I often dump ideas, questions, and answers in TextEdit files which I later use Spotlight to retrieve. Saving lots of these files manually is a chore, so I created an AppleScript to take care of this.
How it works is it takes the first paragraph (a line followed by return) of the document -- typically the title in my writing -- and uses this to name the text file (note some characters like ':' cannot be used in file names), and then saves the text file in your Documents folder. Here's the script:
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20080917031839321