‘I like my screen-less 15 minute walk home from the station as it’s where things percolate and I get blogging ideas. Most of them perish when I turn the key in the lock sadly, but for a few beautiful minutes I was onto something…’

This comment on my recent post on idea percolation got me wondering just what the best methods are to hold onto those solutions that disappear from the mind as fleetingly as they appeared? Thinking further as to the ways we tend to record anything I realised it boils down to three, basic approaches…

Mental: ‘…oh, what was that thing again?’ – a sentence those of us without photographic memories are all too familiar with, as we struggle to remember something that we know we really should have written down somewhere. Whilst occasionally effective, I salute those of you that are blessed with the gift of photographic memory – the rest of us mere mortals are left to dream of one day unlocking this Holy Grail.

Analogue: Little to-do reminders, lyrics scrawled on restaurant napkins, novels meticulously moulded across multiple Moleskines…the simple act of noting something in longhand will no doubt stay with us for generations to come. Of course, the biggest hurdle for any analogue note-taker is the pressure of ensuring the first indentation on a previously untouched pad is as neat as possible…

Digital: There’s not many people these days that don’t have a smartphone to hand. Whether it’s sending yourself a text, noting it in an application or recording yourself a voice memo, the opportunities available to record information are plentiful. With the increasing use of cloud storage, the ability to work cross-device is an added benefit to digital notation.

Personally, I prefer a mix of analogue and digital and tend to find myself recording short thoughts on my iPhone’s built in ‘Notes’ application before eventually transferring those that require further development over to pad and paper – as an advocate for the day-to-day use of a pencil for note-taking, there’s a satisfying parallel to the scratching of graphite on paper as the note ingrains itself further in my mind.

So, over to you…where do you keep your light bulbs? Do you have any hints and tips that you’d like to share with others to assist the flickering of filaments through to fruition?