Thursday, 20 November 2008
Bin your ideas now!
I often find myself coming up with a lot of seemingly good ideas (well they seem good to me at the time). I’ll make some notes, email myself an outline, and bug my friends about my new ‘awesome’ idea. However in the light of the next days morning. I usually have two reactions:
1. I’ve gotta run with this idea quick quick – Let me figure out how to progress it
2. This idea is terrible – DELETE
This seems pretty sensible initially. Delete the obviously crappy ideas and grow the good ones. Trouble is, that even if an idea is good, does it really merit your attention and effort? I’ve recently come to the conclusion that focusing on one or 2 ideas is better than coming up with tons of good ideas and trying to find the time to grow them all.
So, I’ve created a ‘ideas rubbish bin’ (catchy name eh?) where I intend to ruthlessly dump the majority of the ideas I come up with. The main benefit of this ideas bin is two-fold:
1. I can avoid the haunting feeling of loss at binning my idea, by keeping them somewhere I could ‘potentially’ revive them from
2. I create some mental ‘clean space’ for the few ideas I want to focus on, without having the other ideas divert my focus or attention
So far this process is working well and I felt a real sense of relief at ‘binning’ my ideas. Try it out, see what you think, I’d be curious to see if it works well for you too.
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