How do you keep track of your ideas?

Hello, my name is Ian Peterman. I'm CEO and founder of Peterman Design Firm, and today I just want to talk a little bit about how to track your ideas. And this is something that I, I get asked because I work with inventors. I work with a lot of projects at a time. And I've always, always answered it, but now I figured I'd just put it together in a video and just share with you guys some ways to track your ideas. And by ideas, I am usually referring to, you know, product ideas, company ideas, service ideas. You know, those are the ones that I am constantly coming up with, and the people that I'm working with, those are the ideas that they're always coming up with as well. And I want to talk about, you know, why, why should you keep track of your ideas, notebooks, digital notes, lists, memory, and go over kind of the different ways that you can and which ones are ones that I have found most effective for myself. First is why should you keep track of your ideas? And, you know, a lot of people don't. So I've met a lot of people that, oh, they have an idea and they let it, They just basically have it and it goes and nobody follows up with it. But if you're someone that's really serious about launching a product and wanting to develop something, you want to start creating some kind of way of tracking all of your ideas because eventually they'll start coming together and you may find yourself wanting to try to remember an old idea that suddenly becomes relevant. as you're launching a product. And in launching a product, launching a business around it, it takes a lot of ideas and a lot of different solutions, and you never know which one is going to be needed at a certain point. And that's kind of the thing with ideas is you may have an idea now, and in 5 years that idea may be the thing that makes it so you 10x your company. It could be the thing that saves your marriage or whatever it's going to be. But you don't know. And so one of the ways that I've been able to be so successful is documenting all of my ideas, keeping track of them. And when I get to a point where it's a valid idea or potentially something worth exploring related to what I'm doing, all of a sudden I'm able to go back and figure out what that idea is, re-remember it, and come up with solutions to things that It would have taken me a lot longer if I had chosen not to keep track of that idea from before. So I personally have, I have at least 2 notebooks on my desk, actually 3. I have 3 notebooks right now, all full, about this size, and notebooks are great. There's a lot of research and study about how writing ideas, not typing, As much, but actually writing, physically putting your pen or pencil to paper helps you remember things and organize your thoughts better. So there's studies on, you know, taking notes at the end of the day, beginning of the day, that really help your brain be able to reorganize and save things in your memory. But it also makes this for something that you can keep track of. And I use Notebook because I like to sketch and write and do all kinds of things and I do digital as well, and I'll get to that in a minute, but there's just a tactility about it that for me and how my brain works, that works really well. And I've known a lot of people that notebooks are the best way to do that. Next thing to talk about is digital notes. So I do use digital notes because search feature. Let's be honest, I can search for all kinds of stuff. Digital notes work really well in sending ideas to people. But to be honest, I've gotten ideas from people that are finally moving forward with a project. I've gotten handwritten notes. I've gotten sticky notes. I've gotten notebooks. I've gotten digital things. People have drawn things in Paint. People have done something in Photoshop. Some people have used all kinds of different tools And there's some really great ones out there for digitally taking your notes and keeping track of ideas, and it all just depends on what you're wanting. But I can tell you from, from a product development standpoint and my experience in receiving and having to decipher people's notes, you know, digital notebook doesn't really matter. They work really well in terms of communicating the ideas. Really, whatever is going to work best for you to communicate the idea. And the other thing to think about in keeping track of your ideas is making sure that it's something that you can communicate to someone else and not in the moment necessarily, but spending time in doing that can be really helpful. Lists are really great. I find them to be personally a little tedious. I almost don't use lists anymore, but they have a really good use in just tracking ideas. So I have done, list of ideas and when you're speccing out, if you're wanting to launch a product, listing things out in concise groups will really allow you to help build a scope of work that you'll want to use later and you'll need to have that put together. So if you have ideas and you can collate them and put them together into lists, it's a really good way to track them and be able to segment out, especially if you're doing digital lists, List it out per, you know, idea type or per, you know, I have 10 ideas around this product, or I have 10 ideas around this company, or I have 10 ideas about this. Being able to list them out like that can help actually make the process easier when you start to go to launch a product and you want all of your ideas. And yeah, they could be just bullet points that reference, that just trigger your memory. You go, oh, I remember that idea. And I have sketches over here and I have notes over here, but listing them off like that at a high level can really help make that scoping process when you work with someone else and you're working together, whether it's a partner or hiring an agency, it'll let you be able to bring all your ideas together quicker and save you some time there. The last one is memory. While there are people with photographic memories and There's many people are able to remember lots of things. Memory is great, and you should substitute it not completely. You really just support it with notebooks or digital notes taking or lists, some other thing that'll allow you to put it down. And the way I personally use it that works works really well for me may not work. Really well for you, but is I do notes mostly to jog my own memory. Once I read the note again, then all of it'll come forward. But without that, I honestly, I've spent so much time working on other people's ideas that my memory doesn't have the bandwidth to remember everything about every single project at all times, no matter what. So I always have some sort of system in order to jog my memory and say, oh, this is happening, this is happening, this is happening. This is what needs to be happening and use that as a tool. So keep that in mind. Memory is great. I used to, you know, rely on it a lot more in terms of just raw data, but efficiency has led me to using far more combination of note-taking and memory. So anyway, I, I hope this gives you a little bit better of an idea on how to keep track of your notes. And what systems might be beneficial as you go through this journey of wanting to launch your own product. How do you keep all those ideas together? How do you organize them? Ways to save them. And there's many books out there. There's a ton of great books on how to keep track of things, how to document, journaling. There's many different options, many different books, many different processes. And finding the right one is just going to help you be able to bring your ideas into one place, or, you know, like me, have multiple notebooks, but all in something that you can find so that when you get to that point and you're like, okay, well, I really want to actually make this idea start happening, you're going to be able to have something to actually reference. So when you talk to a designer like myself or a design firm, you won't take 3 weeks to get all of your notes together. You'll be able to say, oh, well, I have all of them here. Here's all my notes. Here's my ideas. I can answer all the questions and we can scope out the project easily. And that will save you a lot of time down the road. Or right now, if you're launching a product right now, definitely make sure that you're keeping track of things in some systemized way so that you can be a little bit on top of it and make sure everything's in place. Hey, thanks for watching. We really appreciate our viewers, and if you haven't subscribed yet, please do subscribe to our channel so you can get more great videos like this in your feed. And like the video. If you want to learn more about the Peterman Design Firm, please check us out on our website, petermanfirm.com. You'll find link and information in the description, and of course we're on all social media as well, so check us out there. All right, thank you.