I'll just chime in with reinforcing the core idea. There was a sea-change in my life around getting reliable capture going and this involved solving the trivial inconvenience of having the note taking be a hot-key away instead of a cloud service or some other bigger friction. Speed trumps features by a massive margin in this space.
I'm using a local rather than cloud based system now so it's always an alt-tab away. Then the hot keys for navigating the structure of the notes is also hotkeys so that it can be low latency.
The big change was being able to build on ideas on the timescale of months or years at all. Concretely, the first round of conceptual re-compression I did over my notes on mental models wound up being part of the kegan 4-5 transition.
Not OP, but I have a similar hotkey. I use Todoist as my capture system and mapped Alt+Super+o the following script (is there a way to embed code in comments?):
wmctrl -x -a "Todoist"
xdotool keyup Alt Super o
xdotool type --clearmodifiers --delay=3 q
Script performs: select Todoist window, lift hotkeys, wait tiny amount of time, press q (q is the hotkey to add a task for Todoist).
I've found one of the main benefits of getting a virtual assistant type device (Alexa, Google Home) is allowing me to capture ideas by verbalizing them. This is especially useful if I'm falling asleep and don't want to pull out a notebook/phone.
This looks like me saying things like "Alexa, add 'is it meaningful to say that winning the lottery is difficult' to my todo list".
I think, down the road, there comes a point where the place to capture ideas is no longer needed.
This is mostly speaking from personal experience, but I found that after years of capturing ideas like this I eventually just didn't need to, because I realized I was generating hundreds or thousands of ideas a day and I didn't do anything with most of them and having them written down was not a useful way to select amongst them, so instead it made sense to just let them come and go and not get stressed out if I didn't capture something.
This suggests this sort of technique is useful for a while until it trains you so well that you can drop the capture tool.
Yes, you'll still sometimes need to capture things, but the point is that you continue to carry around the brain that produced the ideas you thought worth capturing, and if you had them once and they're worth doing something with you'll have them again, so you can eventually ease up on the capture side. Of course, if you're not babbling enough, you should do something like this to change that!
I tentatively agree with this for individual topics. Certainly as you get a big backlog of little ideas to work on, you should raise your threshold for idea capture, perhaps to the point where it doesn't seem important to carry around the notebook.
However, there will often be other areas which you could usefully open up your brain to thinking about.
A repeating block I have with increasing capture is the tension between having enough notebooks to be convenient and having one's notes not be hopelessly scattered.
To expand: I strongly prefer paper notes to digital. I want to have notetaking stuff with my everywhere. I want maintaining access to notetaking to be convenient (robust to changing from gym clothes to jeans etc). I want to be able to trust that I will look at / can find a given note in the future.
I've never quite cracked getting all of these lined up. The closest I've come is having a pocket notebook everywhere I can think of, but laundry or removing notebooks to read them at a desk tends to break this system.
My solution is a combination of:
This doesn't really work with "gym clothes", but works for most other things. (Wouldn't working out get a notebook sweaty anyway? I mean, obviously, it would be nice to have it on your person while working out, but this just seems pretty hard. Maybe keep the bag near wherever you are for easy access.)
I often seem to need one of the notebooks I didn't shove in my jacket/bag that morning, but there's only so much one can do!
I'm a big fan of the "get everything out of your head" principle from Getting Things Done. And a benefit to doing this on paper, rather than on your phone, is that you can have your system with you at all times, without the distractions that come with a smartphone.
I read about a study in Thinkertoys, a handbook for creative thinking, about how employees who thought they weren't creative but were told to tell themselves that they're creative had more ideas compared to those who continued thinking they were not creative. (I could be paraphrasing incorrectly since it was a while ago). Writing your ideas down could be a way to reinforce to yourself the idea that you are creative, in case you have doubts about that.
Related to: Babble and Prune, What Makes People Intellectually Active?, Zettelkasten.
Summary: if you want to generate more ideas, carry a notebook and write down any thoughts you have.
I've heard these ideas repeated again and again in different forms: books on note-taking, writing, and creativity; the sorts of interviews where artists are asked "where do you get your ideas?"; and most recently, the final post in the Babble and Prune sequence ("Write"). It would be good of me to gather together some references (especially if there's any academic research on this topic?), but I'm going full-on anecdotal here, and just present to you the most complete version of the thing I can cobble together from memory.
I've personally found this technique to be useful, and anecdotally, so have many other people.
Let's say you want to have more ideas in some specific category. For example:
Step 1. Get a pocket notebook, or create a new list in a phone note-taking app, et cetera. The goal is to maximize availability and convenience: to the extent possible, you should be able to capture ideas at any time and place.
Step 2. Write down any ideas that you have. Any idea at all. It doesn't have to be good! This is brainstorming. One or two words is fine, so long as you know what it means. Elaborating the idea more will help you remember and may help you generate more ideas, but you can save that for later.
That's it! It's that simple.
Why write a whole post on this? My suspicion is that a lot of people won't raise this very simple strategy to attention to try. I think writing down your ideas has a magical quality to it. You might think:
Or other such thoughts. If you're at a loss for ideas, I suspect these thoughts are wrong. The following "why it works" section is mostly to illustrate that there may be more to this technique than is immediately obvious.
There are some obvious reasons why this might help, and there are also some less-obvious reasons. In approximate order of decreasing obviousness (which is also, as it happens, decreasing order of probability):
The most obvious thing: you're writing down ideas, so you'll have a list of ideas to look at later.
Actually, writing things down seems to help even if you don't look back at it later: as alkjash mentioned in Write, just the act of writing it down might be enough to make it stick in your memory.
It might be that you ordinarily only think about your creative project more-or-less when you sit down to work on it. You don't have any ideas because the only time you spend trying to come up with ideas is when you're sitting in front of a blank page.
