Write Down Your Ideas

How many times have you had a good idea come to mind only for you to forget what it was when you had time to act on it? Like trying to recall the details of a dream you had last night as it slips away from your mind, you struggle to recall what the idea was. Sometimes it comes back, and sometimes it gets lost and you end up moving on without it. Most of the time this isn’t a big deal, but some of these lost ideas could have turned into great opportunities if only you could remember them.

To avoid being foiled by forgetting again, get in the habit of noting ideas like this right away in a place where you’ll come back to them later, whether that be on a device, in a notebook, or on a board. Be sure to note your ideas with enough specific details to be able to reconstruct your thoughts later, as hardly anything is more annoying than looking at a note you wrote earlier and not recalling what it was about. This post goes over three important points to consider about writing down your ideas:

-            High upside and low downside of recording “aha” moments as you have them

-            Use the cost of forgetting and the opportunity of recalling an idea as motivations

-            Writing down ideas can spur further thoughts to make your solution more complete

High upside and low downside

We all come up with great ideas when we’re doing things like taking a shower, going for a walk, or other times when we have a chance to unplug from immediate distractions. Unfortunately, those great ideas often hit us at a moment when we can’t act on them right away. And if we don’t make a note about the idea and just wait until a good time to act, we often don’t remember the idea quite well enough to take advantage of it. But when we write down an idea descriptively enough to easily recall it when reviewing the note later, it becomes much easier to finish writing the details and putting that great idea into action at the right time. A small amount of effort to stop and write down the idea when it comes to mind often leads to a much faster and better implementation of the idea when you have an opportunity to do it! You don’t have to waste extra time later trying to jog your memory about the idea or settling for a less good solution when it’s time to act because you can’t quite recall key details thought of earlier.

Cost of forgetting and opportunity of recalling as motivations

To motivate yourself to adopt the habit of writing ideas down in enough detail as they come to mind, think back to a time that you lost a good idea. A good idea thought of right before falling asleep usually isn’t remembered the next morning or ever again after that. How much extra time did you have to spend solving a problem that could have been solved faster if you had written down your idea instead of assuming you would remember it in the morning?

Another way to motivate yourself into this habit is to remember times when you have written an idea and it helped you act on the idea more successfully later. Maybe on Saturday morning, you thought of a great idea for a work or school task to complete on Monday and because you wrote a descriptive reminder of the idea when you thought of it, you were able to complete the task on Monday morning in 30 minutes instead of the two hours you were initially expecting that work to take.

Spur further thoughts to make your solution more complete

When a great idea hits you in a flash, it’s usually just a starting point and not everything you need to make the idea successful. Often, you need to run with the idea and figure out additional details or overcome some obstacles to make your great idea a reality. The need to figure out these details usually becomes evident as you start to think more about your initial idea. Luckily, writing down your initial idea not only brings the need for these details to mind, but also might make it easier to have further epiphanies about how to best complete those details or overcome obstacles blocking your larger idea. It will feel like you’re coming up with one good idea after another to help accomplish what you’re ultimately trying to do, and it feels great when lots of good ideas start clicking rapidly! Writing down ideas at the time you have them not only helps you to better recall those ideas later, but it also facilitates thinking through the implications of those ideas and figuring out all the specific steps needed to implement the ideas successfully.

Conclusion

Hopefully, these points have convinced you to adopt the habit of recording ideas when they occur to you, if you are not in a place where you can act on them right away. Writing down ideas does not take much time or effort or cost much of anything at all but rewards you with making action easier to take when an opportunity comes up. Remember how bad it feels when you forget an idea and how good it feels to easily act on an idea later because you wrote it down earlier and now remember clearly what to do. Also, think about how writing down an idea initially can spur more thoughts later as you consider the details of implementing your idea. This can be especially helpful if you want to write something that rhymes – you might think up a clever wording now that you won’t remember when you get home to work on it in three hours if you don’t write it down now. Sharing an example of my own, writing down an idea as soon as I had it is how I came up with the flow of It All Starts with Organization, which if not written down right away would have likely been forgotten.

Try adopting the habit of writing down good ideas you have now so you can act on them when you can and see the value of doing this for yourself!

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