Where good ideas and designs come from? Thanks to these tools and methods!

The last post in my personal entrepreneurship series (see the note on the pure coincidence at the bottom of this post). In this, I just wanted to share some useful tools and ideas which have helped me along this journey, for storing important things like Designs, Ideas and Book notes!

Design repository

When you work on so many products and screens, referring good designs becomes essential. Looking at some professional designs out there naturally inpsires us to improve our own designs or even carry some of those ideas over to our Apps and screens. That is why maintaining a place where I can store all the inspirational or nice designs comes handy and I use Google Photos for that!

Some of the pictures which I have come across, stored as an album in Google Photos

When I come across an app, instead of immediately jumping into using it, I take a moment to look at the design and other things. If its interesting or something which could be applicable to my own app, I store a screenshot in the above album. Sometimes I attach it to a specific app or screen.

Ideas are like atoms

When you love what you do and have one eye on the future, ideas bounce in your brain like atoms. There are some fancy tools for mind-mapping or taking notes, but when all you need is something quick to jot down before you forget, Google Keep has worked well for me. And it syncs across all devices and web.

When a new idea pops-up, however crazy it may sound at first, I jot it down in Keep. Then I keep adding further points to it as I ponder over it more and more over the coming days and months and years!

This is different from the TODOs in the Google Sheet plan document which I had shared earlier, since those are more of features and things to be done for that project. Whereas these are random ideas of abstract nature which may or may not see the light of day or some moonshots.

Here is a screenshot of my app ideas in Keep:

These are just some of the ideas which I have stored in my Google Keep. Sorry the image is blurred; thats intentional!

Book Notes

In a previous post, I mentioned how I took a liking to reading non-fiction books. 90% of the time I read a physical copy, so that I can enjoy a small break from my gadgets.

Now when I need to take some notes, I used to fire-up my mobile camera and then upload that pic to Google Drive. Naturally it used to create a large image file.
Later I came across Microsoft's Office Lens app, which frankly, is quite amazing. This is probably the only Microsoft product I have used since more than 10 years!
Not only does it nicely capture the edges of the note, but the size is much smaller than the picture from the phone camera. I like storing these as images rather than scanning them as text since the picture still preserves the "book-feel".

Last week, for my previous blog, I had to find a note from a book I had read about customers and marketing. I could not remember the exact book or the file name. But, I just had to search the word! Google drive is smart and even scans the text from the stored images (creepy in a way I know). I just typed "Marketing" in the search bar, and viola, I had access to the notes with that term!

Google Drive search for my book notes containing the word 'marketing'

I only regret not doing this early on when I started reading books. Might as well go back and re-read all those books, just so that I can capture the notes in this form!

Using these tools in a disciplined manner makes it easy for me to come up with good ideas and designs! Hope it inspires you too! Ofcourse please do let me know what tools you use!

PS: I had been posting about my journey on all Sundays for the past 1.5 months. Call it a pure coincidence or something, but this last post in my journey is being published on Sunday the 4th of April, which was also my last day in Motorola, exactly 8 years ago! That is when my entrepreneurship journey really began!