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Index Your Ideas Today (You'll Be Glad You Did)


As a writer, your brain pelts you with ideas on the daily. Every stranger, every mundane event, and even everyday objects can spark something in that overactive imagination of yours. You get ideas at the most inconvenient of times, like when you're driving or dealing with other people.


Wait, does that not sound like you? Do you have a grand total of zero ideas coming at you for most of your life, but then every once in a while you're blessed with a single blindingly brilliant concept?

Regardless, you need a way to manage the ideas you get and spreadsheets are boring. That's where we come in. Read on to discover how we create databases from which to pull inspiration for our myriad writing projects.

Megan gets down her ideas by...

Let's all take a second to remember that I am not the most organized person on the planet. I do try to be, to which my abandoned planners and calendars and weird bullet journal hybrids can testify. What this means is I'm constantly switching out what I carry on a daily basis. Dozens of notebooks in every size have spent time in my purse, all with half-baked thoughts.

Sometimes I don't have my purse or I'm just about to burst with an idea, so I interrupt the conversation I'm having with an actual human and tell Siri to take a note for me. This is probably my most common form of idea-capturing, but again, it doesn't lend itself to an easy access when I'm hungry for inspiration. It's also organized by date, and how the heck is that helpful?

But there is one constant in my organizational schemes, and that constant is Google Keep. I'm a sucker for Google's suite of productivity apps to begin with, but Keep just works so well for what I've always wanted in an idea organization system: color-coding, tagging, checklist-making, you get the picture. When I've got a spare hour and my laptop's handy, I open all my other apps, gather all the scraps of paper at the bottom of my purse, and start transferring everything with one iota of potential over to Google Keep.

Jessica gets down her ideas by...

I’m equally not the most organized person in the universe. The one thing I know I’ll always have on me is my phone. Before I had a phone, I had ideas half jotted down in notebooks and doodled on the back of class assignments.

Since graduating college, I’ve gone mobile, as in my ideas are now put mostly into the notes section. I use iCloud because it’s easy to access across devices and syncs up with my computer with no hassle. When I get too many, I move them into a document. I keep an ideas document, labeled and on the cloud so I can access it any time I’m start thinking about an idea. What happens next? Absolutely nothing. This is where most of my ideas go to spend the rest of their eternity.

Sometimes though I’ll start thinking back to those ideas. I’ll hunt down the original one, copy it into another document, and start working on it. Sometimes these ideas have nothing come of them, sometimes I’ll keep working on them. When nothing happens, I’ll put them back into the ideas document or I’ll move them into a folder of old ideas if I have enough invested in them. Someday I might revisit them, but I never know.

More Suggestions We Love (But Just Don't Use)

Some other great places that you can use to record your ideas, but we personally don't use are....
  • Word processors, like Microsoft Word
  • Post-It Notes
  • Dry-erase boards 
  • Index cards on cork board
  • Trello and other apps (we’ll probably have a post on this eventually, right?)
  • Small notebook that you can keep on your person
How do you get your ideas down? Do you have a system you use to keep track of them? Let us know by commenting below and make sure to subscribe so you can get the latest posts.



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