idea. Ah-uh: you can forget them."
Back in the 90s, that feeling when Netscape or Windows used to crash. First, a feeling of utter sadness, having lost whatever work was open (imagine writing a Word document for school and hours lost, that's when you learn to save regularly). Then the feeling of relief: ah, at least I gotta start over. But it keeps gnawing. What did I miss? Back then, there was no term for it (or it wasn't popularized), now there is: FOMO.
With regards to your quote, writing down helps the brain memorizing. It turns out typing it out doesn't help as much. In that sense, a notes app isn't akin to writing a note, the former isn't handwriting and the latter isn't digitized with all the advantages (and disadvantages!) attached. Its why I bought a reMarkable 2 for my mother (before they went all cloudy). She writes down a lot. It became a mess of notes, pure chaos. A digital notebook is the best of both worlds.
Back in the 1990s, on old Macs, when Netscape crashed, it crashed with a "type 11" error which brought down the whole system. (I remember Word had autosave... I don't know when it first appeared, though.)
I have the same feeling now... Firefox doesn't crash anymore, even with 1000+ (unloaded) tabs... but I will often found that the page (or a youtube video) is now gone/removed after months or even years.
I suspect it still loses data and maybe corrupts profile if there is a disk full.
Personally, when I am in idea mode I'm usually incapable of detailed problem solving, and when I'm in details mode I'm incapable of idea generation. It takes many minutes to change modes and on some days I simply can not change.
So, if I don't write notes, I can't do anything complex. Some 20% of the ideas turn out to be useless, and must be discarded, otherwise they add up, but most of them, buy a large margin are stuff that should be executed.
When I work my side project I keep all ideas and tasks scribbled randomly on a page in a notebook. If I try to organize those pages or keep tasks away from ideas on a different page I just crash. I have to be sure not to try to organize any of it. I barely use the lines and just cram in little blocks of text wherever I feel they should go in the monlment. I flip back through the pages and have a record of what needs done, what I have done, and the things I need to do or think I need to do.
This somehow enables me to chew through a tremendous amount of work compared to projects at work that are rigidly organized. Sometimes I will write down a huge list of tasks, never look at them again, work for a few hours, and check my notes to find that I can cross them all off.
I have tried using the tools we typically use at work like Jira or Azure Boards. Total waste of time that stifles the mind.
Sometimes I can come up with great ideas while I’m not working on anything and therefore I’m not equipped to properly store them or efficiently vet them. I’ve been spending my spare time on improving my note taking process and organization.
Knowledge management feels like the western frontier of tech in some ways. Lots of wins can be had if you get it right and it’s often up to the note taker. Tools alone can’t solve the problem for most, at least not yet. Hasn’t stopped many from trying though.
I'm often doing this with my wife when she cooks - trying to write it down so we can recreate it when something turns out great; and it often does and we haven't captured it. But I always remember the story I read about a guy whose side gig was inventing a colored solution for kids to use blowing huge bubbles (harder than you think - it's got to be colored enough to see, but become transparent and nonstaining or their moms will instantly kill the product). Several years in, he found a perfect solution - then discovered the next day he hadn't written it down and couldn't recreaate it. It took him several more years to find one that worked and successfully bring it to market.
So, sure, maybe most of what goes in the notebooks is cruft, but the process is key. And the author DOES have an excellent point that the search & discovery capabilities of your system are key.
It doesn't need to be a good idea. It needs to be the next step in the branch; consider being in a conversation when some interruption happens. Interruption resolves, you say "and now back to...what was I saying?" In that moment, the value or proposition might have only been an argument or segue towards a broader point, or a sub-digression, but without that connective node, the entire pattern is lost.
You could counter with "then it wasn't a good idea if you didn't remember it" but it's the structure of how we think rather than the quality of the outputs. Why do we retrace our steps when we misplace something? What does that have to do with anything? It's the scaffolding structure around which we build a mental model. It's so you don't run outside and start looking under rocks. If you believe you wouldn't do that, you have to consider then why, and that is innately tied to the pattern-finding structure of our brain.
Creatives may cling to a lost node as the Rosetta stone, perhaps assigning more weight than is qualified, but then you won't actually know unless you find and explore that branch of thought. Its value lies in its unquantifiability.
> I've forgotten probably two or three major ideas, and it'll make you sick, just horrible.
