Productivity

Seven go-to productivity apps for 2012

January 10, 2012 By Mark Tosczak 2 Comments

With a new year just underway and productivity and organization being the focus of many new year’s resolutions and goals, I thought I’d give a quick run-down of some of the key apps and tools I’m using to stay organized these days.

General Productivity and Organization

Dropbox for sharing documents between multiple computers and sharing large files with other people. It’s on both my personal and company laptops, plus my iPhone. Dropbox has become my default location for storing any file that I want available to me wherever I am. I’m using almost 90 percent of the capacity in my free 2GB account, so there is a pretty good chance I’ll upgrade to the paid version this year. (Though if you click-through the link here, sign-up for an account and download the software, I’ll get 250MB added to my account, so I’d very much appreciate you doing that.
Evernote, for notes, travel information, reference information and lists — including my to-do lists. I use this every day as a key part of my task management and project management tracking system, and have basically stopped using paper. This is part of my effort to have less stuff and less clutter this. Just like Dropbox, I have Evernote on both my laptops plus my iPhone. I’m using the free version, for the moment.
Basecamp for project management at work. We’ve been using this for over a year now at work, and although it’s not perfect, it still seems to have the right mix of just-enough features without too much complexity.
LastPass for password management. I think it’s almost essential to have some safe, secure, always available way to manage passwords. I have a little home-brew system for generating and remembering unique passwords, but even that isn’t enough for the dozens of different passwords I need to keep track of. LastPass helps keep me sane.

Writing and Creativity

Scrivener for writing. I save the files in Dropbox and have it installed on both my machines. I love the writing interface as well as its ability to handle complex, multi-part documents – everything from blog posts to my daily journal to novels. I wrote the first draft of this post in Scrivener. It’s a Mac-only app, so Windows folks are out of luck (or perhaps there’s an alternative – I just don’t know).
Xmind for mind mapping. I’ve found mind mapping an excellent tool for organizing thoughts and ideas, and translating the results of brainstorming to a coherent structure. I should be using it at work with our teams as a brainstorming tool. I would just hook the laptop up to a projector so everyone can see the mind map as it’s built. This comes in both free and paid versions, but I’ve only used the free version.

Social Media

I continue to be a huge fan of Hootsuite for social media management, especially Twitter. It’s a web app, so it’s available at any computer with an Internet connection, and there’s an iOS version as well for the iPhone and iPad. I get the same set of lists, searches and other features no matter where I log in from. Plus Hootsuite has built in analytics, scheduling and other capabilities. The free version has quite a robust set of features, and the quality is so good I wouldn’t hesitate to pay for the premium version if (more likely when) I need the extra features.

Of course, like most people I use Microsoft Office for word processing, presentations, spreadsheets, email, contacts and calendars. And there’s a range of other applications and tools I’m in and out of each day. But the ones above are really my go-to apps for getting things done. If you have any must-have applications, I’d love to hear about them. Please leave a comment below.

Filed Under: Productivity, Technology, Useful stuff

Six tips for getting more out of conferences

March 9, 2010 By Mark Tosczak 2 Comments

Don't just sit there. Make sure you get the most out of attending a conference or seminar. (Photo source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/211097)

I recently attended Ragan’s Social Media for Communicators conference in Atlanta (which was excellent — the folks at Ragan did a great job finding speakers and putting on a great event). For 2½ days about 500 of us met at Coca-Cola headquarters and heard first-hand how some of the country’s best known companies are using social media.

In addition to getting a lot of good ideas about social media, I also came away with some thoughts — some new, some old — about ways to get more out of a conference or seminar.

1. If it is a social media event or if people will be tweeting about it, find out the hashtag (or designate one if no one else will) ahead of time. Bonus: start tweeting before the event to make yourself known to other attendees and meet them before you actually arrive.

