dela3499

Thanks for sharing. Are thoughtwriter or tersewriter useful in that workflow?

For the blogging app, the goal is really to encourage daily thinking and writing, not necessarily to create the best source of deep content.

I do think many long articles should actually be short articles, though. You can say a lot in 450 words.

Per-day pricing seems less attractive to me now. I'm starting to think apps should be pay-for-value, not per-per-use. So, I agree that a yearly or monthly licence/subscription might be better.

I was surprised people found the prompts so useful, so I'm focusing more on that next. I think I'll create a dedicated site with a wide variety of prompts next. Should be fun!

Ha! I'll keep Slack in mind. Let me know if you come across any prompts you'd like to add.

Ha! That's an admirably simple solution. Not quite a full replacement, but it gets you surprisingly far. :)

Trying is necessary but not sufficient. Many don't try, though, so I think it's a simple, useful recommendation.

Thanks for sharing. Perhaps it's better to make the free version have more (all?) the features, and then charge for having more than one drawing. It's a bit hard to commit to paying for a service before I've been able to use it successfully. A pro account is required to move items around, for instance, which makes it difficult to see what it would be like to use the full version of the tool.

It's a bit like a rubber-duck debugger. You open it up, describe your problem, think about things for a while. You might even pretend to interview yourself, say.

The things you write will be messy, and probably not worth keeping. So, this is a space where you can write those things with the expectation that you'll throw away what you wrote, except for the few things that matter.

I don't know how common this form of writing is. Many people describe writing as a process of clarifying ideas, but I think they usually mean writing for an audience, as with a blog.

Real persistence (not just localstorage) is something I might add, perhaps as a paid feature.

The whiteboarding analogy isn't quite right, since the tool isn't for drawing (and no drawing features are currently planned). It's the whiteboarding workflow that I'm intending to copy (mess around, get some good ideas, then erase the board).

Good idea on branding. I think I'll try it out!

I've written custom webapps for the following:

1. Brainstorming/thinking - https://thoughtwriter.org (which I just launched)

2. Remembering stuff (books, shopping, project ideas) - list limited to just 100 items (so it can't get too long)

3. Tracking habits - daily, weekly, and monthly trackers that only track current period and previous one. (So I can make sure not to skip two periods in a row)

4. Planning - an hourly schedule and a weekly worksheet to track most important tasks, fun, etc.

5. Capturing new ideas - queue that deletes items older than a two days (so it forces me to review things, or just let them go)

For freeform stuff (usually website mockups), I'll usually just grab a piece of paper or use Inkscape.

Inkscape is probably a decent tool for thinking (at least if you're already familiar with it), since you can zoom in and out on an infinite canvas, draw and type things, etc.

With tersewriter, I'm excited by the idea of creating a platform between Twitter and Medium. It'd have a 300 word minimum and a 450-word maximum. That way, every post is substantial, but focused on just one idea. My main motivation is to create a tool that gets me thinking and writing every day. I figure the word limit makes posting less overwhelming, as with Twitter.

Yeah. I've been thinking a lot about how to monetize the different apps. Together? Separate? What to offer for free, and what to offer as a paid premium. One idea (crazy?) is to charge per day of use, almost like AWS. You'd get 10 days of free use (of use, not just calendar days), and then pay 10-50 cents per day of use. That'd make it nearly impossible to spend a dime on the suite unless it really created a lot of value for you.

Ha! I'm totally on board, so you're welcome to share all the thoughts you want about any of the tools. I'd originally developed them all as one app, then split them apart. (There are 6 and counting! Mockups are all on Twitter - https://twitter.com/dela3499.)

I don't collaborate much, so I'd be curious to hear what kinds of collaborative workflows you'd like to see.

Do you use it for thinking, or for more polished work? When I write, I'm just brainstorming usually, and it's pretty messy.(e.g. "What do I want to do today? Hmm. I'm not sure. What are the three issues on my mind? ...")

I'll be releasing it in a day or two. :)

Thanks! Glad you like it.

That app is my next priority, and it should be released in a day or two. I'm pretty excited about it, actually. It's a list that can have 100 items max, so you never get overwhelmed by the things you save. I've added way too much to every other app I've used (Gtasks, Trello, Workflowy, Asana), so this one is designed to make that impossible.

I hadn't thought to include some direction on how to compress notes, but that's the hard part! Thanks for pointing it out.

I'm glad you like the prompts. I could totally do a special prompt of the week! Cool idea.

Yeah, I often think about how Elon Musk was once asked about innovation, and he said, 'Just try. Seriously... did you try yesterday? Did you try today?' It'd be great to help people just try to make some progress.

Thanks for sharing specific use cases. A couple notes:

1. I use this for thinking, not really for writing publicly. I actually made a variant of this tool for writing short blog posts. Here's the prototype - https://carlosd.org/tersewriter/

2. One idea is to make custom prompts, but another is to have a set of fixed, community-curated prompts. So, I could have memento mori in there if lots of people found it useful.

3. I hadn't thought of using the prompts as post-it notes, but that's an interesting idea.

Thanks. Yep, it persists to LocalStorage. It's just one whiteboard for now. I had multiple before, which meant I didn't have to clear them as often, but it actually gets harder to clear them the longer you wait. (I'd forget what was important to keep, and what could be thrown away.)

I have 2000 notes in Evernote, but I've just left them there and mostly ignored them. It would take tens of hours to review them all. The whiteboard is just for thinking about new ideas. When I'm done, I clear it. To be even more explicit:

1. Whiteboard is empty

2. I write for 20 minutes

3. I review to see what's worth saving, and try to compress it into just 4-5 words.

4. Save 4-5 words in a personal list (I have another custom-made app for this.)

5. Delete all the text on the whiteboard (CTRL + A then backspace)

(then repeat)

Yep, they're writing prompts, and they could be made modifiable. I figured I'd just try to make a good set of fixed prompts to start off. Do you have some ideas on how you'd use the prompts if you could modify them?

Thanks for the link. Any favorite prompts that help you think?

Definitely! It's started to annoy me too. I should be able to fix it tomorrow.

True enough. It was the best metaphor I could come up with. Maybe scratchpaper? (But you throw away scratchpaper. In this app, you erase everything when you're done, which is more like a whiteboard.)

Howdy, I'm Carlos. I made Thoughtwriter to avoid losing all my best ideas in long notes (I have 2000 notes in Evernote, many of which are more than a thousand words long.) I've been using Thoughtwriter for the past year in various forms, and figured I'd finally polish and share it.

I don't use Evernote anymore, and now often write thousands of words a day, solve various problems, and keep just 5-10 keywords to remember the solutions. Rather than being buried piles of text, my best ideas are now stored in a short list I can review in seconds.

I'd love to get feedback on how to improve Thoughtwriter, and see if anyone else has experimented with a workflow like this.