Help! I have an idea!

Don't Panic! Your brain has just given you a wonderful gift! You might be able to act on it now, but what if you can't? Well, that's what this guide is for! There's a bunch of different ways to keep track of your thoughts, but for brevity's sake, we're gonna use three examples. Meet Mary, Gary, and Terri, three creative individuals with very different ways of organizing their thoughts! We will refer to them throughout the guide to show you a few options (but not all the options, or we'd be here forever) you could take to organize your ideas.

ACT I: Documentation.

The first thing to do when you have an idea you can't act on right away is to DOCUMENT it. It doesn't matter how well formed it is, the idea needs to get out of your brain and into somewhere concrete, after all, it could slip your mind! Here's what our creatives are doing:

• Terri has an idea while surfing the net. They put it into a temporary .txt file for later.
• Gary has an idea while daydreaming during a lecture. He writes it down in the margins of his notes for later.
• Mary has an idea while eating a bagel in a coffee shop. She writes it on a napkin and stuff it in their bag for later.

Phew! Our newly-formed idea is safe, for now! Of course, this isn't a permanent solution! Ideally you want to find a cozier, more permanent place for your idea to rest.

ACT II: Storage

There's really only a couple of things you really need to consider when deciding on where to store your ideas. And they're more guidelines than anything:

• Is your storage medium easy (for you) to use?
• Does your storage medium have enough space for how often you'll use it?
• Is your storage medium easy to restore if something happens to it?
• Is your storage medium secure?

With this in mind, some storage mediums will work better for some people rather than others, so let's take a look at what our creatives our doing:

• Terri is using a note-taking app like Obsidian or Notion as their storage medium, as they are on their computer frequently and they're quite familiar with how it works. They intend to backup their archive on an external hard drive, just in case.
• Gary is using a 3 ring binder and lined paper as his storage medium, as it is expandable and easy to modify, but they prefer the experience of writing things down on paper. He can backup his archive by making photocopies of the entries, or scanning them into a computer.
• Mary is using a series of leather bound notebooks as her storage medium, because having something nice to write in inspires her to use it more frequently. She intends to backup her archive by taking pictures of it and uploading them to an online drive.

Whoa, what a range of approaches! When an idea archive is easy to use, you might find yourself using it an awful lot. Ideas can pile up real quickly, and when you have a lot of ideas to go through, you're going to want to get to the one you want quickly, so you can get to executing it faster, which brings us to...

ACT III: Organizing Your Ideas

So your ideas are safe and secure in whatever medium you stored them in, and that's fantastic! But as previously mentioned, you're going to have a hard time referencing them once you have a whole lot of them. Organization systems are subjective, and what works for one person won't necessarily work for another, so instead of providing a list of best practices, here are some suggestions that may or may not work for you!

• Try breaking your ideas up into categories, and then break them up even further! There's a certain degree of granularity where this stops being effective, so try not to go too crazy with it.
• Organize your ideas chronologically! By dating your ideas, not only will you have a rough idea of when you thought of things, but you can easily look back and see where your brain was when you had that idea, and that's a beautiful thing!
• Make a map! it's a great way to see how your ideas can connect to each other.

How you doing there, creatives?

• Terri is creating seperate folders in their note-taking app, naming each folder after the type of ideas that are stored within them. These folders are further separated by the idea's purpose.
• Gary is using dividers in his folder to separate his ideas by category. A map at the front of the folder serves as a table of contents.
• Mary is organizing her ideas chronologically, with pages closer to the front of her notebook coming first.

As you can see, there's no real wrong way to do it! Congratulations, you have now successfully gathered thine thoughts.

What's next?

Well, now that you've got your ideas safely preserved, you can now rest easily knowing that whatever brilliant idea you had while in your shower on a Tuesday night can be easily referenced for future implementation. As a bonus, looking back on your old ideas might inspire you to come up with new ones! It's also a great way to get to know yourself better.

Well, that's all for this guide, thanks for reading!