Ask HN: How do you manage and organize Ideas?
My own habit is to just quickly write down the idea in one sentence and plan to come back to it later. But the problem I am facing is I never really get back to them.
How do you manage things?
I had a good idea last week. Today it accepts credit card payments.
Do it immediately, even if to the detriment of you social life and sleeping patterns.
I can't put ideas down. Moment I have one I collect keywords and setup some Google Alerts. Cheapest way to taste a market. Second I would look for clients and email the directly, posing as a "consultant" or specialist, or a seller/buyer in the field. If things look warm, I get the domain name and whip out a brochure site in 2 days. Google apps for email. EveryDNS for DNS hosting. Everything on one $20 VPS.
1 idea every 2-3 months. If you do it twice you will have all the boiler-plate stuff ready to go. ~12 hours of work for a complete image.
http://orgmode.org/ is a brilliant tool for this kind of thing. And you don't need to know emacs to get started. If you're unfamiliar with emacs then getting it setup does require some persistent effort, however once your over that hill, it's really easy to work with. And I have mine set up so that I can hit a key binding wherever I am and a window will pop up so that I can enter a note or todo item.
Here is how NOT to do it: keep the tabs open in your browser.
My 2009 new year's resolution was to never have more than 10 tabs open in Firefox. It took a few months (April IIRC), but when I hit the goal, it was the best thing I ever did for my productivity. Sadly I lost the habit and now I'm on 50+ tabs again and trying to lose them.
Scrapbook (a FF addon) is the top candidate for my tool of choice, especially as I have its storage folder in Dropbox and thus syncs with all my machines.
Register a domain for them. That way when I get the renewal bill I am reminded to go and do something about it.
A pretty good sign that it was a bad idea is when I don't remember on the renewal date a year later what I registered the domain for ;)
- Evernote - iPhone Notes - Keeping far too many windows open in Chrome and FireFox as a reminder, - pen and notebook (x 2), - Things for Mac, - Things for iPhone.
All of the above help me to document and organise ideas as i get them.
Sound like a mess?, well yes it probably is to someone else....but documenting ideas as I get them, in the most timely method possible ensures that I capture everything and i'm not left carrying these crazy ideas in my head every night.
Don't worry about not coming back to every idea, but do force a habit of reviewing your list at least once a month, you'll be surprised by what you find in there after just a few weeks!
I think most comments are missing a point. His issue is not on the capture side of his ideas. It's on the execution side.
Read the "4 hour workweek", it give good tips about starting a business on the side. It's a bit over the top sometimes, but it motivate me working on this : http://grownsoftware.com/swiffout (just a project, not really a business, but that book help me anyway ) I think the book is great at convincing you that it's easier than you think.
Beyond that take any idea (ideas are not that important ), work on it everyday for a while and see what happens.
I put them into a spreadsheet that shows a 4-level hierarchy of concept, sub-concept, sub-sub. Then i roll up the spreadsheet into strings, LOAD DATA INFILE to a mysql db, and index using Sphinx and SOLR/lucene.
All this is pretty easy using rails (or Django, PHP, or grails, I imageine)
(or write some memo's, use Google desktop to index them).
The important thing is describe your business plan/Cconcept in a way that you can find it using your search terms.
I'm trying to fix the same problem.
My attempted solution is to blog at least a paragraph on it. This way I have a public record of it, the opportunity for feedback, and some sense of progression.
It hasn't worked very well so far, though, because I'm still much more likely to pop open an idea.org buffer and append it into a category where it will gather dust.
I got a personal demo of Tinderbox from Mark Bernstein at LeanCamp - looks very good for rapid brainstorming and documenting multiple streams of thought:
The question is: Why don't you get back to them? You probably have better ideas or more interesting/priority things to do.
IMO, writing them down is good. It worked well with me if you keep them all in one place. The nearest opportunity/free time take a look and do one.
Ideas often spark at a situation where you have little time to take care of it. I use Evernote on my iPhone and PC. After making a short not I usually later on go back and evaluate it. 
Over the years I found this to be the best sorting and capturing mechanism.
I have a google chrome extension for quick plugs, I just open it and write down the idea. I'm into mobile apps these days, so it works really well for me. When I'm done with one App, I go to the next in my ideAa Box
If you think the idea is worth it, spend the time at the first go. :)
If you never go back to them, that suggests a failure of motivation and/or structure in your life. After all, if they're exciting ideas, WHY don't you get back to them?
Maybe you should solve that problem first. A tool may help you "go back to them" but it won't help you make them.