Putting a notebook in your pocket means you can think about this at any time. Moreover, it creates the affordance: your brain will register this as a thing it can do. (Moreover, you're probably more likely to have interesting ideas when you're out and about, getting all kinds of sensory stimulus.)
Getting out the notebook to write one idea causes you to put more time into thinking of ideas. You might end up writing two or three more you thought of in the time it took you to write the first.
It could be that an important aspect of this is: you're intentionally practicing noticing that you have ideas. Like so many other things, perhaps this is something you improve at through practice.
(Note that practicing noticing story ideas vs research ideas vs other kinds of ideas might all be different skills; you don't necessarily get much better at one just because you've practiced the other.)
You know how level-ups in video games manage to be addictive, even though your brain has no intrinsic love of watching little numbers go up?
I think there's a similar thing here.
Ordinary scenario: You have a passing thought which could be turned into a creative idea. You take no action, and are soon distracted with something else. Your brain concludes: that was a useless thought.
With notebook: You have a passing thought which could be turned into a creative idea. You take out your notebook and pen and start writing. Your brain concludes: looks like that was useful for something! I'll try and come up with more things like that!
Keeping a list of ideas gives you the feeling that you're building something. Each new entry is another brick in a palace of awesomeness.
Beware: if you don't do anything with your list, this feeling will fade with time. Your brain will figure out that you're laying bricks in nothing but a ... sad pile of bricks.
The book Getting Things Done suggests that you need to build a relationship of trust with your future self, in order for lists like this to work -- writing something down needs to mean that you'll take appropriate action later, even if only to (appropriately) discard most of the ideas.
(This post won't mainly be about how to take your ideas and do something with them, but see the later section "developing ideas".)
Another idea mentioned in Getting Things Done is that writing things down gets them out of your head. According to the author, so long as an idea is in your head, it's taking a little bit of your attention. If you write it down in a list, and if you trust yourself to look at the list later and take appropriate action, then your brain turns off the reminder and you free up the attention for other things.
Alkjash says something similar in Write:
Fast forward to 2013 and transport yourself to my first summer research program. Every Monday, we give a brief board about that week's progress. I mull ideas on paper over the week before TeXing them up Sunday night.
A curious thing happened - all my progress happened on Monday and Tuesday. I spent the rest of the week meandering around the same ideas, checking special cases and writing up fragments of arguments. On Sunday night I write everything down, and the ideas crystallize on paper. They lose their grip on me, and I move on to new pastures.
(Note that, as a grad student, I've mostly heard rather the opposite: it seems most people make most of their progress the day before their weekly meeting, not the day after. But, both factors could be in play.)
Maybe you've been vaguely dissatisfied with the way your apartment is set up for some time. All of these thoughts feel the same to you; you file them under "apartment is dumb".
Recently, you've decided to do something about it. In order to get started, you'll record your ideas. You stick a notebook in your pocket and start writing thoughts whenever they occur to you.
When you write something down, you have to put it into words. Even if it's just a short phrase, it involves a little bit more detail than your fuzzy mental handle.
Now you notice that you actually have a diversity of complaints, with an implied diversity of remedies. Because you've written each of them down, you can see this diversity at a glance.
This certainly happened to me, when I was first taking notes on rationality (after reading HPMOR). What seemed to me like a single, unified concept kept splintering and splintering.
The opposite could also happen. You vaguely think your cloud of ideas on a subject is huge and diverse, but when you carry a notebook and write every thought down, you find out that everything comes to just two or three points.
Since this post was inspired largely by reading Babble and Prune, a few words on the relationship to that model:
In the subsections on "practicing noticing" and "reward", I implied that there was some kind of learning going on -- training your brain to notice/produce the kinds of ideas you're looking for. Can we explain this in terms of Babble & Prune? The Babble & Prune model naturally splits this into two distinct types of learning:
A lot of Babble & Prune is oriented toward simply pruning less, an idea which I don't inherently agree with. Yes, pruning less overall might be the right thing for a lot of people. But I'm much more interested in fine-grained adjustments to the pruning filter.
Relatedly -- in the "basic technique" section of this post, I emphasized that you should write down any ideas at all. Of course this isn't literally true. You have to calibrate your level of pruning.
Another disagreement I have with Babble & Prune is the idea that more layers of filtering is worse. I think the "three gates" (first filter: conscious thought; second filter: saying it out loud; third filter: writing it down) was one of the best and most useful parts of the sequence. (Modulo the fact that for me, the position of the second and third gates is often reversed: I'll write something before I'd say it, due to my close relationship with notebooks.) Yet, I disagree with the contention that this is too many filters. It's too few filters.
Imagine if you had no filter. In order to avoid saying bad things, you would have to learn to self-censure your conscious thoughts a lot more. Less ideas would rise to consciousness, and the ones that did would be more constrained by the Gricean maxims and other factors.
Adding a buffer between thinking and speaking allows us to think more, and to develop our thoughts more fully before speaking them aloud.
Similarly, in Zettelkasten, I described my pipeline for developing ideas as consisting of at least four stages:
This might not fit your use-case. For example, if you're trying to do visual art (for example, drawing a webcomic), your workflow can't all be different types of writing.
The main thing I'm trying to get across here is that in order to develop the ideas you've captured into something worth sharing, you probably need several stages.
The Babble & Prune model mentioned that babbling is far from totally random, and in particular, as you babble you're mostly mutating ideas (less like random sampling from idea-space, more like a random walk around idea-space). By adding more stages of filtering, I'm suggesting that the way to produce high-quality content is something like simulated annealing: gradually imposing higher and higher standards on our ideas as we continue to mutate them, so that the final result can crystallize into a strong metallic alloy.