Out of sight, out of mind?


Actually, I don't strike-through these items, and I certainly don't erase them. I've got enough problems losing thoughts and snippets and sentences and often entire paragraphs by saving over something that I thought I'd saved to take a chance on actually deleting a thought that may not yet have found its place in the overall context of a column. I simply change the font color to red to let me know that I've already used that particular thought, or to green to tell me that I apparently don't intend to use it in the present column. When there's no more black text on the page I figure that I've worked all the items that I've collected into the final product.

Another, perhaps even simpler, method of taking notes has also found some use of late. Instead of a separate note page I simply type everything onto the page column page, opening brackets after a thought that I think demands a separate page for further development, or perhaps a link to outside material. The drawback here is that when I move these bracketed materials to their intended place in the entirety of the column I have to be pretty sure that they've actually found their proper place. I usually don't move items around numerous times before they're finalized. Both of these methods are, of course, not only lo-tech, but also single-platform - they simply reside on a page of writing.



Go to: Doing things the hard way.