Shape Your Best Ideas With a Monthly Idea Survey
Sometimes ideas seem useless unless they are linked to other ideas. Revising all your idea notes every month gives you the opportunity to connect the dots and turn ordinary ideas into great ones.
You can have “Eureka!” moment from time to time, but more often than not, great ideas start small. They ooze and take time to ferment. This is why Robie Ganguly, CEO of Apptentive, invites you to play them all once a month:
… pull out similar ideas and see if they coalesce around something. If [ideas] are particularly directional, I make them more concrete ideas with plans and questions that I can convey to other people.
Not only will a monthly Idea Guide remind you of what you’ve come up with, but it can also lead to solutions that you would otherwise never be able to piece together. Of course, you must constantly jot down all your ideas for this method to work. Ganguly recommends marking everything you think about, good or bad:
… let ideas float and disappear. Once I stopped worrying about every idea turning into action and allowed myself to just get ideas out, it became “cheaper” to have ideas because I didn’t have to worry about turning everything into an action plan and implementation.
When you have a moment of sparkle or clarity, take a moment to jot it down on paper or in your favorite note-taking app. Invest in your bank of ideas . It doesn’t matter how you do it, the main thing is that you do it.
How Most Successful People Track Their Best Ideas | Fast Company