Ever since I took on the challenge to post something on my website every day for 365 days in a row, the two main problems that I face is (1) What am I going to get ideas to post on my site and (2) Where am I going to store these thoughts to be used in a later post.

The problem of where to store my thoughts I feel is worse than the generating idea problem. Why? Because you never know when an idea is going to reveal itself. I mean sure, you can try an create an environment that promotes creative thinking. This is something that John Cleese has discussed in one of his lectures about creative thinking. But where to put these ideas? I need a central location where I can dump any thought I may have as quickly as possible, and then access them from virtually any location on any device.

I think that Evernote solves the “where to store these ideas” problem.

Evernote is a website that allows you to write notes, scribbles, documents, whatever and stores them on their remote servers. You can then access these notes via any web browser on any computer, as well as using any mobile device to access and modify these note. Specifically smart phones.

That’s what I’ve been doing for the past few weeks. I signed up for a free Evernote account, installed the app on my phone and tablet, and then whenever I have an idea for a blog post I whip out my phone, write it on the app, and then sync it up to the server. Then at a later time I will look at these ideas in the comfort of my home and develop them. These are not going to be highly detailed notes that I write down with different fonts and diagrams and whatnot. But to quickly write something down somewhere, that’s all I need.

I loved the thought of have a paper notebook to scribble down my thoughts. It’s such a romantic idea. But let’s be honest, I’m not going to carry a A5 size paper notebook everywhere I go. I will, however, carry my mobile phone wherever I go.

Of course there are other online, “cloud-based” solutions for storing notes and documents online. Google Drive is another example comes to mind. But for me, Evernote seem to have a nicer user interface for just writing stuff down rapidly. Plus it handles it’s offline content slightly better as well.

So far I’ve got about a month’s worth of blogging material jotted down on my account, ready to be properly fleshed out. Let’s see if I can keep this habit up.