I wish I could remember ideas well enough to even remember that I've forgotten them. When an idea of mine disappears, it's gone without a trace. I think I need to sleep better.
Not that I can claim David-Lynch levels of ideas, but I've found more than a keyword or phrase is needed to restore the mental state I was in or chain of reasoning I had when the idea came to me. You really need to save context in addition to the idea itself.
The GTD methedology can work well to park ideas in a Someday/maybe pile.
There are plenty of to-do/task managers which can accept tasks via email, and having a sudden idea can be as easy as sending that email address a quick note.
i write stuff down so i can stop memorizing it. sometimes i get back to that, sometimes i don't. it doesn't matter. if it is important i will remember it, or remember that i wrote a note about it (and then hopefully find that note). if it is not important then it will stay there left ignored.
the problem is i seem to treat browsertabs the same way. i open tabs intending to look at them later. then forget about them, and so they accumulate. i could close all the tabs, but some actually are important. and so i have to go through them, and clean them out once in a while.
I used to do the same and that turned in to turning tabs in to bookmarks, then i ended up with soooo many bookmarks.. then I discovered pocket. But within a year I had so many unread items, they even informed I was in the top 3% of users... Fuck.
yep. I've been thinking about this problem for some time now. With Google, and especially Slack, what I've discovered is resurfacing is more important than organization. You have some tiny thread of memory than you want to input into a system and have that system bring back the webpages and context. This is what Slack gets right.
We have Slack, we have Google, but we do not have anything that is personal. A personal search engine. Something like macOS Spotlight, but more contextual. In Slack you can find individual messages which match a pattern, but you can also expand to see the entire context of that message with date and time. The bookmarks in Chrome do not even tell you the date/time you added them. That's such a basic thing that is missing. The ability to create a "view" of your bookmarks organized chronologically would be another useful tool. In addition: what other sites were you looking at around that time? What city were you in? What was the weather in that city at that time? Sounds silly, but this sort of info can jog your memory.
The browser extends into the global but we have not yet discovered that the browser should extend the other way, into the personal. On one side we should have Chrome, on the other end should be Joplin or Obsidian.
I do the same, but then I take an iPad with me for long plane/boat trips with all the articles saved for offline reading.
Between the time spent in waiting rooms and actual travel time you can actually go through quite a lot of material (of course, pandemic didn't help with this strategy).
I save articles that look interesting but aren't critical to Pocket. I have a daily script that clears anything more than 2 weeks old. Either stuff gets read or it gets forgotten.
I do something similar with reminders - I schedule everything instead of keeping lists. That way I get reminded in a more digestible fashion and often by the time the reminder comes up, it's no longer relevant anyway. Makes clearing the list more organic and less cumbersome.
that's why i don't just bookmark everything. it also takes more effort to open a bookmark than to switch to a tab. instead i try to use bookmarks for the really important things.
I never understood how people can use browser tabs this way. If open tabs represent your backlog of stuff to come back to later, what represents your "current working set"? How can you concentrate on one task when there's so much other stuff open?
If I don't need something right now, it is stored in a read it later service (blog post, news articles) or a bookmark service (software projects, company web pages, etc).
I don't run my brain according to computer science principles, but generally the "current working set" for me are the tabs furthest to the right of a browser window's tab bar.
I use the Tree Style Tab add-on for Firefox. The working set can be one nested tree, like a directory in a file system. Or it can be a window, while I also have other windows with many tabs. I'm not well-organized though, just saying how it is.
For me its actually the browser window itself that represents a working set. I put all related tabs into their own windows and put the windows I'm not using on my supplemental monitor in the background so they're out of the way.
Otherwise I start drowning in browser windows and tabs
My working set is a workspace. I send browser windows to separate workspaces if I context-switch apart from a few basics like e-mail etc. which has a workspace to itself.
I may start adding things to my "scratch" workspace, and then if I realise this is something that's turning into more than just visiting a single page I'll tear of the tab and send it somewhere.
Many of those workspaces can stay up for weeks or months.
For open browser tabs, have a look at Onetab (browser extension). It'll close the tabs but keep them in a list however long you want. It lets you reopen things from the list with a click and optionally remove the ones you reopen from the list. In practice I find I very rarely go back to one of them, but for the rare occasions I do it matters, and knowing the urls are all preserved makes me much more likely to actually click that button now and again.
