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Comment by gdubs | Hacker News Reader

I always keep a stack of index cards with me, bound with a large clip. Every idea gets a blank card, and I don’t feel bad ripping them up. I store them in a box I made, and they’re easy to flip through and sort.

I also have a nice notebook with dotted grid paper that I use when I’m feeling more precise with my thoughts and want to capture them more permanently, or just more elegantly.

Other than that I’ll use TextEdit or Notes.app on the iPhone, but often will transcribe that stuff to a card so I have everything together. Some stuff I’ll leave digital if I know I’ll need to keyword search for it later. But, generally, physical cards are pretty easy for remembering where things are.

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Index cards have been most effective for me too.

On those days when you are wondering what to do next I get them out and go through them. I add notes to some, throw some away. Some I break out into several cards.

There is something about the physical nature of the cards that makes them work better for me than any app I have yet tried

> I always keep a stack of index cards with me, bound with a large clip.

Sounds like the Zettelkasten system.

I'd like to try it. It sounds like a system you don't back out of, a system for life. How was your experience with it? Any caveats you'd discovered along the way?

I bought some heavy weight, dotted grid cards and they’re really beautiful. But be careful - you don’t want to get precious about them. Part of the appeal is tearing them up when they’re no longer needed, and using as many as it takes to capture an idea.

Ah, so it is different.

The Zettelkasten system seeks to save all of the cards and link to each other through a simple, but sometimes convoluted code of links. Its goal is to make all the notes into parts of a large catalogue.

Yours is more like what I'm already doing. I have a stack of wide yellow sticky papers on my desk, where I spend most of my work time. If I have an idea, I write it down on a sticky, stick it to the top-side edge of the table, and forget about it until the time of review. Once I'd transferred the notes to a more permanent storage – a to-do list or the outliner – I fold it and throw it away. (There's something more appealing to me about folding, as opposed to destroying the note.)

Using index cards might work out better for me, 'cause I'd be able to store them in a stack, rather than spread over the edge of the table. Worth looking into. Cheers!

I have the notebook layer and the App layer. A box of Index cards sounds to be a solid staging layer to add to my system. Thank you.

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