Many creators struggle with coming up with ideas for content.

However, by implanting a system that wires into what you already do on a daily basis, your new problem will be figuring out which idea in your list excited you most.

Here is my framework for never running out of ideas.

Keep a daily work log

Whether it’s toying with a new framework or building a new feature, keep a running log of your activity. I recommend this being one long page so you have as little friction as possible for where to go to add your notes.

Include code snippets and comment on how they work. Note the most interesting things about them, things that you find exciting.

Add diagrams if needed to help you understand what’s going on in the future. Tools like Excalidraw and Figma have made creating great diagrams for workflows or infrastructure easy.

Review it regularly

You should review your active work log at least weekly, daily is even better. If not you might lose context around the notes.

Parse out any cool and interesting things you learned during the process. Chances are others can learn from your work too!

Once reviewed, move your notes into an archive of some kind. It could be organized by day or week, the choice is yours.

The archive is just a CYA in case you miss something. The goal of this part is to keep the daily work log clean

Connect your notes

This concept is borrowed from Zettelkasten. Make short, concise, and complete individual notes about the things you’ve learned.

Next, link those notes with relate with other related notes or categories. Drawing these connections between notes can help with both generating ideas and the creative process.

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My preferred tools

Notion

I use Notion as my daily work log and archive for my notes. I keep the work log pinned to the side of my screen at all times so it’s always at hand.

Once per week, I scan the entire page and parse my notes into ideas. The contents of the page gets copied into a database, and organized by the week start date.

Notion also has a database of ideas that I can create content on. It’s just a list of things to pull from if I don’t know what I want to create.

Obsidian

My organized notes go into an Obsidian vault. I rarely let these notes get longer than a screen's worth of content. Any longer and the topic can probably be subdivided.

Notion is my active workspace, and Obsidian is my idea and content vault. If I’m ever looking for new ideas, I look at the graph view of obsidian and find hot spots of notes.

Todoist

I also use Todoist to quickly capture ideas on the go. Those are usually “ah hah” moments that I don’t want to lose, but don’t quite fall into this process.