How to Capture Your Ideas (Never Forget a Great Idea!)

Is it just me or do shiny ideas get a really bad reputation? Right? I mean, people need ideas in order to make their business, their organization, their lives. Better yet, all these people are telling us in order to be productive, we cannot possibly entertain shiny ideas. Something here is off. So in this video, what I want to talk about is how we can find the happy medium between ideas. Ideas are amazing, which they are. And ideas can be a recipe for chaos, which they can also be. My hypothesis here is that ideas themselves are wonderful. What's not so wonderful is how we humans can sometimes get infatuated with an idea and maybe lose track of what's important. Basically, ideas are great, humans are great. But sometimes the relationship between those two can be a little codependent. In this video, I want to walk you step by step through how you can start to capture all of your ideas. Keep all of those ideas in safekeeping in one brain dump zone and quarantine those ideas away from your day to day life. That way you can be an idea generating machine. Amazing. But also be super productive. When time requires you to be that. Recognize when it's time to turn off the ideas area and focus in on the day to day work you have to do not get distracted, but at the same time not become boring. To go about this, we are going to do four quick action items together. Ready? Step number one is we are going to create a brain dump zone. The requirements for your brain dump zone is to have something that you can access within about 90 seconds. Okay. You need to be able to access this whether that is a piece of software or a notebook. Your goal is to have one spot that you can dump all of your ideas into within 90 seconds of thinking of that idea. Now yes, there'll be exceptions. If you come up with an idea in the shower, I don't expect you to bring your notebook with you. But our goal is going to be that within a normal realm of the day, you can find that brain dump zone and dump your idea within 90 seconds. For most people, an easy way to go about this would be a notebook. If you are someone that is more digital like we are here, you might also find a task management or project management tool. Helpful things like ClickUp, notion, coda, airtable, all of these can be great spots to dump those ideas quickly and easily. The most important thing about this whole brain dump area is that it is easy for anyone who is dumping the ideas into it. If you're looking to capture ideas from a whole team, make sure it's not a notebook that only you can access in the same way. If you're looking to make sure that these are ideas that are private to only you, make sure your ideas aren't shared somewhere that it's shared with your corporate team. Team. Okay, so we want to make sure that we are mindful of our audience. Once we have picked our brain dump zone of some kind, we need to decide what is important to us to know about every idea. For some people it's going to be really important for them to know what day they thought of an idea, what's the date? For other people they're going to want to know what is this idea for? Is it for my first company or my third company? For other people, they don't really need to know anything other than it's an idea. And that's fine. Once you've decided what is important for you to know about any given idea, we want to create fields for this in our relevant tool. So if we're using a notebook, what we might do is create columns on each page that represent each of the things we want to track. For example, we can have a column for date and another column for the idea. If you're using a digital piece of software, you might use something like the name as one thing or the row as one thing or the custom field as one thing. We just want to make sure that whatever we want to have, we have pre made. So when we have that idea, we know exactly where we're putting information. And we don't forget by accident. For us here at ProcessDriven, we actually have a shared team idea brain dump area. And one thing I like to see on every single idea is what category of the business is this idea for? Is it for operations? Is it for product? Is it for marketing? This is helpful for me to know. It is one thing that I like to add in on our internal team ideas brained up area which just rolls off the tongue. Got that. Ready to go on to the next step. Okay, third step of our brain triage system is going to be deciding when do we actually dump ideas? Now this sounds like a trick question, right? I said at the beginning, whenever you have an idea, dump it. But I want to be clear that not everything is an idea. The reason we're brain dumping ideas is so that way we can put all these shiny objects in one spot and then look at them later from a place of rest. We'll talk about that in the next step. But there are going to be some things that pop into your head that probably deserve to skip the line and go right on your to do list. Okay, so this is the exceptions to the rules we want to decide on now. For example, in my business here at ProcessDriven, we practice this as a team. And if there is ever an emergency, something that's preventing us from fulfilling a promise to our team or to other people outside of the company, if there's anything like that happening, the team knows that that is considered an issue. And what that means for us here is that issues never have to go onto the ideas list. They are so important, so urgent, so must do that. They skip the line and go right onto people's task list. If the website is down, if the bank is calling, if we get a scary letter in the mail, all of that stuff is an issue that does not go onto the ideas list. This brain dump ideas area is for us to think about. That would be nice or oh, wouldn't that be cool? Ideas, concepts, big dreams. But things that we must do or are non negotiables, recognize that those do not go on this idea of backlog. Now, I've already given you my criteria here at ProcessDriven, but what I want you to do in this step is decide for yourself what ideas are you putting here and what ideas are never going to go here because they are so important that they should go somewhere else. Define that for yourself. So you always know, do I go to my brain dump area or do I put this on my to do list or email somebody or whatever? What is that line in the sand for you? That's step three. Finally, we are in step four and this is the review phase. So to review, so far we have picked a brain dump area. We've decided what we want to track for each idea and we've decided what are the exceptions to the rule. The fourth thing we want to think about is how do we get ideas out of that brain dump area. The last thing we want is to take all these great ideas, collect them, collect them, and then do nothing with them. What's the point? So this last fourth step is for you to decide a repeating cadence for reviewing those ideas. For some people, this might be every Sunday night as they're preparing for their next week. For others, it might be at their quarterly team retreat when they're planning out their next quarter. Whatever the cadence is for you, decide it by knowing this and making this promise to yourself, putting it on the calendar or on your task list as a recurring task. Put that shiny new idea on the list. You have the peace of mind to know. Okay, I'm not doing this idea right now, putting it on this list, but I'm going to get back to it. Next time we have our planning session, I'm going to review all this and it's not gonna just be stuck here on this list and never go anywhere. If you're not sure what frequency is appropriate for reviewing your ideas list, I would suggest starting off with every two weeks. That gives you a good amount of cadence, that it never feels like you're, you know, ignoring your ideas, but not too often, that you're being constantly overwhelmed by the question of should I do this, should I not? The purpose of this whole structure in all four steps that I told you about is to separate again, the, the ideas and what should I do to the actual doing. The question of what should I do? Is very stressful, uses a lot of our willpower. So if we can just add all these tasks to the list without, you know, no discretion, just add them all on there, no idea is a bad idea. And then every week or every two weeks, we look over them all and we decide, no, no, no, yes, no, yes, you know, whatever it is, put those ideas onto our task list, tuck that ideas list away and focus on our tasks for the next week or two weeks and then repeat that way every day. It's not a wildcard of oh, what idea am I going to do today? I'm not sure. No, I've already decided I can just focus on doing. The point of separating this is to bring a little bit more calm into your life, reduce that decision fatigue of deciding what I should do, and most importantly, ensure that you're committing to new ideas from a place of rest rather than this frenzy and excitement around this new shiny idea. So that is how you can go about capturing your ideas easily in four simple steps. Once this is set up, this is just going to become a recurring routine as part of your business or organization or self development. And if you have any questions about this, you probably are going to want to watch this video next where I go through some more ways to be even more systematic throughout other areas of your business or organization as well? Because the fact is, idea management, that's just the beginning. Speaking of decision fatigue, isn't it kind of exhausting to go on YouTube and try to scroll around and find the right answers to your questions? Yeah, I think so. I'm a huge YouTube watcher and I find it a bit overwhelming at times. So if you are someone who finds systemization, operations, efficiency, and the stuff we talk about on this channel helpful, save yourself that decision. Sign up for our email newsletter in the email not email the description area below and you'll get these videos directly inside your inbox so you don't have to look around for them. They'll come right to your inbox each Friday as soon as they're released. Otherwise, thanks so much for watching and until next time, enjoy the process.