Never forget an idea again

Last week I mentioned that I started bullet journaling. It’s a great way to reflect and review my days. To be a bit more conscious of what’s going on in my head. After three months of consistent journaling it has turned into a treasure trove with valuable insight to how I spend my time, what my focus is and what I’m thinking about.

The way I’ve been doing it is that I sit down with my notebook each morning when I have breakfast. This is my reflection time. I write a few bullets on what I’m grateful for and how I expect my day to turn out.

In the evening I sit down again and review how the day actually turned out. If there was something I learned, situations I could have approached differently, events I got to take part of—these things go down in my journal as good as I can recollect them.

This all works great. I’ve built the habit for it. But the problem is all those things that happens in between. I’m not the type of person who walks around having my notebook with me at all times. I use a Baron Fig Confidant Hardcover. It’s a wonderful notebook, the quality is great and I love it. But it’s a bit too big and clunky to bring around. So I needed a solution for storing thoughts and ideas while being underway.

Now, I have found the Drafts app being the perfect tool for this. I don’t want a permanent storage space for those thoughts. I don’t want to store this digitally. I only want to have a place where I can hold my thoughts until I have the time in the evening to record them in my notebook.

Drafts is perfect because each time I open the app it presents me with a complete blank screen. It doesn’t open previous notes or ask where I want to save my new note. I can start typing directly, close the app and the note is automatically put away in the inbox. The next time I open the app—it’s got a blank slate again.

It’s like digital post-it note’s, having great value as temporary support. But I throw them away when their purpose is served.

In the evening when I sit down for my reflection, I go through those notes and transfer them as I see fit to my notebook. This is my permanent place of storage. It’s such a relief ridding myself of the digital organization I previously had to endure. I always struggled with reorganization after reorganization. Storing things on paper helps with that, I don’t have the need to reorganize things again and again. The simplicity of the bullet journal system keeps everything in check.

I found this setup to be a great balance between the digital and analog. The simplicity of capturing thoughts with digital tools—and the permanence of writing it down on paper.

I’m etching things better to my mind when I write it by hand. It sticks better.

Any note taking app will of course do for capturing ideas, but I like the Drafts app because it’s meant to be a scratchpad. The whole philosophy behind the app is “write first, store later” which goes hand in hand with what I want to do in this case. Drafts works as a frictionless bucket where I can throw my thoughts in, so that I don’t let any ideas go lost. My notebook acts as the permanent storage where I go back and review later on.