Ideas are a dime a dozen.
Good ideas? Maybe one in a hundred.
Great ideas? Once a year.
THE idea? Once in a lifetime – if you are lucky.
Having ideas is an intuitive process, one with an element of randomness. Certainly, this intuition and randomness can be nudged by preparation, domain study, brainstorming, question-bursts etc. But all the same, when and where great ideas happen is difficult to predict.
However, capturing ideas – good, great or otherwise – is not random. It is a discipline.
In the photo above, I am showing my morning journaling routine (based on Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages) when a write a couple pages on anything that comes to mind right when I get up (and after I feed my cat!)
But next to my journal is an iPad.
That’s where the discipline comes in.
You see, if a run across a good idea in my journaling, I then immediately transfer it to my iPad capture system ( in my case, Omnifocus) and I then know this particular idea will be reviewed later – 100% of the time (usually Sunday morning).
(Side note: for me, journaling is a great way to create ideas and thoughts, but it isn’t an optimized system to review them. It is very easy to lose ideas within a written journal over time.)
Thanks to my use of my iPad, my iPhone, and good old paper, I have a 24/7 idea capture system in place.
That’s my “idea capture discipline”.
What’s yours?