A Meta-Layer for Notes

Ideaflow, the note-taking software I help build at work, also embodies many of these principles. In fact, Ideaflow is my current “main” notes app. Ideaflow’s main interface is a timeline of notes, what we’ve internally called your “thought stream”. Imagine a long Twitter-style timeline, where each tweet is a note of some arbitrary length, potential

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Pretty soon, it becomes surprisingly easy to fill a full work day simply responding to whatever pops up instead of intentionally working on the highest priority things. We can easily fall into the trap that I described in the intro where we outsource our prioritization with whatever comes up.Without a trusted way of saying to ourselves and our team... See more

The bigger issue, though, is what I have come to think of as note-taking’s camera roll problem: no matter how well they organize themselves, most notes are still doomed to be forgotten. When it came to pictures, Timehop and later Google Photos addressed this problem by making an effort to resurface old photos in a variety of ways: on the anniversar... See more

The real potential of a digital organizational system is to be a tool for capturing and systematically reminding you of past ideas, inspirations, insights, and connections. The heart of creativity and innovation is making spontaneous connections between seemingly unrelated things, and note-taking programs can, when used correctly, serve as a cognit... See more