Turn Your Notes Into a Creative Lab

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

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 pr... See more

"The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle; reinvent. Build a tangled bank." — Steven Johnson