Here to Create

What do you do when you have too many ideas and no time to put them all into action? Do you write them on little scraps of paper, shove them into a drawer, and hope you can find them when you want them? It seems like an enviable problem to have too many ideas, but when you’re buried under a mound of paper, you might envy those whose minds are less fertile. Obviously, you need a method to dig yourself out.

I wrote before about the tools I use to capture ideas. After finding those tools, the next stage was organizing the ideas I captured so I could find them again. I tried using Google Notebook to clip ideas from websites and record my own, but I wasn’t happy with the internal organization or the sketchy backup ability. I tried keeping a list of ideas in Google Docs, but I found myself forgetting to use it because I had to open a separate document. The best solution I’ve come up with for recording my ideas for writing has been Toodledo, an online task list application that I was already using for more general to-dos.

It can be hard to know where to start when thinking about organizing ideas. After exploring many possible solutions, I came up with these requirements for an organization system:

• Sorting options. Toodledo lets me sort by folder, tag, priority, due date, and more.
• Searchability. Toodledo has a great search feature, accessible through a keyboard shortcut.
• Ease of use. Once I played with the software and organized my tasks, Toodledo was easy to use.
• Ability to backup. The many steps required to get a thorough backup in Google Notebook and Docs was one of my sticking points. With Toodledo, I can backup and export in a variety of ways.
• Accessibility. I like to be able to access my tasks and ideas from anywhere. Toodledo lets me do that anywhere I have an internet connection. And if I collect ideas in my notebook, it’s easy to add multiple ideas at once. Also, there’s a Firefox addon for Toodledo that lets me add tasks even when I don’t have the website up.

Toodledo has a lot more features than those I’ve mentioned, but I try to keep things simple. The ease of entry and retrieval in this application encourages me to write down ideas for far-future projects that I would have otherwise lost forever.

I’ve been very happy using Toodledo to organize my ideas. But until a few days ago, it hadn’t occurred to me to use the same system for my fiction ideas. I just wrote new characters, settings, and plots in my Circa PDA or my journal and there they stayed. I might as well have thrown them away, so low were my chances of finding them again. So I’ve started entering my fiction ideas in Toodledo as well. I can tag each idea as fiction to keep it separate from my other writing. And there’s a notes field for each entry, so I can even enter a paragraph or so.

I chose Toodledo for my tasks and ideas because I like having access from anywhere in a convenient, easy-to-use format. But this same approach could be applied to many different formats. A spreadsheet could be useful for those who like to keep track of a variety of details and have the ability to sort. Even using one long document and making liberal use of the search function would be better than a stash of notes crammed into a drawer.

I’d love to hear what you do. How do you store your ideas so they don’t get buried in the avalanche?