So True
I had this realization shamefully recently. I used to think my value was as the "idea guy" where I drop in - drop a wisdom - and then get out. But the reality is that it is very very very very hard to do that in a reliable-enough way and so your random ideas need to be worked and refined.
I'm rewriting the outline for my book and it's so incredibly difficult to refine and hone the outline, which is taking ideas and forming them into a cohesive flow.
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I had a thought as I was going to bed last night, I tweeted it but neglected to post it elsewhere:
Bedtime podcast idea: "Murder, They Wrote" which alternates between discussing episodes of Murder, She Wrote and Castle.
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I make heavy use of an RSS reader called FreshRSS that I selfhost. I currently have it pulling in nearly 100 different RSS feeds from news, tech, science and general blogs. One feature I would love is the ability to quick filter.
Here's what I am thinking: I read an article about Pixar's new movie, Elemental. Great. I am now aware of this movie. However, it's the first day of the trailer and every outlet is rushing to cover it. I'd love to be able to add a filter that removes every post which includes "Pixar" + "Elemental" for the next 7 days.
Quick and simple, I just wouldn't see those posts. Sure, an occasional article I'd like to see might get caught by these filters, but the noise it would remove would far outweigh the possible false negative.
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"Judge me by how good my good ideas are, not how bad my bad ideas are" - Ben Affleck
His point is even geniuses have bad ideas. And he's absolutely right.
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New Project Idea - Scrib
I make frequent use of Google's Keep as my place for short easy notes. I also sometimes use Samsung Notes, as a by product of my writing on my phone (Note 9), but those are almost entirely scribbles as I lay in bed and want to write an idea down.
I want a note taking tool which lets me grab random thoughts and save them. They might be quotes, or ideas, or reminders. They might often be half-baked.
This idea actually came as I am rethinking my personal organization and figuring out how best to build it.
Goals
- Be able to scribble a note within two clicks on my phone.
- Make the referencing of these notes more useful
#2 is where both Keep and Samsung's notes tool falls down. They are just the digital equivalent of yellow sticky notes. I want to have it be smarter at organizing notes by date, as well as by identifying keywords. If the word 'D&D' appears in multiple notes, then I want that word linked to a page which pulls all notes which use that word. I'd like to do it even for phrases, but am not sure how taxing that is processing wise.
I'm going to keep doodling on a design for the project, and then I'll add it to my coding roadmap.
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These last few months have reminded me of a short story idea I had, about a man who resisted government observation and privacy invasion by creating a dark web site dedicated to tools to resist it. From face masks, to apps, and everything in between. And that to do this, he had to continue to be observed, and live a life like someone completely unaware of these things.
Never wrote the story, maybe I'll give it another go one of these days.
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