Since I can remember I have had ideas, as most of us do, and some how I record that information. Well not really, what I usually would do is have the idea, create a mental note, then evolve the idea every time I would remember it, and keep all that as a mental note. It turns out that I have a pretty good memory and I can remember most things for a very very long time if I care enough about it, but the key is the word “most”, I will remember everything to a certain point and won’t necessarily remember the details, and there lies the problem.
With that in mind I have been trying to evolve this process over the years, and I have done a series of things, like taking actual notes in a word document, or creating the project in Visual Studio, and evolving it by using the diagrams available there, drawing pictures, post its, and many others.
While the methods described above are pretty good they lack features, the word document allows you thoroughly describe you idea, but if long it would be hard to see the overall idea, also it is hard to organize more complex ideas, and there is not a necessary flow. The project, allow you to describe through diagrams and gives you code, but the finer description is harder to get, surely code comments help, but they are not on the diagram. Post its, eventually you run out of place to stick it, and also your wife might clean them up ( This has been there for a year now, its even yellow already ) . Pictures, get lost in the see of files, and apparently you can never name them in good descriptive way, and they lack comments.
That brings us to my latest trial, after talking to a friend and doing some research, there are this tools, that allow you to map your thoughts, and gradually build on top of it with new findings and ideas, the tool I am using is, wait, wait, PersonalBrain (http://www.thebrain.com/), there, I have found that its pretty simple to use, it has a 30 day trial in the full “PRO” version then it downgrades, and you loose some features, but you can still use it normally, they have this online storage if you want too, and it would allow you to share between your computers with little or no effort.
Although this is a tech targeted blog, you can use this to anything in your life, and in a group manner as well, for example in a brainstorming session, you can gather the group/team’s thoughts with all the benefits. For now I am only using a good brainstorming storage of my ideas, so any time a have sprouts I sit down an Brain it up.
The tool use a very friendly interface, and it will organize things as a Brain, so when you start you create a Brain, then you add thoughts to it, where you could for example put anything that comes to mind, as you think of then, for example, you are creating a dish, and you start by with a “Dish” thought, well now what’s in the dish. Meats? What are the possibilities, pork, chicken? Vegetables? What kind of vegetables, onions, carrots, celery? What about condiments? Hummm, cumin, salt, peppers? The nice thing is this will be represented in a graph form, where as you thing about things, you connect then and organize then in a line of thoughts manner.
Then when you have the basic layout of the thought, you can go back and expand, each of sub thoughts, and deepens the knowledge about each of them with, contacts, links, textual description, other documents like pictures, word documents, and so on. If you have the “Pro” version you will be able, to tell the thought to search more about it self, you click on it, and then you will get a option to search the internet, and it will open you browser and search for you then you revise the returned search and drag and drop the link that you found interesting.
You can also connect thoughts, so if for example you have a though that might help in another though, you can then link both together, so you will have that reference, when refining or solving that problem.
I haven’t fully evaluate, the tool, and also I haven’t looked at the competitors, but I was so amazed by what it brought to me, and the way this was designed that even if I stop right here, I think it would be an amazing benefit over every other attempt that I have done before, and yes, I will be using this from now on to record my thoughts and ideas, and maybe go a little bit further, then just ideas, who knows.
I just wanted to share this little with you guys and recommend that you try it out, it might not be for you but you can only tell after you tried.
I got a fortune cookie the other day that said:
“YOU ARE ADVENTUROUS – RIDE THE HIGHWAY OF LIFE”
Why So Serious? 