Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them
David allen
I’ve been thinking recently that I need an improved way of capturing my thoughts quickly.
I find that ideas (or more likely inspiration) tend to come to me relatively often. But my memory has never been the best, so I need to make sure that I can capture them with as little friction as possible. There is nothing worse than forgetting an idea, so I really wanted to make sure I could minimise the chances of this happening.
Now these ideas, can come at any time and in many different forms, so I needed a tool that could efficiently record them. As usual, I needed something in a digital form so I could drop in a link or screenshot, and it had to sync across my devices. Quite clearly, it needed to be an app of some form.
To start with, I looked at the apps already on my phone to see if there is anything that I could tweak to fulfil this glaring hole in my system.
While I’ve got loads of apps on my phone (who hasn’t?!), none of them jumped out as being an obvious choice for instant captures. Notion is great, but I haven’t got the knowledge to get the inbox database set right. And to do lists didn’t really work as these ideas wouldn’t necessarily need actioning straight away.
So, I started looking around, and after shortlisting three or four apps before I quickly settled on Evernote.
I have used Evernote previously, but not for years if I’m honest. So I signed up for a free account, and set about testing how well it could work. To start with, I have the app on my phone and my desktop, but I’ll look at adding it to my iPad in due course too.
I’ve originally set up 4 notebooks; Inbox, Work, Personal and MR84 (that’s my shorthand for this site and YouTube etc). I can quickly create a new note, and this can be in the form of text, sketch, audio or a photo. I can also add links, or scan a document directly from the app. Any new notes are set to be saved to the Inbox as standard, but I can then move them around as I need to.
Another cool feature is that I can create templates for my notes (Thomas Frank talks about templates in his Skillshare video). Now this isn’t something I have spent a great deal time on, but I will definitely be looking into this more just to help as a prompt when inspiration strikes.
I will definitely be looking into Evernote more, and I’m sure there are some great tutorials online. I’ll also be looking at whether it is worthwhile upgrading to a premium account, but the free one is serving me pretty well right now.
But as usual, while this tool is great, it is more about the system in place.
I needed my process of capturing my thoughts to be slicker. I can’t risk forgetting information, and misplacing it. With this inbox for my life, I can write a note, take a picture or save a link and know that it will be there for me to review. I can then move this information to whichever part of my system is best suited. That could be my To Do List, or my article database.
Next steps…
As I said, I will definitely be looking at how I can develop my use of Evernote and including the addition of templates. A small part of me even wonders if it could take over Notion as a project management structure. This means I wouldn’t necessarily need to move my capture notes out of Evernote. Rather, I could just develop them and organise with the same app.
An interesting thought, but too early to tell right now.
Anyway, it’s rally important to ensure you can capture these thoughts or ideas and how you can store and organise them to ensure our efficiency remains high. Time is precious enough for all of us, so lets make sure it isn’t wasted.
