Idea Tracking Tools

Got another great idea? Time to capture it and make it work for you. A notepad an pen is a great idea if you've just woken and don't have time to open up an electronic device, but if you want to really process ideas, there are a number of software apps that can help.

Here's a few that range in both price and complexity:

Evernote

Evernote has both free and paid plans. There is little difference between them except for upload limits. The app is available on Windows and MAC and on smartphones. It allows users to clip articles for future reading, save images and PDFs and organize them into different notebooks and tag them according to how they might search for them.

Evernote is hugely popular with people who work online, and writers, because you can build it as big as you want and everything is cross referenced.

Wunderlist

Wunderlist is what it says - a list. Sounds a bit dull, but this list can have tasks, subtasks and shared lists that make sharing your to-do list a snap. Y might also want to add a due date and have a pop up and/or an email to remind you of your due date for that task.

Wunderlist's efficiency is a direct result of its simplicity.

Trello

This is more of a team app - suitable for business teams who work remotely and need to coordinate tasks between themselves to complete a project. It's a much more intensive tool than Evernote or Wunderlist, but it makes it easy to see at a glance where ideas are being worked on and who is working on them.

Thinking Rock

This is a piece of software from an Australian company who have taken David Allen's Getting Things Done idea and turned it into an idea capture and processing workflow. The software is free and open source - available from Sourceforge.net.

Notes

It's on every iPhone and iPad by default. What most people don't know is that you can connect the two via iCloud and add check boxes so that notes and lists created on one can be seen by the other. It's a simple, easy to use app that's with you on your phone whenever you want.

Whiteboard

No - it's not a digital app, but if you place a simple whiteboard in your office, you can jump up from your chair and actually write on it! Yes, some people are easily amused - but the act of physically writing ideas can make them stick a lot more than typing them out - just ask any copywriter who has handwritten hundreds of copies of classic sales letters to assimilate their principles.

Which method works best for you will vary according to your needs, and you may even find it more productive to use a mix of idea capture apps.