Growing Your Ideas

If you are like me, then ideas come continually in waves. In the waves, there are a mix of promising and mediocre ones. The ideas are essentially raw materials to something that may prove fruitful.

Between making an idea happen as a reality and the conception of it, there’s a key middle step. You have to have a good capture process that makes it easy.

Here are some things I do to ensure I don’t lose good ideas and I have a healthy source of raw materials to harness if it makes sense:

• Capture in Evernote. Evernote is a simple and remarkable tool. It can become your brain’s hard drive for capturing any resource information and ideas. I have the Evernote App on my iPhone which syncs to the cloud. This keeps everything up to date and synced. General ideas get captured right away, whether I am in a conversation with someone or coming back from a run.
• Twitter posts of a thought. Twitter is easy and accessible from my iPhone and any of the computers I use. If I have a raw thought, it takes a little more brain power to turn it into something meaningful as a Tweet. If I see a resource I like online, I will Tweet it also. I review my Tweets over time for new ideas and the ones that still have context and I can get behind I move into a project phase.
• Journaling. Writing out what is happening in life is not only cathartic but forces clarity. Reflecting about what is happening and how it is impacting me in a paper journal slows my brain down. I like reviewing it once in a while to find the ideas that still make sense.

These are the raw places where my ideas are captured so I don’t lose them. Moving the real ones into projects and tasks is the next step. Having a place to capture and incubate the ideas allows me to have an idea factory that can be drawn upon.

When there is time and distance with those past captures, I can look to see if I still have an emotional connection to take the idea to fruition. There is more context. A worthy idea typically keeps coming up and demands attention.

There you are. A few ways to capture your ideas and change your world. What do you think?