Ideation Workflow
How a rough idea becomes a real artifact.
Approach
- Think by hand first. Capture ideas as handwritten notes and sketches (GoodNotes on a tablet). Let them flow — words, arrows, boxes, half-diagrams.
- Let it be messy. The first pass is for divergence, not polish. Rough is fine; the point is to get the thinking out of your head.
- Refine with
handwritten-to-para. Run the skill (see the reference below) to ingest the GoodNotes exports, transcribe the prose, and route the content into a PARA vault. - Formalise the diagrams. Simple ones become inline Mermaid; complex ones become
.drawiofiles via the draw.io skill. - Ship the artifact. The output is a clean note plus proper diagrams, ready to become a doc, a spec, or code.
Why it works
- Handwriting lowers the friction of thinking; a keyboard invites premature structure.
- Separating capture from refinement keeps divergence and convergence from fighting.
- Automating the transcribe-and-route step means messy notes become artifacts instead of rotting in a folder.
Reference
handwritten-to-para.md— the skill that turns GoodNotes exports into PARA notes and draw.io / Mermaid diagrams. Open it from this folder in the explorer.
Stack
GoodNotes · PARA · draw.io · Mermaid