How I track my writing ideas in 2023

Eva Amsen 🔬🎶
4 min readMay 2, 2023

Four years ago I wrote a post called “How I keep track of my writing ideas” in which I described a Google Form with an iPhone shortcut to jot down ideas on the go. I’m glad to see that post is still getting read, but in the meantime I have moved on to a different system and I thought I’d show you that as well.

Putting Notion to good use

The biggest change for me has been that I’m now a full-time freelance writer, so the ideas I note down will hopefully eventually become published articles. To help me track those and follow them from idea all the way through the writing and editing process, I’ve been using Notion.

You can do a lot with Notion, from making simple to do lists to linking complex databases, but it can be very tempting to just create databases for the sake of it. I tried very hard to avoid databases altogether until I found a really, really good use for them and I think my article tracker is a good example of a useful database.

My new system for tracking article ideas

Here’s how it works.

A digital kanban board

I’ve set up a Kanban board in Notion where I can create new article ideas in the left-most column. This layout is a direct copy of a physical kanban board I have above my desk in my office, but instead of moving post-it notes around this digital…

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Eva Amsen 🔬🎶
Eva Amsen 🔬🎶

Written by Eva Amsen 🔬🎶

Writer, science communicator, musician. Find more of my writing at Forbes.com, Undark, Nature, Nautilus, The Scientist, Hakai and other places.