Not to sound obtuse, but that just sounds like browser history at that point. What sets it apart, aside from only storing the "fatal pages" - the pages that tabs were killed at?
Moving tabs into history doesn't address why people are keeping tabs pen. The presence of the tab reminds you of something. If you move it into history, you have to go looking for it, which only works if you remember that you saved such a tab in the first place.
hmm, the tab management page of one tab is interesting, but it is only available if i move tabs into onetab. i'd like the ability to manage tabs like that, assign them to groups, move them to windows, etc while all the tabs are open. i remember the original firefox container feature had something like that.
I recently started using a bookmarking app (one of the many, so many) because there were often one or two lingering tabs that I didn't want to close, and it was interfering with the way I normally clean up my screen. Normally, I close the entire browser and start fresh two or three times a day, during the workday. At night I turn the computer off, and start with a blank desktop the next morning.
Anything that really matters will pass by you multiple times in different ways. So, while some of those tabs that collect during the day no doubt have value, arguably none of them are worth keeping.
Chrome has a "bookmark all open tabs" feature, I do this to clear everything out once in a while, safe in the knowledge I'm still hoarding the data safely somewhere.
Yeah, they copied that from Firefox after they noticed how useful it was. So did Microsoft; well after FF, but IIRC long before they rebased Edge on Chromium. In Edge it's even the same hotkey: Ctrl-Shift-D.
Reminds me of one of the writing tips by Neil Gaiman [1]: "Start a compost heap"
The act of entering information into a Notes app feeds the compost heap in a more or less indirect way, which then acts as subconscious nurture for later creativity. If you of the creative kind, that is.
This looks interesting. It sort of reminds me of an open source obsidian. I tried obsidian for a while but ended up switching to a dropbox directory full of markdown files. Felt likely slightly less friction to start a new page in vim, and also be able use ripgrep to find old ideas.
While the stuff we write down is not valuable, the process of doing so is very valuable.
Most people don't even take notes or use a shoebox/second brain to store these things. What most lifelong notetakers know is that the notes themselves aren't important, but rather the process of physically writing the notes, internalizing the information, and building new connections in your head is quite important.
The remnants of this process are mostly throw away from the author's perspective, but may be novel to a random person. This reminds me of someone uncovering a journal of nonsensical information saying "What's this about?" to then the author says "That's how I figured it out".
The beauty of it all is that it's meaningful to the author and not necessarily anyone else.
I agree -- I'm a lifelong chalk/whiteboard-er. Having a large space where I can write/draw/diagram is critical for me to work through ideas. Occasionally I take pictures or copy down my notes, but usually I just erase and feel like nothing is lost.
I also find the physical component of whiteboarding to be very helpful -- standing up, walking around, pacing, etc vs. just sitting down and writing on a notepad.
Yeah, but why not reuse like... 99% of your notes? Why not just write things down only if you're going to need them again, and in a way that you will be able to find them when you need them? I'm more likely to reread a note many, many times than to take one I never reuse, because every time I need to use a cardinality aggregation or invert a conditional, I go back to the notes for that.
I noticed "I think through writing". Whenever I need to implement a new feature I first explore status quo and write it down on confluence, jira etc. Then write down that I'm gonna do, alternatives etc. It takes time but makes it way clearer how to move forward on fuzzy things.
One of the reasons I have a nice notebook and pen to write with is because I can enjoy getting stuff out of my head and then, probably, never returning to it again.
Just a simple thing so I enjoy the act of offloading in whatever way I feel like doing (scribbling, thoughtful stuff, drawing, whatever) and then I've freed up some space in my head so I can relax.
I could try the same with a notekeeping app but I feel like I have to actually maintain them, or work with their system. Not to mention, it requires screen time that I might not want. A pen and some paper has no such system so it's liberating.
IME when the note is intended to be dropped off and picked up at a particular time it's useful (e.g. remember to pack insect repellent -> add to packing list -> wait 4 weeks -> check packing list).
I'm increasingly convinced of the value of checklists for small items - especially repeated tasks.
If it's a cool idea for, like, a new business or the start of essay without any predefined time to pick it up and work on it it ends up being kind of pointless and just creates a mess.
For those things, if it's a good idea it'll pop up in your head again, probably in a better form.
Note taking has to act like a pipeline to be useful.
Ditto for camping. After one trip, I inventoried everything I took out of the car and added items that I wished I'd had. And then typed it up and left copies in my gear bin.
