Capturing Potential 🚀

🧠 Why Notes Matter

What do you do when your day job demands your attention, but your entrepreneurial spirit is burning bright with ideas for your future venture?! It’s a delicate dance many aspiring business owners know all too well. Despite our superhuman multitasking fantasies our brains are precision instruments, not Swiss Army knives—and they’ll inevitably drop a ball or two when stretched too thin.

⚡ Catching Lightning in a Bottle

Your innovative ideas can’t wait, but they also can’t interfere with your current professional responsibilities. This is where strategic note-taking becomes your best friend. If something at work sparks a great idea for your new business, you want to immediately write that thought down and save it for later. This should be done in a place that’s incredibly simple to access. Maybe use Siri or Google to take a voice note, or have a dedicated notepad that you keep in your pocket at all times. You should keep the structure simple - make it as easy as possible to record your thoughts as they come up.

Then, dedicate some time during the week (again, outside of your day-job hours!) to triage those notes. This is where we think about the notes strategically. First, do they still seem like good ideas? If not, delete them - you’ve got plenty of other things to work on. If they pass the sniff test, ask yourself if they’re related to something else that you’re actively working on? Great, add them to your notes or productivity software on that project. Are they good ideas, but not something you’re working on yet? That’s where your product or business idea backlog comes in to play. See if your new ideas should go into a project you already have in your backlog, or if you should create something new.

🌟 Brainstorming Breakthroughs: Powering Your Plan

When you’re juggling countless projects, a robust note-taking system ensures that you can keep every single one of them in air without fumbling. Your notebook is your personal assistant that tracks your progress and keeps your entrepreneurial vision crystal clear.

I found this to be 100% critical when starting out, where it seemed that every day brought another new hurdle that I had to clear while working on the next step. Your legal business documentation, your business plan, your marketing plan, your website, community, and content: you can’t work on them all at the same time, but you need to be able to jump right back to exactly where you were without losing any momentum.

And while I prefer using project or product management tools for the big stuff, an adaptable note taking system works wonders for managing your small fry. For instance - I use Jira to manage my list of article topics and the posting calendar, but I use my note app Obsidian to actually outline and write them.

🔍 Exploring Note-Taking Approaches

As your business ideas begin to take shape, you’ll quickly realize that not all note-taking approaches are created equal. Just like every professional has a unique workflow, note-taking systems need to be as dynamic and adaptable as the minds they serve. Understanding the landscape of available tools isn’t about finding a one-size-fits-all solution, but about discovering a framework that can flex and grow alongside your entrepreneurial vision.

📝 Pen vs. Pixel: Methods That Matter

In my college days, I was Team Pen & Paper all the way! All of my notes and research were organized in spiral notebooks of graph paper. But drafting my thesis forced me to change; it was too much trouble to find that one note, that one idea, that I really needed for my current paragraph. I started using Microsoft OneNote (one of the very first note-taking apps) and immediately noticed a big bump in productivity.

I still love the feel of a solid, weighty pen and the delicate scratch of the nib flowing across those faint blue squares. But as your needs from more complex, so too must your tools.

🎟️ Backstage Pass: With my top-bound spiral graph paper notebooks, I can easily switch from ‘portrait’ to ’landscape’ mode! I default to taking notes in landscape and use 3-4 columns per page for ad-hoc notes that I regularly triage and add to my digital note vaults.

• Analog Methods: Notebooks offer a tangible connection to your ideas. They’re distraction-free and can spark creativity through physical interaction. Your pen will never drop the wifi, and your pad will never run out of battery. Whiteboards and chalkboards are even more physical - you can stand up and walk around them while writing your ideas in Large Print!
• Digital Tools: Apps provide search-ability, synchronization, and powerful organizational capabilities that can scale with your growing business. There are a lot to chose from, so you can get something that fits your needs and your personality. New features are introduced regularly, like built-in AI Assistants that you can chat with while brainstorming!

And while there’s no need to choose between analog and digital, it’s important to have a plan on how to integrate them. A quick sketch in a notebook might be forgotten and lost, or become a detailed digital project plan. A voice memo could languish forever on your phone or transform into a comprehensive strategy document. Make sure you have a primary note repository that all other sources are funneled to.

🌥 Local vs. Cloud: There’s No ‘I’ In Team

You can stick with the tried-and-true methods for private note taking, where your notes are yours, and anything you want to share with others must be transferred to another platform for, say, collaborative editing. Or you can check out the new generation of note-taking apps which are cloud-native and embrace the team approach. With these newer tools you can easily share notes with your teammates, collaborate on notes with guests, and publish final versions all on one platform.

• Private Notes: Traditional pen and paper is the original private note, but some apps follow the same approach. Microsoft OneNote is the original note platform (created in 2003!) and is included in the Microsoft 365 subscription. If you’re already signed up for MS365 for their email and office software, this is a great contender. Obsidian is open-source, free for personal and solopreneurs, and is local: instead of a database, all notes are stored as individual files in folders. But it still has great capabilities for syncing across your devices.

