Figure 6. Disposable pocket organizer from pocketmod.com
R-mode is unpredictable at best, and you need to be prepared for that. Answers and insights pop up independently of your conscious activities, and not always at a convenient time. You may well get that million-dollar idea when you are nowhere near your computer (in fact, you’re probably much more likely to get that great idea precisely because you are away from the computer, but more on that later).
That means you need to be ready to capture any insight or idea twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, no matter what else you might be involved in. You might want to try these techniques:
I carry around a Fisher Space Pen and small notepad. The pen is great; it’s the kind that can write even upside down in a boiling toilet, should that need arise.[33] The notepad is a cheap 69-cent affair from the grocery store—skinny, not spiral bound, like an oversize book of matches. I can carry these with me almost everywhere.
Some folks prefer having separate cards to make notes on. That way you can more easily toss out the dead ends and stick the very important ones on your desk blotter, corkboard, refrigerator, and so on.
You can use your Apple iPod or Touch or Palm OS or Pocket PC device along with note-taking software or a wiki (see Manage Your Knowledge for more on this idea).
You can use your cell phone, iPod/iPhone, or other device to record voice memos. This technique is especially handy if you have a long commute, where it might be awkward to try to take notes while driving.[34] Some voicemail services now offer voice-to-text (called visual voicemail), which can be emailed to you along with the audio file of your message. This means you can just call your voicemail hands-free from wherever you are, leave yourself a message, and then just copy and paste the text from your email into your to-do list, your source code, you blog, or whatever. Pretty slick.
The free Flash application available at http://www.pocketmod.com cleverly prints a small booklet using a regular, single-sided piece of paper. You can select ruled pages, tables, to-do lists, music staves, and all sorts of other templates (see Figure 6, Disposable pocket organizer from pocketmod.com). A sheet of paper and one of those stubby pencils from miniature golf, and you’ve got yourself a dirt cheap, disposable PDA.
For larger thoughts and wanderings, I carry a Moleskine notebook (see the sidebar Moleskine Notebooks). There’s something about the heavyweight, cream-colored, unlined pages that invites invention. Because it feels more permanent than the cheap disposable notepad, I noticed a tendency to not write in it until a thought had gelled for a while, so I wouldn’t fill it up prematurely. That’s bad, so I started making sure I always had a backup Moleskine at the ready. That made a big difference.
| Recipe 8 | Capture all ideas to get more of them. |
The important part is to use something that you always have with you. Whether it’s paper, a cell phone, an MP3 player, or a PDA doesn’t matter, as long as you always have it.
If you don’t keep track of great ideas, you will stop noticing you have them.
The corollary is also true—once you start keeping track of ideas, you’ll get more of them. Your brain will stop supplying you with stuff if you aren’t using it. But it will happily churn out more of what you want if you start using it.
Everyone—no matter their education, economic status, day job, or age—has good ideas. But of this large number of people with good ideas, far fewer bother to keep track of them. Of those, even fewer ever bother to act on those ideas. Fewer still then have the resources to make a good idea a success.[35] To make it into the top of the pyramid shown in Figure 7, Everyone has good ideas; fewer go further, you have to at least keep track of your good ideas.
Everyone has good ideas.
But that’s not enough, of course. Just capturing ideas is only the first step; you then need to work with the idea, and there are some special ways we can go about doing that to be more effective. We’ll talk about this in depth a bit later (see Manage Your Knowledge).
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Get something to take notes on, and keep it with you. |