Capturing your thoughts - Why & How
Ideas come and fade out in seconds. Maybe one of them may lead you to your holy grail.
Welcome to another edition of Alvistor Museletter. This is Sakthitharan writing to you. Here's what I am saying this week for you. Telling you the importance of jotting down your thoughts and ideas instantly somewhere. And then having a system to work it further at a later time.
I am NOT talking about taking notes. What I am talking about here is entirely different from note-taking. Ground-breaking ideas appear out of nowhere and at any time. Mostly, when you are least expecting it. These thoughts don't arise during work, not when you read a non-fiction book or an article at the office, not when you think hard for a solution or search hard for something.
Contrarily, these ideas appear in your mind when you are doing something polar opposite to serious work. While reading a story, while watching a movie, when talking to your children, at the gym, or anywhere inappropriate. Noting these thoughts down is a good habit.
There are two types of work or two types of roles. (I heard this through Shu Omi)
Manager,
Maker.
The manager wants to get things done, highly relies on task management, team management, work assignment. Maker wants to create things, like writing a book, designing an interface of an app, writing a code, drawing new art, etc. Some may play both roles. Regardless of the roles, ideas and thoughts pop out in their head all the time. Most of them are relevant to their work, but not appears coherently at the relevant time.
People get random ideas at random time about random things. Though they can't act on it immediately, they can record it somewhere for later action.
Capturing is important. Don't rely on your memory here. Your brain is place where thinking happens all the time. It is not suppose to remember things. Practically it is not good at remembering, except for some gifted people. The retention time is smaller, especially for random thoughts.
💭 🔜 📝 Capture all your thoughts immediately, before it fades away. When capturing don't waste your time in estimating the importance of the content or how you going to use it later. "Just focus on converting your thoughts to text (or sketch), nothing else".
I use the app Drafts to capture my thoughts and ideas instantly and later I process it. The text I captured may come out as a tweet, a chunk for my Alvistor Museletter, a trigger for a blog post, a novel idea for my academic research, or simply become a task in my task manager. Check the below article if you want to know more about Drafts.
Drafts(app) - An app where my productivity workflow starts as text.
Drafts. As the name suggests, it is a casual drafting app, a text processor of simple look and powerful action features.
You can use any app of your choice to capture. If you're using Android then Google Keep, Evernote, OneNote are good apps to capture your thoughts.
I also use paper & pen to jot down and then take a photo of it for later processing.
You can use voice recorder app which can transcribe your audio into text.
Smart Voice Recorder - Offline — apps.apple.com
on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
Recorder (Offline transcribing) — recorder.withgoogle.com
for android phones
Do you use any app for capturing? Let me and other readers know. Share them here.
In the further issue, let's discuss how to process your captured thoughts.