Do you have a lot of ideas but no clue how to organise them? Or maybe ideas come to you and by the time you have a chance to record them, you’ve forgotten? Enter the Spark File. As Alex Hillman explains, this tool doesn’t just capture half-baked ideas — it helps you turn small concepts into great things.
Image via Maxi_M (Shutterstock).
Steven Johnson is one of my favourite authors. I wish I could remember who introduced me to him so I could thank them. The first book of his I read was The Invention of Air, and his most recent Where Good Ideas Come From.
Where Good Ideas Come From in 4 Minutes
Recently, Steven started a series called “The Writers Room“. Truth be told, his last post is nearly a month old but has moved me so hard for the last month that I wanted to share.
Enter the Spark File
The Spark File, Steven describes, is a process/tool that he uses to collect “half-baked ideas” and then revisit them. For eight years, he’s maintained a single document with notes and ideas with zero organisation or taxonomy, simply a chronology of thoughts. He calls this document his Spark File.
Once a month, he revisits the ENTIRE Spark File from top to bottom, revisiting old ideas and potentially combining them with newer ideas.
I’ve adopted this process for the last 30 days and it’s had a remarkable effect. The most astounding part is how often I find myself writing the same thing in different ways. I’ve taken that pattern as a clue to explore a concept further, and see if it merits more investigation.
Your Crippling Compulsion, and the Solution
I was sharing this process with one of my co-conspirators, Tony Bacigalupo, while working with him last week and he said: “this process is amazing, it sounds like a defragmentation for your brain.”
And it is.
This is particularly important because, as Tony pointed out, we don’t have ideas all at once and we certainly don’t have them in any particular order. Perhaps more importantly, we tend to either have a compulsion to act on our ideas immediately, or not at all.
This compulsion is blocking your greatest work.
By using a Spark File, I’m able to “act” on an idea simply by writing it down at the bottom of the document. Compulsion fulfilled. But unlike the process without Spark File assistance, the idea’s destiny isn’t written yet. It has the potential to become something greater than an idea, and I’d argue something greater than most 99.9% of all execution.
Any of your half-baked ideas can contribute to the development of better answers.
Where Better Ideas Come From
Once a month (or any time I wish), I revisit my Spark File notes and look for patterns and clues. I can find inspiration and most importantly, I can find answers, sometimes answers to questions I didn’t even know how to ask while I was jotting down my half-baked ideas.
I’ve found that the inspiration and answers I’m gleaning from my Spark File are tending to be more complete, overall deeper, and more thorough than if I sit down to work on a single idea “in the moment” that I’m having that idea.
This has been especially useful while developing material for my now in session course on Mastering Community Building. (Find out more about it here.)
You can defrag your brain too.
Homework
Your homework, should you choose to accept it:
Read The Invention of Air.
Read Where Good Ideas Come From.
Read Steven’s post on his Spark File.
Start a Spark File of your own. Write in it every day.
Read through your entire Spark File it every few weeks (but not every day) looking for links and patterns.
Note: I’m using ByWord on my iPhone and iPad because it supports Markdown & syncs with Dropbox (referral link included), so I can easily edit and review from anywhere. Steven likes Google Docs, which is great so long as you’re connected to internet. ByWord lets me do Spark File work offline.
Better Answers & How I Learned to Defrag My Brain [AlexKnowsHTML]
Alex Hillman is the co-founder of Philadelphia’s Indy Hall coworking community, one of the most respected coworking spaces in the world, and a pioneer of the global coworking coworking movement. Follow him on Twitter @alexknowshtml.
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