2. Find other ways to organize attendees online. I started a Twitter list of conference attendees. After the Ragan conference, a fan page for conference attendees was started on Facebook and another attendee started a LinkedIn group.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Business, Career, networking, Productivity Tagged With: conferences

How to budget time for social media

February 15, 2010 By Mark Tosczak Leave a Comment

You have limited time - use it wisely when it comes to social media. (Photo source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1068015)

One of the challenges of social media is how to manage the amount of time that you could put into these activities. How much time, and how exactly you spend that time, will end up being a little different for everyone depending on your goals and strategy.

Here’s a framework to help you budget your time. This is especially helpful for personal branding and networking activities, where it’s harder (or seems harder) to just carve hours out of your workday for these activities.

Content creation

Do you blog? Do you write articles or white papers or create presentations that you share on Slideshare? What about podcasting? Creating original content can help you establish a brand and demonstrate your expertise and knowledge. It’s a very powerful strategy, and if you choose to use it you’ll want to set aside some time to focus on it.

How much content do you want to produce each week or month?
How much time do you need to devote to produce that content? How many hours is that each week and each day, on average?
When will you put in that time? During your lunch hour? In the early mornings or late at night? On the weekends? Decide when and put it on your calendar.

In my case I’m probably averaging about 10 hours a week on blogging right now. You don’t have to spend that much time, but consistency is important.

Listening and reading

It’s important to keep up with what’s going on in your industry — reading blogs, articles and books, listening to podcasts, and generally keeping up with new ideas and conversation. How much time you spend on this will vary depending on your industry and goals.

Accountants need to keep up with the latest tax law changes. Doctors have to try to plough through stacks of medical journals. I try to keep up with the flood of books on social media that are being published and the many, many blogs on the subject. Since it’s so easy to become overwhelmed by the amount of information available, it’s a good idea to decide how much time you want to spend on this.

What do you need to keep up with? Books, blogs, professional journals, other sources?
How many hours per week will you devote to this?
When will you keep up with these? At night before you go to sleep? Can you listen to podcasts and audiobooks on your iPod on the way to work?
Do you have a system to bring the most relevant content to your attention? Google alerts? RSS feeds? Some of the tips in this post on finding and sharing great content can help.

Conversation

Of course, social media isn’t very social if you’re not talking. That could include sharing content you find, responding to others in a variety of social media channels (including commenting on blogs), and even reaching out to people via email to connect offline. It also is the tool that allows you to turn mere online connections into actual relationships (whether they’re weak or strong).

1. What social media channels are most important for you? Twitter, Facebook, a specialized social media network on Ning or a forum devoted to your industry?

2. How much time will you spend on these channels? An hour a day? Three hours a week?

3. When will you spend that time? In short 15-minute bursts throughout the day? In a longer, more concentrated period a few times each week?

More tips

All of us have a limited time and energy, but the vast world of social media can suck up an enormous amount of that if we’re not careful. So here are some tips to manage that.

Focus. You probably have limited time, at best a few hours a days, to devote to this. So concentrated on the 20 percent of tools/sites/strategies that are going to yield 80 percent of your results. For me, these days, that means Twitter, writing blog posts and reading blog posts and books get most of my attention.

Be realistic. Don’t sketch out a plan that calls for 30 hours a week (almost a full-time job) of work on this, and then find out a month into it that’s it’s just too much. It’s better to start out with very modest ambitions. As you become more fluent with the tools, you’ll be able to increase your productivity by becoming more efficient and integrating these tools into your life.

Consider the rest of your life. If you’re going through a really busy period at work, going on vacation or caring for a sick family member, some of these actvities may temporarily take a back seat. That’s OK. Don’t burn yourself out or disregard other priorities just for the sake of keeping up with some ideal social media time budget.

Got ideas or questions on how to budget your time for social media? Please share them in the comments below.

Filed Under: Blogging, Career, Content marketing, networking, Online marketing, Personal branding, Productivity, Social media Tagged With: time management

How to blog frequently

February 9, 2010 By Mark Tosczak 1 Comment

Posting frequently requires discipline and a commitment to that goal. (Photo source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1122022)

One of the biggest challenges for most part-time bloggers is finding the time and energy to blog consistently. Since Jan. 18, I’ve been engaged in a little challenge here for myself — 30 posts in 30 days.

