Use an ideas basket for quick note taking [Hack Your Day]
If you struggle with keeping in mind all the little ideas that come to you, try out a solution I found which works well at home, at my desk, and makes sure I get everything down before it goes away for good.
As I’ve mentioned before I myself struggle a lot with the heaps of ideas that come to my mind. I was designing a theme when I visited Hack Your Day to take a look at the styling of one of my elements and the thought occurred to me that it would be awesome to have the number of comments appear inside the speech bubble icon for the comments section.
These small ideas come to mind a lot, and I bet this happens to you too, so what do you do? You can open your favorite app, which means opening a tab, navigating to the url, writing in the task, and saving it, possibly even adding contexts and tags. This doesn’t take long, but takes too many actions and will deter your train of thought.
My solution was to prepare a small basket and some very mini pieces of paper (or index cards work fine). When an idea comes to mind I just stop typing or clicking, write down my idea and toss it in the basket. This enables you to resume working in seconds with only taking a very minor detour.
This also works well because you aren’t creating yet another list, and you can easily review later on. At the end of the day, just go through the pieces of paper thrown in there. If you still think the idea is good, keep it, record it, and if time has taken its toll on it, then throw it in the bin, simple.
Original post here: Daniel
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