Create Your Idea Engine
The creative insurance policy you should be using today.
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I spent years with notebooks scattered everywhere.
Brilliant ideas written on napkins, sticky notes, random scraps of paper.
Most of them? Gone forever.
Four years ago, I opened a Google Doc and just started dumping ideas. No organization. No structure. Just capture.
Now I have 50+ tabs in that doc.
One has a ridiculous idea for a 70s-style car commercial for my products. I’ll never make it, but it’s there. Another has the framework that became my main offer.
The random sits next to the revenue-generating.
Here’s where I was getting it wrong before, and you might be, too.
You’re trying to organize ideas before you have them.
You’re building elaborate systems for capturing insights, but then spend all your creative energy maintaining the system instead of thinking.
Your Idea Engine isn’t about organization. It’s about permission to think without pressure.
The system is stupid simple:
Open any note-taking tool (I use Google Docs because tabs keep topics separated without being rigid)
When an idea hits, dump it in
No editing. No categorizing. No “is this good enough to save?”
Just capture and move on
Nothing is too silly or audacious.
That’s the point. The stupid ideas often lead to the useful ones. The random observations become tomorrow’s content. The half-baked thoughts mature into frameworks.
When you’re stuck, you consult it. When you’re creating, you ignore it. It’s not a productivity system. It’s creative insurance against your own forgetting.
Your brain is better at generating ideas than storing them. So stop making it do both.
What’s stopping you from building your own Idea Engine today?
Most ideas don’t need to be acted on. I learned this the dumb way. I use OneNote but I’m bad at referring back to it. I always have ideas. The crazy thing was how many more ideas I’ve had since I left my corporate job. There was no room for ideas there. Just follow rules and don’t be creative. So sometimes my ideas overwhelm me but it’s a sign I’m actually where I should be.
Organization is one of the byproducts of being a “systems“ person.
It has many benefits but it also, as you perfectly mentioned, has it drawbacks.
I like this idea because it will allow your ideas to “marinate“ a bit before you quickly put them in the file cabinet, close the file cabinet and lock it.
If you don’t use it for a couple of weeks, put it in the cabinet but by keeping it out a bit, I can see it being more top of mine and the odds of it being used or greater