How do you organise song ideas?
Give every song one place and make putting something in it take one tap. Organisation fails songwriters not because the schemes are bad but because they demand effort at the exact moment you have none to spare — mid-idea, in public, with a melody evaporating. A system survives only if capturing is instant and sorting can happen later, or never.
Why
Filing is a chore you do on the idea's behalf; capture is a favour the idea does you. Anything that inverts that ratio dies. In practice this means the fewest possible decisions between having a thought and it being safe: not which folder, not what to call it, not which app — just record, or write, or photograph.
What it does
- Capture first and name later. A song with no title is still a song you can find by its first line.
- Keep everything about one song together, whatever form it arrives in.
- Let the list order itself by what you touched last, so the live ideas float and the dormant ones sink.
- Mark how much you believe in something yourself, rather than trusting a tidy list to tell you.
What it deliberately does not
- Tag taxonomies. You will invent four tags and use two.
- Deciding whether something is 'good enough to keep' before it is kept.
- Splitting one song across three apps because each is best at its part.
- Any system whose first step is 'set aside an evening'.
What that leaves behind
untitled — first line shows instead
- I never learned to say the thing
- so I sang it at the door
- Stage
- Spark, Shape, Structure, Done
- Confidence
- set by you, never guessed
- Search
- appears once the drawer holds six
Related questions
Should I sort ideas into good and bad?
Only with a mark you set yourself, and only knowing you were wrong last time. Confidence is worth recording because it is a snapshot of your own judgement on a day, not because it is accurate.
What about ideas that are only a title?
They are songs with one line in them. Keep them in the same place as the rest; a title with nowhere to live is a title you lose.