most good ideas come into our minds as hunches: small fragments of a
larger idea, hints and intimations. Many of these ideas sit around for
months or years before they coalesce into something useful, often by
colliding with another hunch.This is why I’ve been maintaining a single document where I keep all
my hunches: ideas for articles, speeches, software features, startups,
ways of framing a chapter I know I’m going to write, even whole books.
I tend to record most of the hunches I have on my Moleskine or Evernote. Usually I’ll write my hunches and then when I feel I had enough for a specific project, I try to write a long form article that somehow attempts to dig deeper on the hunches. Writing this article has proved very useful in getting some clarity on the topic since the hunches often are conflicting, groundless and disparate which result in the need of proper research. Articles like this are usually what informs the development of my side projects and what keeps me from just coding things without proper intent. I like to think of this as my design process: hunches -> article -> development. It is not fancy but it works for the small pet projects I do.
In the coming months I will attempt to maintain (and frequently re-read) a single spark file with all the ideas as suggested in the article. I want to avoid having hunches getting lost across multiple Moleskines and I want to make it easier for multiple ideas to have sex