(Archived) Facilitate Super-Fast Brainstorming?

[eunomiac 0]

I am trying to find a note-taking application that will help me with a fairly large and unwieldy creative project I'm now at the brainstorming stage for. I use tags to break up all of my ideas into a reasonably large set of categories, but the problem is that the ideas come fast-and-furious, and I need a way to tag them as quickly as they come. Currently, and please correct me if I'm wrong about this, I believe I have two choices:

1) I can enter everything stream-of-consciousness into a single note, and just manually break it up into its disparate ideas and tag them all at a later point. But, that turns what could be a one-step process into a two-step process, and is thus inefficient.

OR

2) I could close one note, open another and click through the different fields to tag it appropriately "in the moment," but that's too slow, and it interrupts the stream-of-consciousness flow of the brainstorming.

As you've probably sussed out by now, I'm talking about something that lets me enter ideas "stream-of-consciousness" as they come, while still being able to tag those ideas in the moment as individual notes. This way, I could just write, without having to close one note and open another whenever I switch topics (and tags) in my head. I imagine something as simple as a basic multiline text field, in which I could write something like:

Great Idea~Oh this is a swell idea that I would like to tag as such.#swell-idea
That Thing~Can't forget to do that thing either.#todo
Other Great Idea~Which also makes me remember that other swell idea that I also have to do.#todo swell-idea
But hey now, I can also do this with paragraphs, so they don't necessarily have to be "one note per line;" perhaps the
interface could first parse this whole block of text by hard carriage returns, then check backwards from each carriage
return for the first '#' sign. Everything to the right of that # is a space-delimited list of tags, and everything to
the left is the note that bears those tags. Incidentally, this paragraph-support is why Twittering my notes isn't quite
adequate for my needs.#method @for-evernoters
Good Point~Wow I am so awesome.#humility modesty @motivation

Which would result, as you can probably figure out, with five notes:

• [*:hql8zb6w]Great Idea "Oh this..." [swell-idea] (in default notebook)
  [*:hql8zb6w]That Thing "Can't forget..." [todo] (in default notebook)
  [*:hql8zb6w]Other Great Idea "Which also..." [todo] [swell-idea] (in default notebook)
  [*:hql8zb6w](untitled) "But hey now..." [method] (in "for-evernoters" notebook)
  [*:hql8zb6w]Good Point "Wow I am so..." [humility] [modesty] (in "motivation" notebook)

I think this would hugely facilitate brainstorming in general, would be easy to implement across all platforms, and would make Evernote the absolute perfect program for my purposes.

[jefito 5,589]

You can always create your notes untagged, in-the-moment, and then once the moment has passed, go back and tag your new notes as appropriate. Finding untagged notes is pretty easy.

~Jeff

[firefox_97 4]

+1

I agree this could be a nice feature, also a nice way to add multiple notes from a text message, you can already include @notebook and tags in a text message, but a way to allow multiple notes would be nice.

It can be pretty fast to create notes though, with keystrokes (at least in the windows client, I don't know the shortcuts in others). Ctrl-N to make a new note, and F3 to add a tag, then start typing tag name and it will auto complete, which may be faster than typing the whole tag. I don't know of a way to also change the Notebook easily from the keyboard, but that could be done later based on the tags perhaps.

[eunomiac 0]

You can always create your notes untagged, in-the-moment, and then once the moment has passed, go back and tag your new notes as appropriate. Finding untagged notes is pretty easy.

True, that would be option #1; it still requires going back and sorting through everything, which is the second superfluous step to a brainstorming process that could be super smooth (not to mention having to break up one stream-of-consciousness note into several smaller notes to tag them individually).

It can be pretty fast to create notes though, with keystrokes (at least in the windows client, I don't know the shortcuts in others).

Yeah, except my creative process is a little... unpredictable. I get ideas everywhere, all the time, and sometimes they spill out so quickly I nearly get hit by a car crossing the street while furiously tapping into my blackberry. So it's the mobile divices I'm mostly thinking about; being able to key a side-button on my blackberry to this sort of "freeform idea entry text field" within Evernote would be a dream. Free-flowing ideas, all neatly sorted as they flow... a dream? Nay, a revelation!

[jefito 5,589]

The sow-now-and-reap later technique is not so bad. I use it a lot myself, though in a slightly different way: I tag early and often, but also often add a _Todo tag for notes that I want to revisit soon. At convenient momemnts, I can go back and check my _Todo notes, and re-categorize, read more carefully, etc. It's for stuff that's interesting but not my main focus, so I put them aside where they're easily accessible to look at later.

Dunno, your idea is interesting, but seems like more advanced functionality. You would still need to go back and break up these notes by hand sometime (via some special operation I'd expect); I doubt that most would want this to happen automatically, as it would probably be easy to casually get things wrong, since the formatting characters are common and the parsing you suggest is a bit awkward (back-tracking? No thanks). Maybe with somewhat different format indicators, but if I were a user who typed in a a perfectly innocent note that happened to contain the magic formatting, and it all of a sudden, without action by me, my single note atomized into several separate notes, I'd be upset, once the confusion was over.

Might be good third-party functionality fodder, though.

~Jeff

[eunomiac 0]

You would still need to go back and break up these notes by hand sometime (via some special operation I'd expect); I doubt that most would want this to happen automatically, as it would probably be easy to casually get things wrong, since the formatting characters are common and the parsing you suggest is a bit awkward (back-tracking? No thanks). Maybe with somewhat different format indicators, but if I were a user who typed in a a perfectly innocent note that happened to contain the magic formatting, and it all of a sudden, without action by me, my single note atomized into several separate notes, I'd be upset, once the confusion was over.

Well, the whole point is to avoid having to go back for any reason. I think the key is that this wouldn't apply automatically to every note you type. I envision more of a separate place you would go when you wanted this functionality — a "brainstorming pad" or whatever. ("Everstorm?" ... Maybe not.)

Anyway, platform permitting, Evernote could preview the resulting note with each carriage return (e.g. you hit "Enter" to move to the next line, and Evernote (1) surrounds the paragraph you just finished in a rounded border, enclosing the whole note-to-be, (2) bolds the title and (3) highlights the tags, BUT still maintains the text exactly as you entered it so you aren't confused about what would happen if you Backspaced into it and started making changes.) Then, when you're done, you can either "Save Draft" (preserving the text you've just entered without parsing it out, so you can return to it later), or "Parse Notes", which will split the text into the previewed notes according to the format indicators you supplied. This, however, strikes me as a lot of extra programming when just isolating this "multi-note entry" text field from a typical note should sufficiently limit any unintentional atomization.

And I confess to not being a programmer, but I don't understand your resistance to the back-tracking method I described. I guess I understand if this applied to EVERY note, because then you couldn't use, say, a # symbol as it would create a tag out of every word following it in the paragraph. But if you're in a special text field designed for this, and you know that the last # you type introduces the first tag, then backtracking from the carriage return just strikes me as a fairly easy and robust way to program in this tagging-as-you-type functionality.

Or you could just force every tag to begin with a # (sort of like Twitter does), but #'s are hard to type on Blackberries

[jefito 5,589]

Sorry, but I think that this sort of functionality is well beyond what you could expect from a simple note taking system like Evernote. A purpose-built 3rd-party brainstorming pad that operates as you suggest might be something that a clever programmer could whip up, but I don't think that you'll be seeing it in Evernote any time soon.

just my opinion,

~Jeff

[jbenson2 2,147]

The super-fast brainstorming proposal is interesting, but I don't see any way this can be easily explained. It is just too unnecessarily complicated for a consumer based application like Evernote.