I am curious if anyone is using the Thought Queue? I did a quick search and did not see anyone posting about it. The concept seems pretty straight forward. I guess it is a place to add quick notes about things?
Is there any benefit to moving these thoughts to another rem at some point or could they just live there forever?
To be blunt, it’s useless. Maybe if it let you indent or show the last few lines in it when invoking it, it could be used to take some fleeting notes, but at the moment it is strictly inferior to just pinning any rem to the sidebar and taking notes normally there (using the side pane or just going into it and backing out). Daily notes can serve just as well, but it can be a pain to drag stuff across days, so I’d recommend naming and pinning a few inboxes (at least until queries are in to be able to portal the same stuff by tag into each daily note).
I think there are a few features in RemNote with overlapping use cases:
Daily Documents: Write down what you think, working on on a new, blank page each day. Possibly factor out notes to their own pages at the end of the day/week. RemNote conveniently leaves a portal behind when moving. I use this frequently.Edit Later: Add a thought to improve something with a sort note about what to do. I use this much. I have found that I need more granularity here. I have renamed Edit Later to Edit Soon and made a custom template for Edit Later that I apply when I want to mark an incomplete train of thought or a need to reorganize which don’t have priority right now. I try to bring Edit Later to 0 each week.
#Todo and custom tags which can mark open thoughts.Thought Queue: I see this as continuous daily notes. You can just add something there without the need to fit it into the hierarchy/add it to a structure zettel etc. I don’t use this right now. On Mobile I still use Google Keep to capture ideas.
Quick Add Note: Capture stuff without switching focus. This is especially useful because RemNote does not remember the last edit location yet and you don’t want to close a document when you already have 2 open. But since I don’t use the Thought Queue page (yet?) I have not integrated this into my workflow.I mean, you can just open a new remnote tab and open more documents in that. Heck, keep a daily note and a primary inbox always pinned in a separate tab and open new tabs for documents you are working on.
True, but for me it is a bigger context switch to change the tab/window than pressing Ctrl+Alt+A and type the sentence directly there. Having my daily notes with my goals for the day open all the time is nice though.
The ideal solution would be to open any arbitrary (and “full”, rather than no indentation and history) rem in a popup by shortcut. You could add and remove the edit laters from it as needed.
Almost off topic but if you are interested in the thought queue, I’d recommend you check out an ios app called drafts. Its main purpose is to capture thoughts and quickly being able to process them. At first it seems useless because it’s not feature rich but if you stick to the purpose of the app, it’s fantastic https://youtu.be/tXDlKX0b8GI
Thanks everyone. It is great to see the different ways everyone is using Remnote. There are so many different ways to use it that is almost overwhelming at time!
UMNiK, it seems like you are saying that instead of a thought queue it would be better to just create a stub and move on without actually having the backlink in the document? That sounds useful.
Unfortunately I was not able to reliably open the Thought Queue on my iPhone 6, this would replace Google Keep if it was quick enough. (Nothing is all that quick on my phone anymore however… 
)
One way to do it is create orphan rem as you go and then sort through the stub tag (pin it to the sidebar for easier access if you decide to go that route), yes. I was advising creating a few rem that will be used as unsorted inboxes that are also pinned. This saves the hassle of potentially having multiple stubs to merge and allows for several places to store different unsorted things (fleeting notes for your own thoughts and literature notes with references, for example), but adds the hustle of switching to the inbox to type.
It all depends on whether you wish lean more on tags (whose only meaning is sorting and filtering, so they can be words rather than sentences) or zettels/smart notes (you want to place every note just so, be it behind/below other notes or in an index/entry point).
I do use the Thought Queue as a Fleeting note tray/inbox, and mark them as flashcards (I start all of them with “a::”), so I review the Thought Queue’s queue everyday I start working, using it as a form of spaced repetition for attention management (most of the notes I let go to the next repetition, some of them I work in them moment, making permanent/evergreen notes or something else, and when I’m done with any of them, I stop). I believe I learned about that on Andy Matushak’s notes, somewhere around here https://notes.andymatuschak.org/§Inboxes_and_attention_management.
I haven’t been using it for a lot of time, but so far it’s being great and I plan to continue using it.
Just as a quick tip, you can cloze a period to make them appear in the queue (as described in my proposal to implement this explicitly). How do you deal with the lack of indentation though? Is is not just a single level wall of text when you go to sort it later?
That’s actually pretty clever, I’ll try it. For me the fleeting notes don’t need indentation, since I use them as a base to make different (permanent) notes, hierarchically ordered and linked. Sometimes are just passing thoughts that I don’t want to completely forget about, sometimes are reminders such as “make a permanent note on Concept X and integrate in Document Y (this one is linked)” with some idea or basic content, so I just open the destination Document in another panel and start writing. I never read the Thought Queue other than when reviewing it’s queue, so I don’t care about the wall of text.
Fair enough, I guess I’m just too much of an outliner hound. To be clear though, wouldn’t your workflow still benefit from having the shortcut open an arbitrary rem in popup rather than a predesignated one? Like maybe you could set Document Y as the rem that is opened and whenever you come across Concept X you could hit the shortcut, write it in directly, and possibly tag it as “Edit Later”? It would be ideal to have multiple shortcuts that would popup different rem/inboxes, obviously, but for now even one set by the user would do, just as an alternative to going through the sidebar or search. Literally the only thing the Thought Queue has going for it is having a shortcut to a popup.
I use draft app for this purpose because when I have an idea, I can just enter shortcut and start to write, it’s easier than open Remnote, select thought queue and write, the shortcut is a must, desktop app and mobile app also.
The desktop app has a thought queue shortcut now, it works from the desktop!
i have been using it extensively on mobile,
my workflow
When in log back into desktop then I review them and make notes / discard before I put it into my Second Brain = Remnote
So in that sense - its a Buffer Zone / DMZ / Catchment area for my thoughts etc and prevent me from getting distracted.
I only wish I had an option to make it the default opening screen on mobile instead of the Queue.
For the times I’m using RemNote I use the Thought Queue as some kind of “inbox”. I take that name it has literally and put in all thrngs that are on my mind - projects I want to start but need to flesh out a bit and think a bit before and all things that span over the current day.
That way everything that is work-in-progress or topics I still have to think about sits in my Thought Queue.
I have found out for myself that just starting to create pages wildly leads to a mess and lot of changes later - so I plan the basic outline of pages in Thought Queue first and when done create the pages out of there.
I find daily notes impractical for that - cause when a new day starts, the old day is out of sight, makes planning things over the course of more than one day pretty tricky, I find.
I love the thought que and have it pinned to my side bar. Its my default work space & inbox; a place where I work on new stuff, before filing away the new stuff somewhere more fitting. It is most useful when you use the (Shift+⌥+⌘+~) shortcut which brings up a pop up. The pop up allows you to jot down anything on your mind without leave the pane you are in. Also, I don’t use the daily docs, because I don’t like the idea of forgetting and leaving rem behind over time. I think daily docs are more useful for those that journal. (I don’t journal in remnote)
Same process here. The thought queue is my inbox for everything and the place where my first notes start and grow. When I worked through a topic (e.g. a course or something) I move these notes to a more specific place in my knowledge base.