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Many creativity experts recommend carrying some system for recording ideas with you wherever you go. My tool of choice is a Moleskine notebook, which serves as my portable “idea journal.” But I just learned a new technique to get more out of it. Typically, I will record lists of related ideas in bulleted form on one page of my notebook. But according to Ed Bernacki, author of the new mini-book, I am an Idea Factory, you need to give your fledgling ideas enough room to grow. That’s why he recommends only recording one idea per page.
He compares an idea to a painting. Over a period of days or weeks, the artist focuses all of his or her creativity on the canvas, adding color, texture, detail and nuance to it. It’s a gradual process, which relies heavily on one’s creative “flow.” Some artists, he says, work on several pieces at one time, moving between canvases depending upon where their energies and creativity are flowing at the moment. And so it is with ideas:
"Consider each page as a working canvas for one idea. Move between ideas until one is ready, then act!"
He appears to be suggesting an approach that I had never really thought about: Record one idea per page in your journal, capturing any details on paper that are in your mind at the time. Then, return to it days or weeks later to review it. You then have an opportunity to look upon each idea with fresh eyes, and add more color, detail and nuance to those that inspire you, much like an artist does. And because you have only recorded one idea per page, you have plenty of room to record these additional thoughts and insights. That’s an important distinction!
So how do you record your ideas? Do they have enough room to grow and develop? Do you have a system for reviewing and nurturing them on a regular basis? If not, now is the time to improve your idea collection and review process, so it can deliver bigger and better results for you! |
7/31/2008 by: Matthew Cornell
Nice post. I do the equivalent using my electronic idea journal (a big text file with macros for quick capture and search). Because it's digital, there's always space under each entry. And each entry is its own page via separators between each chunk. For those that continue to gestate, I return to the entry to add the latest thinking. I'm trying out a variation related to blogging. I create a draft blog post for "hot" or "big" ideas I want to blog about. I'm not sure how this'll play out...
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