A short guide to organizing your ideas. Version 1.0.
Don't Panic! Your brain has just given you a wonderful gift! You might be able to act on it now, but what if you can't? Well, that's what this guide is for! There's a bunch of different ways to keep track of your thoughts, but for brevity's sake, we're gonna use three examples. Meet Mary, Gary, and Terri, three creative individuals with very different ways of organizing their thoughts! We will refer to them throughout the guide to show you a few options (but not all the options, or we'd be here forever) you could take to organize your ideas.
The first thing to do when you have an idea you can't act on right away is to DOCUMENT it. It doesn't matter how well formed it is, the idea needs to get out of your brain and into somewhere concrete, after all, it could slip your mind! Here's what our creatives are doing:
Phew! Our newly-formed idea is safe, for now! Of course, this isn't a permanent solution! Ideally you want to find a cozier, more permanent place for your idea to rest.
There's really only a couple of things you really need to consider when deciding on where to store your ideas. And they're more guidelines than anything:
With this in mind, some storage mediums will work better for some people rather than others, so let's take a look at what our creatives our doing:
Whoa, what a range of approaches! When an idea archive is easy to use, you might find yourself using it an awful lot. Ideas can pile up real quickly, and when you have a lot of ideas to go through, you're going to want to get to the one you want quickly, so you can get to executing it faster, which brings us to...
So your ideas are safe and secure in whatever medium you stored them in, and that's fantastic! But as previously mentioned, you're going to have a hard time referencing them once you have a whole lot of them. Organization systems are subjective, and what works for one person won't necessarily work for another, so instead of providing a list of best practices, here are some suggestions that may or may not work for you!
How you doing there, creatives?
As you can see, there's no real wrong way to do it! Congratulations, you have now successfully gathered thine thoughts.
Well, now that you've got your ideas safely preserved, you can now rest easily knowing that whatever brilliant idea you had while in your shower on a Tuesday night can be easily referenced for future implementation. As a bonus, looking back on your old ideas might inspire you to come up with new ones! It's also a great way to get to know yourself better.
Well, that's all for this guide, thanks for reading!