How To Keep Track Of Your Ideas

hey, it's November. And I'm not sure how that happened the year. Simultaneously feels like the longest year ever and the quickest year ever. 2020 is already been tough. And this week isn't going to get any easier in the US we have the elections in the UK. We have gone into a full nationwide lockdown for four weeks. Again, we're seeing the second way of hitting most European countries. and I've noticed in times like these entrepreneurs tend to get a little bit lost in their ideas in normal times, we all. Amazing visionaries with a million ideas come November, December that blank slate of 2021 starts beckoning to us with all of its possibilities. And so our dreams get bigger. The squirrels multiply the shiny objects, get sparklier with the reflections of all of the holiday decorations. And we go into overdrive and it's especially dangerous at this time of year to let that take over because. We often feel kind of rushed in November/December is a time of rush. Well, I get to my year-end goals. Will I have this ready so that I can have the holidays off? There's a lot of this feeling of, I'm not getting there fast enough. And so when we add that feeling to this excessive generation of ideas, we may grab onto one of those ideas in our excitement about it, and think that it's the solution to hitting our year-end goals. And often we can go down a path on an idea that actually doesn't have legs. So I want to teach you a tactic that I give to my clients around idea management. First of all, I want you to come up with an idea management system sounds so fancy, but actually, it's really a notebook, a journal could be the notes app on your phone. It could be a Google doc. I just want it to be something that you would naturally use. Step two, when you have an idea, I don't want you to judge it. I don't want you to think, is this a good idea or a bad idea? I want you to jot it down into your idea management system with just enough detail that you'll remember what the idea was. Step three is I want you to plan ideas, time into your weekly calendar. Now, if you don't have a lot of space that might only be half an hour, but I want you to have a ring-fence time where you can then go back to our idea management system and. Flesh out the ideas, come at the idea with a cool, calm, collected head, rather than that rush in the moment that excitement in the moment and actually be like, is this a viable idea? Do I need to work on it a little bit and decide whether or not you want to put that on your someday maybe list? Is the same valid enough idea that I actually want to consider implementing it in my business, or was it just something fun that I'm not ready to even really think about at the moment? And finally step four, as part of my weekly CEO review process, I will visit my someday maybe list and ask myself if someday is today for any of those ideas. Am I ready to think about implementing that? Am I ready to put one of them onto things I need to plan for next month? This simple process is going to allow you to do is remove that panic that you could lose the idea. If you don't work on it immediately. It's going to have you evaluating the idea away from the moment of having it. So we have that idea and we have that rush and we're so excited. This could be everything we've all been there, right? Lost a day to planning out this idea. I need to get to the end and be like, yeah, this is really not going to work. You know, it's too cool. Complicated. Or you don't have enough time or it's the wrong time of year. So we're going to step away from that moment of having the idea, that moment of discovery. And we're going to evaluate the ideas when we are a step removed from that feeling. This may seem really simple, but if you stick to the system, it will feed your need to have ideas and have creative time in your week, but it will also help you make sure that you're only acting on ideas that really work for your business. And because I know sometimes even when we have that ring-fence time, we can still get really excited by an idea, to help you out in that weekly review of your ideas, I'm going to give you my free idea validator. It's a simple step-by-step process to work out if an idea is worth pursuing, or if it needs to just live in that parking lot. If it just needs to stay in that idea management system for a little while longer, if you go to your dianemayor.com/19, you can grab the idea validator there.