I’m a big advocate of carrying a notebook with you everywhere to jot down every single idea that pops into your head. Personally, I have 3 active at any one moment. One is always in my laptop bag, one is near my bed, and one is in the car. (It should go without saying that there is always a pen nearby too)

No matter how many notebooks you have, pretty soon they will start to fill up with gold nuggets just waiting to be mined. There will be plenty of turds in there that need to be flushed, too.

Every other week, I usually go back through what I’ve written in my notebooks. I often find myself expanding on ideas and writing more in there. If there’s something I want to explore, I add it to a “to-do” list. This is a very short list of ideas I actually think are worth exploring. Every day I set aside some time to do something on this list.

Sometimes, the idea gets killed after I explore it. The most important thing is to make yourself follow up on the ideas you write in your notebook. If you don’t periodically review it and bring the best things to the front of your mind, anything you write in a notebook is useless.

I’ve found making a short list that’s always changing is must easier to take action on because it doesn’t seem as intimidating as a huge notebook full of ideas that I have to surf through every time.

Every few months or so I’ll go through the whole thing just to see what is in there, but it’s usually the bi-weekly reviews of the newest material that adds the most to my to-do list.

Tags: organize, idea, notebook, brainstorm, writing, process

Posted by Classic Jef on Friday, March 23rd, 2007 at 10:54 pm.