Transforming Shower Thoughts into Success

I’m hoping that you’re like me, at least a little bit, and have ideas.

Sometimes a flood of ideas, sometimes a trickle, but every day there’s an idea, or 10, that needs to get out of my head and go….somewhere.

Storing ideas has tons of benefits, and I’ll touch on the two big ones below and show you the exact steps (and tools) you can use to store and keep track of your ideas.

The Two Big Benefits

First of all, when you have an idea pop into your head, you tend to focus on it - that’s how your attention works.

You have that thought, if it’s something that interests you now you’ll focus on it.

Great. Unless it isn’t. What if you’re supposed to be focusing on something else?

Maybe you’re in a meeting and should be paying attention.

Watching your kids recital and have a great idea for a new article…not the best time to dive down that rabbit hole.

What storing your ideas can do is give you a place to quickly offload your ideas so that your brain can move on and stop dwelling on it.

However, you need to have a place to store your ideas and you need to know that it will be there when you need it.

Benefit number two is having a literal database of ideas that you can go back to over time and benefit from “past you” storing ideas and adding to them over time.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have all the good, bad, weird, random ideas you’d had over time with annotations and notes for the ones that stuck with you?

You bet.

So, how can we do this? I gave this a shot using a few tools, so let’s get into that next.

Recommended

Storing Your Ideas Digitally

Can you use a notebook and pen? Sure!

And I was tempted to create my “database” there.

But, I always have my phone with me and it’s unlikely that this is going to change in the near future, so digital it is.

If you still prefer to go analog, you can still use the methods I share, you’ll just upload them or transfer them to your digital repository (probably good to set a regular reminder to do that…).

I originally went with Roam Research as that’s the tool that I do a lot of writing and note taking with, but there’s no “widgets” and it can take some time to open ☹️ I love Roam, but it’s not great for that “I have to write this down RIGHT THIS SECOND” type of thing.

Also, turns out it takes some serious query filtering to get this working…instead of writing this out and turning this into a novel, check out the video to see what this looks like in Roam (it’s possible if you want to do it) and how / why I ultimately went with Notion for setting this up for myself.

You can take this general idea and use just about any tool that you want to use.

Here’s some important things to keep in mind:

• It needs to be FAST to access

• You need to work it into your note taking workflow (i.e. don’t just dump stuff in and never review)

• Ideally it can handle multimedia so you can take notes, images, etc

Some other tools I think might work well for this are:

• Todoist (excellent mobile apps and super fast with widgets)

• Evernote

Extra Extra

• Meditation leading to quieter “default mode network” brain activity

• What the heck is “default mode network”?

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