A guide to organising and managing your ideas

Where Do Ideas Come From?

If you’ve read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, you’ll know that ideas can be fleeting and strike at any moment. Even if you haven’t read it, you understand the importance of capturing these ideas before they vanish. My goal is to help you organise and manage your ideas using techniques I’ve honed over the years.

For me, ideas often come while driving alone - sound familiar? In the car, I’ve crafted speeches, podcast episodes, workshop outlines, emails, and social media posts. It’s not ideal since I can’t jot them down, so I’ve developed strategies to manage them.

How can you get more ideas or better ideas?

The key is to make time for ideation and recognise when and where your ideas come. My ideas flood in as soon as I pull out of my driveway. My husband’s ideas arrive in the shower, and a friend’s come when she’s trying to sleep. What do these scenarios have in common? They are moments of solitude without distractions.

Everyone is different, but here are three strategies I’ve used to nurture my ideas:

1. Support Your Ideas, Don't Force Them

I’m a fan of batch-creating content and getting into a ‘flow’, but setting a strict schedule for creativity doesn’t work for everyone. Forcing creativity by expecting it to arrive between 2-4pm on a Monday afternoon, can lead to frustration and unoriginal content. Instead, I break the process into parts:

• Ideation

• Research

• Creation

Sometimes I can follow an idea through to completion, but often I just capture headlines to flesh out later. Recording everything ensures I don’t lose valuable ideas, even if they don’t get finished immediately.

2. Pay attention to how and when ideas come to you

Understanding your unique creative process is crucial. Learning about my Human Design helped me embrace my natural tendencies rather than fight them. I realised that my abundance of ideas, while a gift, could also be overwhelming.

To manage this, I keep an ideas journal where I sort ideas into categories: keep, drop, or give away. Sharing ideas that aren’t right for me with others has been liberating and productive. Instead of hoarding them, I regularly message people who I think will do a better job of bringing the idea to life than I would. You may have already been a recipient of one of my messages.

3. Set up a system for collecting and managing your ideas

Find a system that works for you. My digital ideas journal is always with me, but you might prefer pen and paper. The key is ensuring your system is convenient, useful, and sustainable.

For example, I use Siri to take notes while driving, which I later transfer to my ideas journal for sorting. This method is practical and helps me capture ideas as they come.

_

Organising and managing your ideas can significantly enhance your creative output and productivity. Whether through digital tools or traditional methods, the goal is to capture and nurture your ideas effectively.

Do you have any unique methods for managing your ideas? Connect with me on social media to share your thoughts and ideas or simply add a comment here.

❤️ Hi I’m Erika ✌️

I’m a marketing specialist with a BA in Media and Comms, Masters of Marketing, Certificate in CX (Customer Experience) and 28 years marketing experience.

I’m well-placed to help you navigate the sometimes overwhelming world of marketing and social media. I work with you one-on-one or create fun and action-oriented workshops and webinars for groups, organisations and businesses.

Connect with me on social media for more tips or to start a conversation 👇