On Keeping a Notebook in the Digital Age – from Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com
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‹div><div><h3>The Spark File</h3› My preferred method for idea capture is something akin to Steven Berlin Johnson's idea of keeping a "spark file" which he's written about on Medium. (Johnson is a prolific and versatile writer who has covered a wide range of subjects. Ⅰ would particularly recommend his book ‹i>The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World</i›. It's rare that "I couldn't put it down" can be said of a book on disease and city planning, but it's true in this case.)
‹img width="300" title="On Keeping a Notebook in the Digital Age" alt="On Keeping a Notebook in the Digital Age" src="http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18hhgio0kowz7jpg/medium.jpg"/›He notes, "…Most good ideas (whether they're ideas for narrative structure, a particular twist in the argument, or a broader topic) come into our minds as hunches: small fragments of a larger idea, hints and intimations. Many of these ideas sit around for months or years before they coalesce into something useful."
In order to exploit this particular quality of idea formation, he keeps what he calls a "spark file": "A single document where Ⅰ keep all my hunches: ideas for articles, speeches, software features, startups, ways of framing a chapter Ⅰ know I'm going to write, even whole books." He doesn't try to organize them. ‹em>The randomness is intentional</em›. He reads them over every few months and finds themes emerging—connections between fragments that wouldn't seem apparent if those fragments were presented in isolation.
Ⅰ do something similar myself—making disjointed notes in a notebook, entering them into a master file, and reviewing after long stretches. I'll do it anywhere but Ⅰ definitely have venues and times that are more productive than others. Modes of transportation are particularly fertile—subways, airplanes, trains. Areas where Ⅰ can be alone while sitting in a room full of people—coffee shops, dinner solo at a bar, jury duty—are ripe for observation. The evening works better than the morning, but mostly because I'm more alert at the end of the day than the beginning.
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