Moving Idea Capture from OneNote to Google Keep
Idea Capture is mentioned in Thomas Frank’s video and companion blog post on his 3-tier management system (which is a nice video, in my opinion). Idea Capture serves as a system for capturing your ideas, notes and others when ever they come up, so that you don’t miss a thing. When settled, you can then sit down and go through your ideas, notes, and other things again and decide what to do with them.
TF uses Evernote for his Idea Capture and he puts all his notes into different notebooks. I like to do trials to see what fits me best, so I experimented with this organization system using a similar app - OneNote. For class notes, work notes, and everything else requiring a proper notebook, I put them all in notebooks. And for ideas popping up in my head, I used to use a notebook as well, and these ideas are recorded in a weekly page, without being categorized efficiently by using labels, because it is quite troublesome to use labels in OneNote.
That is why I moved on to try other apps and the first app I came across was Google Keep and it worked like a charm.
Keep has a clean UI. There are no notebooks. You categorize your notes with colors or labels. You can either view your notes in grid or as a list
I personally like list view better because when I add a new note, the list view order is unchanged, while the grid view order is likely to be completely flipped over, depending on how long your note is.
The thing I like most about Google Keep is, however, the convenience and familiarity in writing notes and applying labels. My favorite todo-app is Todoist. I have been using it regularly for 2 months now. It has a shortcut that allows you to quickly add a new task, which is “q”. After writing your task detail, you can use a “#” to quickly add your new task to one of your projects. I absolutely love this feature.
And the nice thing about Google Keep is that, it allows you to do almost the exact things. The equivalent of “q” in Todoist is “c” and “l” (ell) in Google Keep, depending whether you want to add a new note or a new list respectively. The “#” feature to add project is the same in Google Keep, where you use “#” to apply to your notes one or more labels. Btw, I set up my labels similar to the projects I have in Todoist.
After finding out about this feature, I just screamed, internally: “This is the one”. Todoist has served me really well and now I have Google Keep which resemble Todoist in one of its key features. If you are using Todoist, or if you want to do an Idea Capture for yourself, you might wanna try using Google Keep, too. It is completely free and it does its job well. For me, I have 2 note taking apps now: OneNote for things requiring a notebook, and Google Keep for ideas capturing. Even though labels have been applied. A system is still needed to process these Google Keep notes, so if you have any ideas, please let me know. In the mean time, try using Google Keep yourself. Maybe you will also find what you need!