• Team Approach: When you have multiple people on board, it can be easier to work together in a single document while creating a new product. Newer apps like Notion excel at this team-based note-taking paradigm but, like all cloud-based solutions, it does come with a subscription cost. Notion is a modern, sleek app that runs fast and has a host of incredibly useful plugins - it’s no surprise that it’s been gaining traction quickly over the last few years.

  🛠️ Tool Spotlight: You don’t have to go digital for team-based note taking! The analog equivalent is gathering around a big white board to collaborate.

• Documentation Management: This is the Team Approach’s big brother. As your venture grows, you’ll find it critical to organize your business documentation in a way that everyone can easily find whatever they’re looking for (if they have the proper permissions!). Enter Documentation Management systems like Sharepoint or Confluence. They allow for collaboration on documentation as well as building out a system to find everything - each team or project might have a home page where they link their important documentation. Support teams can post common troubleshooting scenarios, project teams can post meeting minutes and roadmaps, HR can post benefits information and company holidays.

Your note-taking ecosystem is more than just a collection of tools—it’s the nervous system of your business. It could be a combination, or you might stick with just one. But however you decide, remember that the best system is the one that actually helps you get work done.

🎯 What’s Right For You?

As I’ve said, your note taking tool is a personal choice. But if you’re still on the fence, let me walk you through how I made my decision.

🏷️ From Chaos to Clarity: Setting the Stage

First I looked at the note taking categories we discussed above. The first choice was simple - I knew I wanted a digital solution. Don’t get me wrong, I still keep my pen & graph pad on my desk, and I have a big whiteboard in my office. I use them both regularly! But they’re always for the most ephemeral notes - like when I’m on a phone call and need to jot down an email address, or I want to stand up and do some quick math to figure out an image ratio.

Apple Notes was my first thought here as all my devices are Apple. Another app that caught my eye after some research was Obsidian, an open-source note taking app that’s designed around a local file repository - each note is a file on your computer and nothing is stored in the cloud. It has an amazing community plugin marketplace that has extended Obsidian in all sorts of different ways, but the core note-taking facility is fast and responsive on all my devices.

Secondly, I was starting as a single-person operation. I didn’t need a team-based solution then, but my plans were to keep growing until I did! So I started looking at Notion - they’ve been growing quickly in the note-taking space and for good reason. They have a very modern, sleek interface that lets you jump right in and start taking notes, while at the same time offering a ton of extras like calendars, project planning, wikis, and more. And as long as I was operating solo I could make pretty good use of the free tier.

A similar app is Confluence, part of the Atlassian platform. It’s not as slick or new as Notion, but it’s also more tightly integrated into some other apps I already used and had an even more generous free tier (up to five users!).

📋 Narrowing the Landscape

My next step was to list out what I needed and what I wanted in a note taking app. My needs were pretty simple: I had to be able to access my notes locally (for when I’m off-grid), sync them across all of my devices (iPhone, iPad, Mac), I needed it to be low- or no-cost, and I needed to be able to author my notes with Markdown.

My “want” list was a little more ambitious! First up - AI integration. I had been using AI through a few different avenues then, and none of them were really clicking with me. The apps I used were a distraction - I’d write in one app, ask AI a question in a different app, and kept cutting and pasting back and forth. It was getting to be a hassle. So I wanted to try a note system with integrated AI support.

I also wanted the ability to customize the app in all sorts of ways, from color schemes to fonts to plugins that added functionality. Ultimately, I could make my own plugins if nothing existed to fit my issue! This would ensure that the note app would do everything I wanted and would scale well for me.

🤔 The Top Tools

As much as I like Notion, I eventually decided to go with a combination of Obsidian for notes and Confluence for document management. For me, the biggest strike against Notion was that the only way to integrate AI into it was through their paid AI subscription. Obsidian has several free plugins that allow you to integrate your API keys from many different platforms for a pay-as-you-go solution which ends up being far less expensive with my usage. This allows me to use the same API-based access that I’m already using with other tools and keep my costs down.

Plus, the Obsidian community plugin marketplace is amazing, and creating your own plugin is really straightforward if you know Javascript. Finally, since it runs off of local file storage, I have access to my notes everywhere I go! Even across devices: it’s simple enough to sync either through their inexpensive paid service ($4/mo) or through iCloud or Dropbox file sharing.

I’ve coupled Obsidian for my notes with Confluence for document management. This gives me the best of both worlds - my notes are personal by default, but when I need to share a document and collaborate, I can push from Obsidian to Confluence (with a plugin!) and work on it there. And all of my final drafts are also pushed to Confluence and organized into my different business workspaces.

🌈 Your Note-Taking Journey Begins Now

Remember, the most powerful tool in your entrepreneurial arsenal is a clear, organized mind. Whether you’re recording your thoughts with a digital platform like Obsidian or sticking to the traditional pen & paper, consistent note-taking will be your compass in the exciting world of entrepreneurship.

From scattered thoughts to strategic action: this is how professionals turn ideas into impact! 🔨