I also do this! A bonus benefit is you can go back through the list when packing up to come home so you don’t leave your charger/toothbrush/… in a hotel.
I always feel a little obsessive or over-careful making lists for this sort of thing but it’s amazing how much easier and less stressful it makes packing for me.
Since I started note-taking a few years ago, my productivity has increased dramatically. The biggest benefit is that you can stop working on an idea for a bit, then come back later and read it back from disk to main memory, often now seeing issues with what you have written down that are apparent now, but were not back then.
Writing a paper about your idea is the ultimate form of this, but of course most of the time overkill. But it is good to bundle everything up in a paper once enough stuff has accumulated.
> Then you try to relocate a note, only to find
> that your favorite app’s search doesn’t seem
> to be as good as you thought it was at first.
> Now we don’t feel safe forgetting anymore
I guess I'm lucky that this rarely happens. Search works great, and is instant.
I kept waiting for deeper insight, like a system of prioritzation, or culling tricks. But the article seemed to just repeat itself: writing things down frees our brain, and forgetting is ok. We feel value in doing so, ok.
Readit News
Just listen to David Lynch:
"I write [ideas] down so I don't commit suicide later having forgotten the idea. I've forgotten probably two or three major ideas, and it'll make you sick, just horrible. Write the idea down. You'll say: I'll never forget this idea. Ah-uh: you can forget them."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHhf76z6BkM&t=197s
With regards to your quote, writing down helps the brain memorizing. It turns out typing it out doesn't help as much. In that sense, a notes app isn't akin to writing a note, the former isn't handwriting and the latter isn't digitized with all the advantages (and disadvantages!) attached. Its why I bought a reMarkable 2 for my mother (before they went all cloudy). She writes down a lot. It became a mess of notes, pure chaos. A digital notebook is the best of both worlds.
I suspect it still loses data and maybe corrupts profile if there is a disk full.
So, if I don't write notes, I can't do anything complex. Some 20% of the ideas turn out to be useless, and must be discarded, otherwise they add up, but most of them, buy a large margin are stuff that should be executed.
This somehow enables me to chew through a tremendous amount of work compared to projects at work that are rigidly organized. Sometimes I will write down a huge list of tasks, never look at them again, work for a few hours, and check my notes to find that I can cross them all off.
I have tried using the tools we typically use at work like Jira or Azure Boards. Total waste of time that stifles the mind.
Knowledge management feels like the western frontier of tech in some ways. Lots of wins can be had if you get it right and it’s often up to the note taker. Tools alone can’t solve the problem for most, at least not yet. Hasn’t stopped many from trying though.
I'm often doing this with my wife when she cooks - trying to write it down so we can recreate it when something turns out great; and it often does and we haven't captured it. But I always remember the story I read about a guy whose side gig was inventing a colored solution for kids to use blowing huge bubbles (harder than you think - it's got to be colored enough to see, but become transparent and nonstaining or their moms will instantly kill the product). Several years in, he found a perfect solution - then discovered the next day he hadn't written it down and couldn't recreaate it. It took him several more years to find one that worked and successfully bring it to market.
So, sure, maybe most of what goes in the notebooks is cruft, but the process is key. And the author DOES have an excellent point that the search & discovery capabilities of your system are key.
You could counter with "then it wasn't a good idea if you didn't remember it" but it's the structure of how we think rather than the quality of the outputs. Why do we retrace our steps when we misplace something? What does that have to do with anything? It's the scaffolding structure around which we build a mental model. It's so you don't run outside and start looking under rocks. If you believe you wouldn't do that, you have to consider then why, and that is innately tied to the pattern-finding structure of our brain.
Creatives may cling to a lost node as the Rosetta stone, perhaps assigning more weight than is qualified, but then you won't actually know unless you find and explore that branch of thought. Its value lies in its unquantifiability.
I wish I could remember ideas well enough to even remember that I've forgotten them. When an idea of mine disappears, it's gone without a trace. I think I need to sleep better.
The GTD methedology can work well to park ideas in a Someday/maybe pile.
There are plenty of to-do/task managers which can accept tasks via email, and having a sudden idea can be as easy as sending that email address a quick note.
