If you’re someone who has ideas constantly pouring out of their head, no matter how lame or awesome, but can’t find a way to keep track of them all (and when you don’t want to carry around a notebook everywhere), you should benefit greatly from this post. For that last year or so I have been an avid fan of a web app called drop.io. To call it an online file management system would be an insult to the amount of innovation and thought that the drop.io team has put into their software.

I use drop.io throughout the day at my office for tracking files related to specific projects, but have rarely taken advantage of the numerous amount of ways that a user can add things to the drop (phone, fax, twitter, etc…). On my old blog, Appify, I did a review and video walk-through of the system that was a general overview of its capabilities. But recently, I had some lightening strike my face and I got the idea to use drop.io to track my personal ideas and thoughts and take full advantage of the other features I rarely use in drop.io.

Here’s a quick how-to for making your own idea drop:

1. Head to drop.io and set up a drop sub-domain
   Choose something easy to remember like drop.io/johnsideas, then be sure to password protect it so you can keep your valuable intellectual capital secure. This sub-domain, or drop name, will also be the drop’s email address. So John could then email a particular idea to johnsideas@drop.io and it will post it as a note, just like in a blog. This also works for images, documents, and anything else attached to the email.
2. Set up proper security measures
   You can add an email key to make it so not just anyone can add ideas to your thought-stream. Head into the security preferences panel in the drop’s settings. Here you can choose a series of letters like “kyk” that must be included in your drop’s email address in order to be delivered. So John’s new drop email will be johnsideas.kyk@drop.io.
3. Hook up your iPhone
   Add a new contact on your iPhone, call it something like “Ideas” for easy access. Every drop comes with your own phone number that you can dial in on the go and leave a voicemail that will be converted into MP3 format and displayed in the drop’s stream.  Add in your drop’s phone number, and to make it dial right to the voicemail without having to enter in the extension, enter in the 10 digits of the phone number, then hit the “+ * #” key and then select “pause” and then enter the drop’s extension. This will allow you to one-touch dial right into your drop’s voicemail. Next add in your drop’s email for easy writing.
4. Subscribe to your Drop’s RSS feed in your reader of choice
   This will keep you reminded of all of the things you’ve been thinking of, so when the time comes to fully blow out these ideas, you have them readily available, organized in chronological order and at the top of your mind.

The one thing missing from all of this is the ability to search through a drop — a feature that would be really useful with this methodology of using drop.io. I contacted the drop.io team on Twitter (@dropio) and they mentioned that they are looking into search functionality on future releases, so salvation may come soon enough.

Got any other ways of using drop.io or keeping track of your ideas?