I’ve created a short series of audios which answer questions I have been asked from people who have creative minds and a lot of ideas.
You can find them on Substack.
Episode 6 – My brain moves very fast – how do I keep hold of all my ideas?
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Transcript
My brain moves very fast with all its ideas and plans. How do I keep hold of everything?
So this is a common problem for people with busy brains. And I think there’s a couple of things here. One of them is about capturing the ideas. And the other one is keeping track of the to do’s.
So I hope I’ve interpreted that question correctly from the person who asked it. I think what I will do is look at the capturing of ideas in this. in this answer and perhaps look at the tracking the to do’s as another answer later on.
So for capturing ideas I mean clearly ideas come to us at all sorts of different times often often inconvenient times whether you’re whether you’re someone who has loads and loads and loads and loads of ideas and a lot going on in your brain at the same time or whether you are someone who just goes out for a walk and then suddenly all these ideas appear.
So if you’re someone who does have lots of ideas I’d suggest that you have have some sort of way of noting down these ideas – so that might be something on paper that might be something digitally.
And then having time set aside in your diary to look through the ideas because obviously you can have them and you can write them down or capture them somehow, but if you then never do anything more with that then they don’t happen. Quite often it means they come back every now and then and remind you that you had them um but in order to actually do something with them you kind of need to have a process. A way of actually doing something with them.
So if your ideas are quite a quite day-to-day quite tactical things like new social media posts people you want to contact, you might want to do this for an hour every week maybe sit down with a nice cup of tea or coffee collect all the ideas together and then what you can do is decide which ones you’re going to do something with now. Maybe just pick a couple if we’re talking about blog posts, for example.
And then all the other ones you can put in what I call an ideas bank. So that could be as simple as a Word or Google document that you just stick them all in to come back to at a future point. So that’s if they’re if they’re kind of day-to-day smaller ideas.
If they’re bigger and more strategic you might find that that actually you want to do this kind of sorting through the ideas, but maybe you want to do a half day strategy session each quarter or each term, depending on how you how you plan your year.
And you might find that actually that’s really helpful to do with a coach, business mentor or a thinking partner. Just someone that you work with who you can bounce your ideas off and who you can talk through which ones actually you want to do something with.
So those are a couple of ideas on what to do once you’ve captured all the ideas. Just coming back quickly to… how you capture the ideas a couple of little tips. So digital tools you could use I mean you could just use the notes app on your phone I’ve seen examples of people who’ve got hundreds hundreds stored in there. I use OneNote sometimes for some of my ideas, Asana is a project management tool but some people use that, it’s got the kanban visual, a visual facility, a bit like Trello, where you can just pop an idea in there and then move it through a process. And something like Evernote, that’s another bit like OneNote. People mention things like Airtable and Notion. I don’t have any experience of those, but certainly people do mention those as being places where you can set up an ideas system for content or whatever it is you want to, whatever it is your ideas are all about.
If you’re more of a paper person or or like me you kind of use a bit of digital and a bit of paper my best tip here is actually to have a pen and either some sticky notes or one of those you know those tall square note blocks notepad blocks have one of those in every room or place where you often have ideas – so for me that’s outside the shower and in the kitchen and in the car. So that if you have one of those ideas, you can just write them down if you haven’t got your phone handy, for example.
So those are a few ways that you can capture your ideas. As I said before, thinking about all your to-dos, that’s another big topic, I think. It’s probably a question for another recording. But if you do think that would be a useful topic for me to record some suggestions on, then please do get in touch. You can send me a message via ninalenton.co.uk, my website. Then maybe I will record that one as well if that would be helpful. Thank you for listening.