What Do You Do With All Those Great Ideas? How to Capture Your Ideas & Save Them for When The Time is Right

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I have these amazing bursts of creativity and the ideas just fly into my mind. And they are all great and I want to do all of them at the same time! It is a bit crazy. And I already have my quarterly goals set for now. Plus I am so easily distracted anyways. But I don’t want to forget these ideas so I can hash them out later and see which ones are worth pursuing. And if I don’t capture them somewhere what will I do when I get stuck and need an idea? Oh that’s right…I will spend hours staring at my computer, scrolling FB and IG and get NOTHING accomplished. Well thanks to some trial and error and some really smart & helpful friends here is how to capture those ideas and save them for when the time is right.

Do you have an Idea garden?

All entrepreneurs need a stash of ideas. Inevitably we come up with a bunch of great ideas when we don’t need them or don’t have time to run with them. So we need a way to capture these ideas for later. My friend Christine calls it an idea garden. I seriously love this instead of calling it a brain dump. A dump is where the trash goes and an idea garden is where your business grows – see what I did there ;). Every entrepreneur needs a system to capture these bursts of creativity so they can revisit them and turn those ideas into the next product or service for their business.

Where to Store Your Idea Garden?

You know you need to capture these amazing ideas for later, but where and how to keep them is the question we all ask. There are so many options – your laptop, your phone, a notebook, post-it’s on the wall. You may look at those options and immediately one jumps out at you. Then that is the one you should go with. For others it may take you a bit of trial and error to find the right way for you. My business coach uses her note feature on her phone. I have another friend who uses a spread sheet. For me it is a paper journal. There is something about writing it out by hand that helps me get it out of my brain but not forget it. Then it is quietly waiting for me on the shelf until the next quarter planning session.

Now what?

As the old Nike commercials used to say “Just Do It”! Like so many other things in business, it is easy to get stuck in analysis paralysis. Simply take the next step. Don’t overthink it. Try one of these options and give it a month or two. If it doesn’t work, try something else. Eventually you will find the ‘system’ that works for you. As my business coach always says “the right one for you is the one you will use”. So get out there and capture those ideas and save them for when the time is right.