Getting Ideas Out of Your Head

October 3, 2007

I’ve just been doing some brain storming. Never mind what it was about. Some whacky business idea. I want to talk about the tools that I used.

I wanted to get the ideas quickly out of my head so I used Scrivener Gold. I love it because it’s free and it capitalizes sentences. This is great when I’m jotting down ideas because I can just write and press Return and write some more, and it’s nicely cased without any shift-pressing on my part. If an idea is immediately and obviously a sub-set of the previous one then I just press tab at the beginning of that line.

When I’ve got enough to be going on with I select all and copy, then I open Deep Notes and make a new document; I deselect the default entry and then paste. There are all my ideas as an outline where I can drag and drop them to nest and re-arrange them into a more logical order.

Why didn’t I just jump straight into Deep Notes? Because in order to stay on the keyboard I would need to remember the unique key combinations for creating all the specific types of new entry. Back in Scrivener all I had to remember was Return and Tab — freeing my feeble mind for the more creative stuff I was working on.

Although Deep Notes displays each entry as a single line, that line can contain an entire paragraph of imported text, so it’s a snap to re-arrange paragraphs (say, for a blog post) and then export the whole package as plain text.

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