Ideas and I share, what they call, a complicated relationship.
At meetings, where they’re most required, they sit in protest. In the most inconvenient situations, they pour like rain. Right amidst a family conversation, bike ride, seconds before I doze off, at washrooms and the like.
Perhaps, there’s a Murphy’s equivalent here: the better the idea, the more the probability of its arrival at an inopportune time and place.
The 5 most deceptive words in humanity's history are: “I will remember this later”.
Considering my success-rate at recollecting things, I’m surprised I still manage to convince myself that I can. Sometimes, I get up in the morning to write the stuff that breezed my brain’s way last night. Most of the time, it was a one-night stand, never to resurface.
Agreed, many ideas that seem great on arrival do not survive logical scrutiny. Yet, every idea deserves to be given a safe passage and some nurturing. Because, when we say an idea is bad, it’s only bad in the context of the problem we’re solving. When we shift the gaze, the ideas can shift the gears too.
Is there a way to store ideas that matter and organize them better? I have been tinkering with various ‘ideas’.
Commonplace books are a good start
Before the digital storm took us over, writers used to keep a “commonplace book”.
What’s that?
It’s a notebook where you handwrite things you love verbatim. They could be passages, quotes, ideas, observations, etc. alongside your thoughts on the same.
If there’s a way you could organize them for later use and reference, even better.
While writing by hand might seem outdated, I think nothing implants an idea in our minds better than writing it down by hand. Nothing enhances your ability to make uncanny connections than putting them all in a book.
This is the ritual I would suggest to aspiring writers; in fact, every professional regardless of their line of work.
But they do not ‘connect the dots’
I’m a strong believer in handwritten notes. Even today, I prefer to write notes in a physical notebook.
If you never made a conscious effort to take notes, this is an excellent start. If you struggle to recollect a quote that is so perfectly relevant to your current work, this certainly helps.
Of course, as our body of notes increases, it does get increasingly difficult to quickly retrieve the one right idea. But that’s still a big leap from where we started.
Now that we’ve largely solved the problem of capacity constraint, let’s move to the next problem of ‘connecting the dots’.
Creativity is not about producing brand new ideas from thin air. Like Steve Jobs said:
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.”
And, this is where commonplace books fall short by a big margin. While they do serve the purpose of storing the information, it’s not the same as organizing it for future use. The book system thus limits our ability to link unlikely elements and make uncanny connections.
For example, the provision to add related tags to ideas vastly enhances their usability. The provision to filter ideas based on keywords is invaluable too.
I’m yet to start with digital apps like Notion, Obsidian, and Scrivener among others. There’s a custom app for screenwriters too: FinalDraft.
So I’m unable to give an educated opinion on how useful these apps are. Nonetheless, the importance of digital organization of ideas cannot be overstated.
“As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power.” ― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms
Do We Really Need Digital Apps?
Generally, people don’t write because they think they don’t have enough information to write a piece. This is untrue; most people possess more information than they credit themselves with.
The point is most information we possess is scattered and isolated. In the form they exist in your brain, they’re unlikely to yield any meaningful insights. You need to offload them somewhere, to your book or doc.
To this end, you only need to make a start. That needn’t be a digital app.
It’s possible I might use digital apps in the future. However, going by current trends, I’m not sold on the idea yet.
Recently, Notion, the popular note-making app, made news when it announced an exit from the Russian market citing US pressure. makes me want to reconsider.
We need our notes to be secure, lasting, and independent of market changes.
For users to have full control over their notes (data), it seems like a backup in the form of files is necessary.
We are still at the beginning of the digital revolution. We do not yet know if digital artifacts are endurable like printed books. And, whether the formats in use today will last decades, even centuries from now on.
We need formats that are app-agonistic. That survives the evolution of apps.
Until things get clearer, you can use what many people (including me) have been using: Google Docs. That’s all the power ‘app’ you need to start your note-taking journey.
Musings by Madhav 
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