How do you know which ideas are worth writing about?
Finding a Process for Writing
Ideas constantly swirl around in my head. Constantly popping up and giving rise to new ideas. But I can’t possibly follow each and every one, otherwise I would be overwhelmed and exhausted.
My current process is to capture as much as possible in Google Keep with a few main categories:
- Real Estate
- Art
- Blog
- Books
- Finances
- Fitness
- Food
- House
- Movies
- Music
- Parenting
- Portuguese
- Presents
- Projects
- Wood Working
- Work
Every time I have a new idea, I take a note, categorize it, and file it away. Now all these ideas no longer occupy space in my head. I don’t have to worry about them escaping and never returning. And over time, I now have a huge list of ideas so it becomes clear that not all my ideas are good. Or not all of them are relevant, important or worth pursuing right now. They can sit on the shelf for awhile until the universe is ready to make due.
Let Ideas Incubate
Over time I have learned this the hard way– not all ideas need to live and grow into something bigger. They can remain thoughts and ideas that entered and left and that’s okay. Comedians often talk about this too– not getting stuck on a premise and trying to squeeze blood out of a stone. Sometimes moving onto the next premise is the best way to get unstuck and feel the abundance flow.
The trick here is to get space from your ideas. Let these ideas incubate, and revisit them next week, month or next year. The ideas that still resonate over time should be the ideas worth pursuing.
I must admit that I’m not the best at killing my ideas. I tend to let them sit and gather dust rather than applying some kind of KonMari Spark of Joy Test. But this hasn’t stopped me from capturing and categorizing.
A Big Moment of Ah Ha!
Until recently I didn’t have a method of going through and doing anything with these ideas. Occasionally, I would try to go through ALL the categories and find the ideas that seemed like the best to go through. But there were still too many, and there was no good way to prioritize.
Then I read George Kao’s Joyful Productivity, which introduced a new technique- scheduling each categories on the calendar. Each category now gets dedicated time to think and write about. And since the corporate world teaches us to use our calendar, it’s not a far leap to add these categories for exploratory time slots.
Start Writing
Now we can start writing!
