To all the academics out there: do you have a system for doing preliminary, open-ended thinking? A way to way to record and work on your ideas that’s open-ended and not tied to a specific project? Do you work out a lot of your ideas in notes or unstructured writing? How do you do it? - ThreadSky

dhersh.bsky.social • 106 days ago

To all the academics out there: do you have a system for doing preliminary, open-ended thinking? A way to way to record and work on your ideas that’s open-ended and not tied to a specific project? Do you work out a lot of your ideas in notes or unstructured writing? How do you do it?

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hesterblum.bsky.social•106 days ago

The Notes app--I have hundreds of different Notes with half sentences

dhersh.bsky.social•106 days ago

I also have a lot of stray ideas set down in notes app! But its a bit chaotic to go through them, or to hunt down a particular idea.

handstateprof.bsky.social•105 days ago

I use the notes app for brainstorms like “feed the mayo directly to the tuna”. I also have a cool papers file. I also have a generalist file that has examples of analogues of what I study in completely different areas. Pattern matching of a sort. I get bored.

dhersh.bsky.social•105 days ago

Interesting! I think a lot of us jot down thoughts when they occur to us (in the notes app, on stray paper, etc.), but the real question is what do we DO with those notes. What system do people have for archiving those stray stray thoughts and building with them? This is where most of us fall short.

handstateprof.bsky.social•105 days ago

Some things turn into passion projects. There’s a curation and a teasing of structure from these random ideas. Some aren’t so random and there are themes about how hey can be partitioned. You can’t use all of them. But some. Sure.

wickettred.bsky.social•106 days ago

Honestly I text myself stuff all the time and so that thread is like a scribble pad to me.

dhersh.bsky.social•106 days ago

I like that!

wickettred.bsky.social•106 days ago

It’s very good for the thoughts that spring into your head when you’re about to go to sleep or on the bus.

dhersh.bsky.social•106 days ago

My sense is that most graduate students don’t do any of these things, and I want to collect more examples of systems people use to record and develop their preliminary thoughts and ideas BEFORE there’s a particular output (article, conference paper, etc.) in mind.

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