[winter_blue]

This is an excellent piece. I began doing this, rather subconsciously after being overwhelmed by carrying too many things in my head at the same time.

A long time I had the belief that "smart people don't need to jote down things to remember -- they can hold it all in their head - they're smart :)" And hey, I'm smart -- so I'm going to do the same. Needless to say, it was a very foolish things to believe in.

I would say though, reminding myself to take the little effort needed to write something down, is important. Often time I am too lazy to even press Ctrl+Alt and switch to my text editor and write down what thoughts I as having. Reminding myself to do this, and not carry around various TODOs and other such baggage than slows down my general thinking abilities, is crucial.

Now a question to HNers: I've run into trouble organizing the various "brain dumps" (basically, a collection of text files). I sometimes forget about them, and never get back to them. How do you manage this issue? (ie. how do you organize your brain dumps and make sure things are done, etc.?)

[johnchristopher]

I am going to be "that guy" but let me quote something from that wired article about Xanadu and Ted Nelson I read every few years:

> [...] Jellinghaus also began to question whether a hypertext revolution required the perfect preservation of all knowledge. He saw the beauty of the Xanadu dream - "How do you codify all the information in the world in a way that is infinitely scalable?" - but he suspected that human society might not benefit from a perfect technological memory. Thinking is based on selection and weeding out; remembering everything is strangely similar to forgetting everything. "Maybe most things that people do shouldn't be remembered," Jellinghaus says. "Maybe forgetting is good."

Regarding your implementation problem regarding things that must be done: why not simply grep txt files and decide on a simple set of symbol (eg: X,*,1,etc.) to put in front of lines that have to be processed later on ?

Revisit those txt files later for a good read and see what comes out ?

[combiclickwise]

Thanks.

I use Remember the milk for organizing the list from the brain dump. I also have used evernote. Both are pretty good. They also allow you to take it beyond brain dumps. Remember the milk, has reminders (sms, email) which is very useful.

[padraigm]

I use org-mode, with links between files as necessary and some helper functions to quickly create new files in an organized manner with a single key combination. That particular set of org-mode files looks a lot like a wiki, and I can use the agenda view to quickly see all to-do items without having to necessarily hunt through all of the various files for them.