What I do with all my ideas

Last week I introduced you to the concept of idea evaluating and showed you what some people do with their ideas.

Today I wanted to show (and tell) you what I do with mine.

First of all, I carry a ubiquitous capture device (UCD for short) on me at all times. Sometimes it’s a moleskine, other times I type up a line or two in my iPhone and email it to myself, and very rarely I’ll use the voice recording feature to get an idea out of my head.

The closed-loop brain problem sucks.

The Closed-Loop Brain (in a jar)

Ideas are no good stuck inside my brain so they must get out one way or another. If not, I end up blocked. Sorta like creative constipation, or the closed-loop brain problem. Ideas just swirl around and around and don’t get out into the world. Never a good thing.

If the idea is totally making my brain light up, I get to my Idea Book as soon as possible and write and write and write and doodle and write until I can’t write anymore.

I go through my collected ideas from time to time and do a major brain dump in my Idea Book with the ones that haven’t made it in there yet.

My very large, super-awesome Idea Book

And for the longest time, it stayed that way. If I wanted to look up an idea, I had to sift through my many notebooks, scroll through my emails to myself and notes on my iPhone, or flip through my Idea Book and get distracted, and generally waste time finding something.

I’m generally a disorganized and mostly-analog (shocking, I know…) person so tracking my ideas using any electronic means always eluded me.

But I knew I needed to do something.

I was working with a client of mine who is always coming up with new ideas and couldn’t figure out which to do next. I asked her to go through a very basic process of idea evaluation to get them all out on paper and ranked. I was thinking she’d have a notebook full of scribbles and stars and circles around the ones she wanted to do.

When I got a spreadsheet from her instead, it blew my mind.

Here was a way to organize and sort my ideas according to how I ranked them. Here was a way I could cross-reference and search and categorize…

And here was my first product, the Idea Evaluator Kit. Thanks to Sarah Lewis (who rocks hardcore, by the way), this spreadsheet sparked a new idea and led me to create this kit.

Finally! I’m organizing my ideas.

Inspired by Sarah, I’m now going through my notebooks and emails and notes and audio files to get all those ideas listed. My Idea Book pages are now numbered, and I’m cross-referencing them in a spreadsheet. I’m also considering adding some tags or categories to them so they’re easier to find.

I’m also open to finding (or creating!) a mobile or web app to keep track of all this as well. Evernote seems like too much, but I may revisit.

What tools do you use to keep track of your ideas? How do you decide which one(s) to do next? I’d love to hear from you!