How to Keep Track of Your Ideas

The invention of the sticky note was a revolution for those of us who are into personal productivity! It lets us jot down ideas and put them… anywhere. When learning Swahili, my friend Melvin wrote the Swahili word for common objects and stuck them all over his house. He dropped the class after three weeks, but he left the sticky notes up because he liked them so much.

Bernice uses sticky notes to record her Deep Thoughts. Every time she has a thought, down on a sticky note it goes. Then she looks for someplace around her office where she’s sure to see it, and she sticks it right up there. “Licorice flavored wedding cake—a new trend?” is right next to, “Sales report needs more curlicues.” It’s a really good thing Bernice’s influence extends only to her own life.

How to Keep Track of Your Ideas

I also jot ideas down everywhere. I use scraps of paper, little notepads, and the back of cash register receipts. The problem is that once there are ideas floating around everywhere, how do they ever get found? And how do they end up right where you need them, when you need them?

Melvin says the answer is to write ideas in pen, on the back of his hand. “That way, they’re always there when I need them,” he proudly declares. But that only works if you have very few ideas, very small handwriting, or (like Bernice) an awful lot of writing area. And if you bathe before copying the ideas to paper, they wash off. Melvin says this never comes up for him, which would explain why he can’t keep an officemate for longer than about three hours.

Where Should You Put Your Ideas?

Rather than putting your ideas anywhere they can be stuck, create an ideas file. It can be a regular paper file, but even better is a file on your computer. When you get that flash of inspiration, put it into your idea file. If you’re not at your computer, write it in the 3×5 notepad you carry with you, or on a napkin, or on the back of your hand. If you’re drunk, do not, repeat not, tattoo it on your arm. As soon as you get back to your computer, type the idea into your idea file and throw away the page of your notepad or your napkin, or wash your hands. With the new foaming soap dispensers, it’ll be fun!

Index Ideas by Keyword

To make it easy to find your ideas later, when you type them in, ask what you’re likely to be thinking about when you search for the idea someday. When you type in the idea, add a line of keywords that you can later search for to find the idea. If the idea is, “Design a suit out of Armadillo fur and become a Milan fashion designer,” you might include keywords: life passion, runway, formalwear, and revenge for the eighth graders telling me I dressed funny.

If you have many projects happening at once, feel free to have multiple ideas files, one for each project. Or you can have a single big idea file and make the project name a keyword that you search on.

Store Ideas Electronically

You can store your ideas in a word processing document simply separated by blank lines. That’s how I did it for years. These days, I use a spreadsheet. I put my ideas in the first column, keywords in the second column, and the name of the related project in the third column. I can hide the second and third columns if I want to print the spreadsheet and see just the ideas without the clutter of keywords. I can also filter and sort the spreadsheet by project to view just certain projects at once.

If I’m working on a project ideas file that I want to share, I’ll upload the spreadsheet into Google Docs and share it with the rest of the team. Then, we can all add our ideas and look through the file as needed.

For storing free-form notes and images, try the free Evernote program at Evernote. It runs on every platform under the sun and lets you enter free-form notes and tag them. Using tags is just like using keywords, but instead of typing them as part of your idea, there’s a special area of each note for the tags. Later, you can choose to display just the notes that have both the tags formalwear and Armadillo. Best of all, Evernote synchronizes with your iPhone, iPod, Blackberry.

If a project lends itself to related ideas, you can also try mind-mapping software. My favorite is Mind Manager Pro from Mindjet corporation. When I have ideas related to a book or a report or a project, I toss them into a mind map and can then group them. I can put all the idea about how to run the project in one area of the map, all the ideas about potential partners in another area, and so on. Mind Manager can also import and export to Word files, giving me the best of both worlds.

Do a Daily Sweep of Ideas into your System

Keeping your ideas in one place only works if you actually put them in that place! When the notes start to pile up, spend a few minutes typing them into your central idea file or into your individual project files. Then throw the bits of paper away. If you have diagrams that you simply must keep, take a picture of them with your phone camera and email them directly to Evernote or to your email archive where you can cut and paste them directly into your idea file.

I’ve shown my idea file to Bernice and she thinks it’s wonderful! She’s already making plans to get rid of all of her sticky pads and scribbled pieces of paper in favor of a single, simple ideas file. Her font is loaded with curlicues, and she’s about to brainstorm 101 ways licorice-flavored wedding cake can be used to overthrow the patriarchy and restore honor to the old gods. Enthusiasm can be a good thing. Sometimes…

Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!

RESOURCES

• Evernote – Evernote

• For visit Google Docs – Google Docs

• For visit Mind Manager Pro – Mind Manager Pro

Sticky Note image courtesy of Shutterstock