Stuck in traffic? Let your mind wander! I turned a frustrating hour into a productive one. My secret? Capturing fleeting ideas with mental repetition and then using my Supernote to Evernote workflow to forever same them.

Last week, while stuck for nearly an hour in the mother of all traffic jams, I had some insights for an online course, and started building its structure mentally. And by frequently repeating the ideas to myself, I prevent them from fading away. This is a strategy I created and perfected over time to be able to remember the thoughts I frequently have when running.

As soon as I arrived home, I grabbed the Supernote out of my bag, wrote everything I had in mind, and exported the note to the Evernote folder. When I opened Evernote the next day, the ideas were right in front of me thanks to the automation I have in place (video below).

By the way, if you’d like to dive even deeper into my Supernote to Evernote workflow, I suggest also watching this other video.

I previously discussed the importance of chronology in my Evernote system, so I will not repeat myself. Let’s talk about what happened when I opened my laptop to work the next day.

My Evernote is set to always open on the home page, where I have the Notes widget showing me the most recent notes I worked on. In this case, it was the Supernote note. 

When the automation sent that note to Evernote, that moment was set as the creation date of the note, making it the most recently used note in my Evernote.

Anyway, because my notebooks are ordered in revers chronological order, the first note in the Timeline notebook was also the Supernote note. In other words, it was remarkably easy to find the ideas I had the day before.

What I’m doing now is structuring all my thoughts in a notebook. First, I created a Summary note, which I pinned to the top of the notebook. Then I started creating a note for each chapter and dragging them to the Summary note. Chronology will mess up the order of the notes in the notebook, but that’s okay, as the Summary note will keep them in the right order.

It might be possible to have the list of notes ordered correctly by adding chapter numbers to the titles and setting the notebook order to alphabetical. But this would create too much friction every time I wanted to reorder chapters or add a new one in between existing ones. In other words, there’s no point in doing this, as I can easily do it on the Summary note by dragging the items up and down.

I have tried to use Evernote for this several times, but I have not been successful in the past. It was never as fluid as it is now. At first, I thought the new pinned note feature was making me more confident this time. It’s definitely helping because when I’m writing, I tend to jump from one chapter to another a lot.

However, another thing I frequently do when writing is reordering ideas (the chapters). So, after a while, I came to the conclusion that the not-so-new option to drag items up and down in a bullet list is also playing a significant part.

The book, or an online course, or both, is still in its very early stages. But if you are a supporter on Patreon or YouTube, there is a video for you where I demonstrate the notebook in my real account while discussing my process.