Sometimes I have a shortage of ideas and struggle to decide what to write about, like this morning. More often, I have more than enough ideas and it’s just a matter of getting in the writing flow and cranking out the posts. Those are the times when I double and triple up on writing and get a few posts done ahead of the game (insert editor’s smile here). It all comes down to the ideas so you need to capture them when they come.
Ideas have no schedule
Ideas are typically a function of the work you are doing. Either that or the observations you are making as you go through your daily life. For example, right now as I add team members to support the growth of ColorMetrix I am thinking about fixed and variable costs. I just captured that idea by creating a blank post in ecto and you can expect to see a post about it later this week.
You can make “ideation” happen. I know some don’t agree with this but by choosing to write about ideas I am coming up with a bunch of them. Some are related to the Richard Branson book, “Business Stripped Bare,” that I am reading right now. Some more ideas are coming up about a meeting I will have with my newest team member next week. The trick is to capture the ideas when they happen. The ideas, you see, have no schedule and will come when they darn well feel like it.
“Ideation” environments
Yes, I did contradict myself in the prevision paragraph. That’s my point – ideas are flighty little devils. You can plan for them by creating “ideation” environments. Today, I’m sitting in a business class seat with my ear buds in listening to XM 20 on 20. It’s me, the keyboard, the Richard Branson book and a cup of coffee. No inflight wi-fi for now I have ideas to think up and writing to do.
On the flip side, I was at a conference last week and captured a bunch of good post ideas. As I sat in the sessions, I kept both my phone and notebook handy. Some of the ideas rest in the pages of notes I took or the little reminders I captured on my phone (including pictures I took to remind me to write about something).
See what I’ve done here? By writing about ideas for you, I have reminded myself of where all my good ones are hiding. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a few more posts to go write. And remember, be prepared to catch those ideas whenever and wherever they occur because they live and work on the Anywhen time continuum.
I think that once you get into the mindframe of extending the conversation in everything you do the second part is doing what you are doing by keeping notes in various forms to store all those ideas.
Then just writing a bit more about them when you have time really helps in creating posts. I am still working on keeping a post simple because another problem I have is that I start writing and I want to keep adding. (like you see in my comments)
Raul, You just summed up pretty much how I find something of value to post here each day.