Sometimes ideas seem useless until they’re connected with other ideas. Revisiting all of the idea notes every month gives you a chance to connect the dots and turn average ideas into great ones.
Photo by Fiorenza Thompson
You may have a “Eureka!” moment every once in a while, but more often than not, great ideas start small. They trickle out and need time to ferment. That’s why Robi Ganguly, the CEO of Apptentive, suggests you go through all of them once a month:
…pull out similar ideas and see if they coalesce around something. If [the ideas are] particularly direction-oriented, I make them more concrete ideas with plans and questions that I can circulate with other people.
Having a monthly idea rundown not only reminds you what you came up with, but it may also lead to solutions you would never have pieced together otherwise. Of course, you have to be consistently writing down all of your ideas in order for this method to work. Ganguly recommends you note everything you think of, good or bad:
…let ideas float and disappear. Once I stopped worrying about every idea getting turned into actions and let myself just get ideas down, it became ‘less expensive’ to have ideas, because I didn’t have to worry about making everything into a plan of action and implementation.
When you have a moment of brilliance or clarity, take a moment to put it down on paper or in your favourite note-taking app. Invest in your idea bank. It doesn’t matter how you do it, as long as you do it.
How the Most Successful People Keep track of Their Best Ideas [Fast Company]
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