Mind Readings: Idea Capture Anywhere

In today's mind reading, uh just some thoughts about idea capture. Uh one of the things that if you are doing your job well, uh if you are advancing your career and focusing on professional development and training enough, you should be having ideas about the things that you're working on at really random times. You know, when you're on the treadmill or out for a run or doing yoga or cooking dinner or in the shower, depending on how your brain works and the level of focus and the level of commitment you have to the work that you're doing, um, either for yourself personally uh or for the company that you work for, you could have ideas happening any hour of the day. So the question then becomes how are you capturing? A lot of folks rely on having a notepad and a pen.

And when they have an idea, you know, they keep one uh by their bedside and things like that. And I think it's a really important and useful way to track ideas is have something nearby that you can jot down an idea really quickly. That however isn't always necessarily available to us. What I suggest doing in addition to, in addition to, not uh separately, is uh either using a like a voice memo app on your phone or a little you know digital audio recorder so that you can take notes uh when you have an idea, just talk things through. Uh even if you have a smartwatch, for example, there are plenty of apps like reminder apps and and dictation apps and voice memo apps that you can use on a smartwatch.

So even if you're running on the treadmill, you can breathlessly yell into your watch, hey, set a reminder for uh citizen data scientist uh study uh for tomorrow. Your brain is kind of like a lightning storm, a thunderstorm. And all of these little things are lightning rods, right? If you only have one, a pad of paper and a pen, then when the storm's nearby that lightning will strike and you'll be able to capture it and make use of it. But all the rest of the time, all these things are happening and then they just kind of fade away, right?

There's the lightning never touches down, and you never can capture that energy. If you've got smartwatches and phones and you know smart devices and things that you can just yell out in the air, um your phone, uh, your tablet, uh your smart TV, if you've got all these different capture points, it's like having lightning rods everywhere. And then when an idea strikes, boom, the lightning bolt touches down somewhere that it can be captured. So the question is how many of these different things can you have around, and then how proficient are you at getting those ideas into one place or at least or consolidating them? So one of the things I do is I have the reminders app that I use, and then my smartphone and my smartwatch, and when I'm on the treadmill or I'm in the shower or whatever, I can just sort of yell out ideas that go into either my reminders list or my to do list, and then every day go into those apps and move things around, put stuff in my blogging list, so that if I have an idea, it doesn't get lost.

I actually have a hard time with like pen and paper writing things down. A, because I can't read my own handwriting, um, and B, because my brain is usually going so fast that I can't write fast enough to keep up with it, but I can dictate something really, really quickly. Uh, and again, with these with these you know smart devices, you can just say, hey, assistant, uh, set a reminder for it and immediately start talking. As soon as the idea occurs, you can funnel it to somewhere. You can get that idea uh out of your head and into some tangible form where you can then look at it and refine it and things like that.

Like I'm looking at my list of of ideas that I've been yelling uh to the air, and there's a whole bunch of things in here that like, oh yeah, I remember that was what that was. I was um there's one uh I was driving down the road, uh saw a pothole and wonder if I could fill that pothole with um res uh reused waste plastic instead of asphalt, you know, random ideas like that. But I was able to capture it, you know, maybe it'll become something someday, but who knows? Um, but I was able to capture it because I had some device where I could just yell in the air and uh and the lightning of the idea touched down and was captured. So, how do you capture your ideas?

How many different avenues do you have for capturing ideas? And do you have some kind of process that consolidates that, that gets uh all those things back into one spot so that uh you're able to make use of them? Give that some thought and love to hear about how you capture ideas and more importantly, um how you consolidate those ideas and and how you how you make sure that at least something happens with them at some point. But thanks for watching.