Google Notebook: The Gas-X of Brain Farts

Photo by desi.italy

I recently read the post from Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Work Week blog about note taking and his system for writing down his ideas. I have used many methods of writing down my ideas, mostly disorganized pieces of scrap paper that ending up getting lost and gave me zero long term value.

Having a reliable system of documenting your thoughts in a way that allows you to easily return to that knowledge and use those insights at a later time is an invaluable self-learning tool.

About a year ago, I finally stopped using paper as my prime note taking medium and switched to using Google Docs. What I ended up with was a bunch of long disorganized documents pertaining to various main topics that I often think and read about. Although this system was definitely a step in the right direction, I still found myself wasting time by having to later read through these rather large brain dumps in order to find the nuggets of info I was looking for.

My recent solution to this was a fairly simple move from Google Docs to Google Notebook. Although Google Notebook isn’t too much different than Docs, it does have the added functionality which allowed me to break down my notes on a topic into more organized subtopics. Also, there is a great little Firefox Add-on for Google Notebook that lets you quickly jump into your notebooks to jot ideas down without distracting you too much from what you are currently doing online.

I just thought I would offer up another solution for those of you who find paper note taking to be too disorganized for your own personal taste. I would love to here how all you guys and gals solve your brain fart troubles.

P.S. My next post will be on Turning Those Personal Notes Into Profitable Ebooks.

P.S.S. Don’t forget to check out and vote on a website idea I put up on ideablob. This was an idea that was sitting in my Google Docs for a long time now that I haven’t taken any action on and wanted to share and get some feedback on.