Dead Comment
the problem is i seem to treat browsertabs the same way. i open tabs intending to look at them later. then forget about them, and so they accumulate. i could close all the tabs, but some actually are important. and so i have to go through them, and clean them out once in a while.
yep. I've been thinking about this problem for some time now. With Google, and especially Slack, what I've discovered is resurfacing is more important than organization. You have some tiny thread of memory than you want to input into a system and have that system bring back the webpages and context. This is what Slack gets right.
We have Slack, we have Google, but we do not have anything that is personal. A personal search engine. Something like macOS Spotlight, but more contextual. In Slack you can find individual messages which match a pattern, but you can also expand to see the entire context of that message with date and time. The bookmarks in Chrome do not even tell you the date/time you added them. That's such a basic thing that is missing. The ability to create a "view" of your bookmarks organized chronologically would be another useful tool. In addition: what other sites were you looking at around that time? What city were you in? What was the weather in that city at that time? Sounds silly, but this sort of info can jog your memory.
The browser extends into the global but we have not yet discovered that the browser should extend the other way, into the personal. On one side we should have Chrome, on the other end should be Joplin or Obsidian.
Between the time spent in waiting rooms and actual travel time you can actually go through quite a lot of material (of course, pandemic didn't help with this strategy).
I do something similar with reminders - I schedule everything instead of keeping lists. That way I get reminded in a more digestible fashion and often by the time the reminder comes up, it's no longer relevant anyway. Makes clearing the list more organic and less cumbersome.
If I don't need something right now, it is stored in a read it later service (blog post, news articles) or a bookmark service (software projects, company web pages, etc).
Otherwise I start drowning in browser windows and tabs
I may start adding things to my "scratch" workspace, and then if I realise this is something that's turning into more than just visiting a single page I'll tear of the tab and send it somewhere.
Many of those workspaces can stay up for weeks or months.
I recently started using a bookmarking app (one of the many, so many) because there were often one or two lingering tabs that I didn't want to close, and it was interfering with the way I normally clean up my screen. Normally, I close the entire browser and start fresh two or three times a day, during the workday. At night I turn the computer off, and start with a blank desktop the next morning.
The act of entering information into a Notes app feeds the compost heap in a more or less indirect way, which then acts as subconscious nurture for later creativity. If you of the creative kind, that is.
[1] https://writingcooperative.com/neil-gaimans-top-13-writing-t...
Most people don't even take notes or use a shoebox/second brain to store these things. What most lifelong notetakers know is that the notes themselves aren't important, but rather the process of physically writing the notes, internalizing the information, and building new connections in your head is quite important.
The remnants of this process are mostly throw away from the author's perspective, but may be novel to a random person. This reminds me of someone uncovering a journal of nonsensical information saying "What's this about?" to then the author says "That's how I figured it out".
The beauty of it all is that it's meaningful to the author and not necessarily anyone else.
I also find the physical component of whiteboarding to be very helpful -- standing up, walking around, pacing, etc vs. just sitting down and writing on a notepad.
let's assume that without a good note-taking app, we reuse 1% of our notes. And with a good note-taking app we reuse 2% of our notes.
Our feeling will stay the same:those notes are a trash heap.
But we doubled the number of the "ideas" we can access, which seems like a good ROI.
And definetly, the process is useful.
Just a simple thing so I enjoy the act of offloading in whatever way I feel like doing (scribbling, thoughtful stuff, drawing, whatever) and then I've freed up some space in my head so I can relax.
I could try the same with a notekeeping app but I feel like I have to actually maintain them, or work with their system. Not to mention, it requires screen time that I might not want. A pen and some paper has no such system so it's liberating.
I'm increasingly convinced of the value of checklists for small items - especially repeated tasks.
If it's a cool idea for, like, a new business or the start of essay without any predefined time to pick it up and work on it it ends up being kind of pointless and just creates a mess.
For those things, if it's a good idea it'll pop up in your head again, probably in a better form.
Note taking has to act like a pipeline to be useful.
I always feel a little obsessive or over-careful making lists for this sort of thing but it’s amazing how much easier and less stressful it makes packing for me.
Writing a paper about your idea is the ultimate form of this, but of course most of the time overkill. But it is good to bundle everything up in a paper once enough stuff has accumulated.
I guess I'm lucky that this rarely happens. Search works great, and is instant.
I kept waiting for deeper insight, like a system of prioritzation, or culling tricks. But the article seemed to just repeat itself: writing things down frees our brain, and forgetting is ok. We feel value in doing so, ok.