Realizing that I can keep running notes has been a great productivity hack for me. I have long been a heavy note taker but struggled at how to best tie them all together.

Something like a spark file, or a single evernote file for interesting data points that come up in a project has made this a lot better. Sure it may take time to read through, but I know where everything is now and it doesn't require some complex tagging or filing strategy.

I’ve intuitively progressed toward many systems like this on a very experiential basis. Gotta take out formalization and rigidity from ideation.

Agree. On the flip side, I've moved away from the value of group brainstorms for some of the same reasons. I find it much more valuable to let these things simmer for a bit on my own before bringing to a wider group precisely because they're so informal.