Retain those good ideas!
Open offices; meetings with a lot of attendees; one-on-ones with your manager; architecture reviews with current and potential vendors; social meet-ups; There is no shortage of opportunities to gain and share ideas about how we improve our craft. No matter what role you play, there is a lot of value in the free exchange of ideas passing by you each day. How can we gather and make the best of the ones that resonate with us? How can we be present in the conversations around us as this barrage of ideas flies around us? Let me introduce you to a practice I like to call the Idea Catcher.
What are we doing here?
I’m sure that other folks have a practice like this. In fact, up until recently, I thought this was something everyone did. But, I’ve been facing questions from folks I work with that suggest that they don’t. So, I’m going to work through my process here to help me quantify how I do it for them.
The biggest inspiration for the Idea Catcher was to answer the question: “How can I manage to get everything I want to get done daily when I can barely cover my base work?” I was in a situation where I had the ability to change processes, but the amount of manual work didn’t leave room to “clean things up.” The company I was working for at the time had just started to implement a time tracking system as well, and there was added pressure around what we were doing and how to report it. Most of my coworkers were waiting until the end of the day (or week) and then pretty much guessing how much time they spent on things during the week, putting their entries into the pre-defined buckets. I had been down that road before and had seen the odd questions that came from management after a while. The misleading data that came from that exercise had them chasing their tails and although I had to participate, I was going to try my best not to contribute to that confusion. I would be ready with exactly where my time went. So, the first iteration of the Idea Catcher was born. I just didn’t know it yet.
Start Out Simply
It occured to me that for this to work for me, wherever I was going to put this data will have to be Available, the entry should be Simple, and it’d be silly to think that I could pull context out of it as I was entering it. So, the distilation of that data would have to be Periodical if I wanted it to be Informational at all.
Back when I started this out, there was no OneNote, Evernote, or smart phones that share information with our laptops, clouds still held rain and looked like dinosaurs. So, I’ll spare you the gory details about the amount of off-time work that went into a visual basic application that would allow me to enter things through email and sync up a database behind the scenes.
| Action Item | Approximate Duration |
| Get an account set up with your preferred cloud based note-taking app ( I use www.evernote.com). All of them should have a free level or you may have a preferred one through your current employer. | ~20 Minutes |
This practice’s purpose is to cut away any obstacles between you and capturing your thoughts. To that end, the format of the document that is largely up to you. If you don’t feel strongly about it, just use a text file. If a blank page is intimidating to you consider putting a short summary at the top of the page, put a picture of someone or something that inspires you at the top of the document. When you start your work day, open this document and have it handy all day long.
| Action Item | Approximate Duration |
| Create a Document in your note-taking app Called “Idea-Catcher” | ~1 Minute |
| Add a heading or picture at the top of the document to help inspire you. | ~1 Minute |
| Open your “Idea-Catcher” each morning and keep it handy. | ~1 Minute each day. |
Since the time reporting at that company happened weekly, this was a Friday afternoon or Saturday morning standing meeting for myself. It helped to keep me accountable and guessing on the time report to a minimum.
| Action Item | Approximate Duration |
| Create a recurring appointment for yourself to review the Idea Catcher. I find 45 minutes is about the right time to keep things moving along. Start out with an hour though until you feel comfortable. | ~1 Minute |
| Create another document in your note-taking app named “Idea-Review”. This document is for generalizations that pop up during each week’s review. It’ll help you reinforce behavior you want to change. | ~1 Minute |
What is all this stuff?
Keeping the Idea-Catcher open all day long will give you a handy spot to save off all the “good ideas” that pop up. When I was working this process for the first time as a time tracking exercise, I was surprised how much time I was taking on tangents to either work through or respond to those ideas. That was (and sometimes still is) an obstacle to getting through what I wanted to accomplish each day.
