It depends what I'm doing. I've fallen in love with Workflowy for capturing ideas and keeping track of what needs to be done in my various projects. Free and ea

It depends what I'm doing. I've fallen in love with Workflowy for capturing ideas and keeping track of what needs to be done in my various projects. Free and easy - I've grown to like it enough that I'd happily pay a bit to keep using it (that's a hint to the Workflowy guys if they're around). For writing longer things, whatever the purpose, I still have enormous collections of txt's and rtf's hidden peppering my hard drive and many many saved drafts in various blogs. When it comes to creative writing I enjoy using pen and paper, but since it often needs to end up in digital form at one point or another I sometimes skip that step. When it comes to diagrams, though, nothing beats pen and paper. I have long given up any hope of finding them later, though - all but the most important diagrams are destined for the recycling bin from the get-go. That's an approach I picked up from the 37signals blog or one of their presentations somewhere, and I highly recommend it. I no longer worry about making it legible or easy to understand, I just dump my ideas onto the page. For extremely important diagrams, I suppose I could then scan it before throwing the hard copy away, but I can't remember ever doing that. In the context of web development, sketched diagrams have always been a short term intermediate step for me - my code may not be as clear or well-documented as it should be (I try!) but it's still more obvious and less hassle than my chicken-scratch diagrams.