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Comment by browningstreet | Hacker News Reader

I've been trying to get my son to take notes forever. He doesn't, except in one area -- his video channel ideas. He's gotten pretty good at pulling my phone (he doesn't have one) and sending himself a note via our family slack.

We were skiing last weekend and I had a really good idea for him -- I shared it with him and he said, "Get your phone out, write that down!" I said, "There's no way I'll forget, it's too good..!"

Neither of us can remember what it is.

Parental touche, hardcore.

I remember working for someone a couple decades ago who would go on long road trips to his vacation house and use a voice recorder. He'd record hours and hours of his thoughts, and then have his assistant transcribe the recordings.

One thing I've struggled with -- I have a lot of ideas. I write a lot of ideas down, but I do less well at capturing the level of detail that made the idea exciting at the time. That's what I'd like to develop further.

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I've been writing down notes, thoughts, ideas, concepts anything at all that seems remotely worth keeping at the time and I used to hit this particular bit all the time:

> I do less well at capturing the level of detail that made the idea exciting at the time.

Thoughts and ideas usually require context to frame them in the way that is exciting. When writing down notes I always have that required context in my head but I didn't capture that as well. I still start by writing down the part that I'm excited about but now I spend some time trying to capture that context.

What was I reading, watching, listening to when the idea occurred. Where was I when it occurred? Was there another thing I was trying to work through that led me to this? Do I have notes on that other thing, or any other related topics? I was thinking about that I can connect this note to? Coming to this thought cold is there some context I need?

The problem that I mostly have now is that my collection of notes is quite vast at this point and of varying level of quality and detail. I occasionally will spend time pruning, refining, and cleaning up my notes but I tend to produce more than I consume. I've started to focus on places in my notes where there are a lot of tight connections between notes. It means its a place that my mind keeps wandering to and where I have a high density of ideas.

I'm still looking for better ways to manage and refine my notes so these threads are all very interesting to me hahah.

I think your suggestions are well worth trying. I don't want to build the second-brain or knowledge graph that is so often discussed here -- as a secondary effect, I'd be happy if that happened.

But I also know there are two kinds of ideation I want to capture better: lightning in a bottle thoughts (the idea I had for my son came to me while we were bombing down a ski bowl), and thoughts that arise during particularly ideation friendly activities -- driving, running, working out, lying in bed, etc. It can be hard to stop the activity to record a lot, but it's stupid not to record at all (as in the story with my son), and sometimes I'll need to record more or at least record more as close in time proximity as I can manage.

I'm loathe to use voice memos, but I might need to start trying it.

> One thing I've struggled with -- I have a lot of ideas. I write a lot of ideas down, but I do less well at capturing the level of detail that made the idea exciting at the time. That's what I'd like to develop further.

Reminds me ideas I get when smoking pot. Writing them down yields more regret than not to.

:-) I don't mind having not-great ideas in the mix, and I know having ideas in and of themselves won't be enough -- execution and all that. But I believe that enriching my thought capture process will lead to better notes/thinking/follow-up and stronger execution.

Same thing with the "lot of ideas" struggle. I usually put them down initially into a sms or google notes. Then transfer into Obsidian once I get back to a laptop.

Those files are massive man, most of the ideas are 10-50 words and the file for software ideas alone has almost 5000 words (so roughly 250 of {what I think are} good software ideas). It's been an accumulation of everything for the past 6-8 years and really just enforces the whole "Ideas are a dime a dozen" mantra.

I should really start taking action on a few of them though, it's happened once or twice already where someone has made one or two of them with great success and I've gotten pissed/depressed that I didn't pursue them before they did.

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