Give them some time
To put this to work for you simply type the idea you have into the document as it occurs to you. Approach it the same way as you would when brain storming. There’s no judgement to be made. It could be a vague idea that has been really nagging you all morning ( “How do I get better engagement during the meetings I run?”) or something really specific ( “The font on the second page of the sales report hasn’t been changed yet!”) Do the best you can to jot down the idea as it is. This will free up your mind to go deeper into that thought or stay focused on your current task. It took a bit of time to get used to at the begining, but as I got better at parking these ideas somewhere, my daily focus became more sharp because I could dedicate more time to working on my main task and keeping those ideas handy means that I have a ready supply of ideas to pick up when I am ready to move forward.
“I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind.” It’s easy to get overloaded with memories and thoughts of our past. That’e when you need to relax, take a deep breath, and empty some of them out into a Pensieve… that is, if you have one.
Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Refinement
As all of these “That’s a good idea!”, “Do you know how to do this?”, “How can we do that?” entries in you’re Idea-Catcher start to build up, you’ll want to start determining whether the work is actionable. This can be something you do when you have a few minutes at the end of the day, or at the very least during your weekly idea review meeting. After a little practice you’ll find a set of questions that work best for you, but in the meantime, here are the questions I apply to my list:
- Is it something that needs more definition?
- Is it something only I can do?
- Is it something that is pressing?
- Does it provide value to the business or our group?
- Is it something that I’d like to learn?
- Is it worth doing?
Is it something that needs more definition?
If there’s not something immediately actionable in my list, if I can add some bullet point ideas, I do that right there. Otherwise, I mark it for more thought and come back to it after all the other questions are answered.
Is it something only I can do?
If it is something that I know someone else is interested in, I’ll often offer the idea up to them first. Giving them first right of refusal has saved me from hearing about someone’s bruised toes in the past. It has also, depending on the situation, caused a healthy bit of competition for who can come up with a more workable solution.
If it is truely something only I can do, then I add a note to the idea saying that whatever the solution is, documentation should be created so that I’m not the only person to hold the solution. For, you know, when I win the lottery. I wouldn’t want to leave my coworkers hanging because I’ve greedilly held onto the proper method to recharge the company’s Dilithium crystals.
Is it something that is pressing?
If time is a factor in the idea (“Create a backup purge script before the backup drive runs out of space!”), set a fitting priority. Having a time constraint doesn’t necessarily shoot any idea or task to the forfront of our list, but it should be a consideration. This should also spawn other ideas based on the checks and balances associated with that time frame (“How long until we run out of space?”). Add those to your Idea-Catcher or directly to your companies work system if the time constraint is that pressing.
Does it provide value to the business or our group?
As we all get busier and busier, we have to get more picky about what we spend time on. These last two questions I ask myself to help draw attention to that. I should be able to realize a tangible result coming from an idea that grows into something actionable. Asking myself this question helps me define that result more clearly or, if it doesn’t it gets passed by.
“You can do anything you want, but not everything!”
David Allen
Is it something that I’d like to learn?
Sometimes, working an idea is worth the time because it will allow you to improve skills that will be helpful in the future. For me, learning a new programing language or approach to programming, and finding a voice in blogging all fall into that bucket. Trying to keep this type of work down to having only one of these active at a time, having tangible results attached to each, and keeping the overall goal in mind when reviewing progress helps these to keep moving forward.
| Action Item | Approximate Duration |
| Review your Idea Catcher. Go through each of the items on your list and ask your list of questions. | ~60 minutes |
| Use the Idea Review document to hold your list of questions to ask and any realizations that occur to you. | ~1 minute |
Conclusion
After completing the action items above, you now have a place to put ideas. Setting aside some time during the week to iterate through it will help turn those ideas into tangible work. Then you’ll have a handy list of interesting projects that you can raid at anytime to amaze yourself, your coworkers, and with some luck, your boss.
Using this process has helped me improve my question asking and listening skills ( That sounds like an excellent idea! Tell me more about that?) , keep my focus during the day by allowing me to store off ideas that I would have taken the time to tangent on in the past, and allowed me to keep a stash of handy ideas to pull from. In the next one of these posts we’ll look at some examples of breaking up the work into meaningful chunks, how to gain momentum with this work.