The magic of creative work comes after you collect ideas and start to find the connections between them.

Tools like Notion or Evernote aren’t built to help you make the most of what you’ve collected. They feel unnatural because humans don’t think in folders and categories; we thrive on connections and associations.

This is why for the past eight years or so I've been maintaining a single document where I keep all my hunches: ideas for articles, speeches, software features, startups, ways of framing a chapter I know I'm going to write, even whole books. I now keep it as a Google document so I can update it from wherever I happen to be. There's no organizing... See more