As it turns out, I probably couldn’t have picked a worse time to try to average a post a day. Work has been crazy, with a lot of travel and an unusual amount of night and weekend hours. A couple of my volunteer commitments have required more time than usual. And just last week snow kept my daughter out of school for four days, which disrupted our household schedule and made it even harder for me to keep up a demanding extracurricular writing schedule. There is more travel on my calendar in the next couple of weeks, so this is not going to get any easier. In fact, I’m going to have to average about 1.5 posts a day to make my goal.

Nonetheless, despite the challenges I’ve learned a lot of good lessons about how to blog frequently. Here are some of the keys that have helped me to write as often as I have the last couple of weeks.

1. Keep a list of blog post ideas some place. Your list could be in a file, on paper or even inside your blogging software. But keep a list of ideas and every time an idea pops into your head, add it. You don’t have to end up writing a post for every idea, but having a bunch of ideas ready to go makes it a lot easier to keep to a writing schedule.

2. Work several days (at least) ahead. In the last three weeks or so I’ve had a couple of times when I had as many as four posts written and scheduled to go. Typically I was able to do that on the weekends, when I could devote more time to writing and when I felt less pressure to publish. This helps because it takes the pressure off to produce something for today or tomorrow and makes you feel less anxious about maintaining a frequent posting schedule.

3. Write partial drafts. Sometimes I don’t have the energy or time to finish a blog post all in one go. But that’s OK, and in fact in someways it’s better. If I start to write a post knowing I don’t have to finish it right now it makes it less intimidating to start. And if I go back to a post I’ve already started with the intent of finishing it, it’s easier because I already have some of it done. Writing partial drafts has been one of the most important keys for my regular posting.

4. Prioritize writing over reading. It’s tempting when you hop on your computer to just check your email, your RSS feeds or Twitter to see what’s going on. Don’t. Write first and write often. If you want to be a frequent blogger, you have to put your priority into creating content. And the way to do that is to simply put in the time.

5. Have a goal. Thirty posts in 30 days was a goal for me, to see if I could post that frequently. It was a private goal at first, and now I’ve made it public. But keeping that goal in mind has helped me keep going at times when I didn’t feel like blogging. Other people can post this frequently, so I should be able to also, right? (Check in on Feb. 16 and we’ll see how well this worked for me.)

These have been the most important things I’ve done in the last few weeks to post frequently, even as I’ve been busier than usual in other parts of my life. How do you keep up a regular blogging schedule?

Filed Under: Blogging, Content marketing, Creativity, Personal branding, Productivity, Writing

3 tips for turning Gmail Tasks into a simple GTD tool

December 11, 2008 By Mark Tosczak 5 Comments

This morning I woke up to find that Gmail had enabled Tasks on my account. A task list has probably been one the biggest hole in the suite of Google apps and tools, and this new Gmail add-on looks like a pretty good start on remedying that

This is still a very lightweight app, and it doesn’t have half the features of some of the more mature task management apps out there, such as Remember the Milk and Todoist. While not specificallly designed for David Allen’s Getting Things Done time management methodology, with a few simple tricks it looks like it can be turned into a serviceable tool for GTD. Here are three tips to help.

1. Create a Next Actions list as well as Someday/Maybe lists and any other lists you might need.

Gmail allows you to create a series of lists. So I’ve created a series of lists to serve my purposes – Next Actions for actual task management, Someday/maybe for those things I might want to do someday, To read for books I’d like to read, etc. You can create and edit these lists using Tasks’ pop-up lists menu, in the lower right hand side of the Tasks box.

2. Use indentation to create GTD contexts within your Next Actions list.

Within my Next Actions, I’ve created a series of Tasks called @calls, @work, @home, @errands and so forth for the contexts that I typically use. When I want to add a next action within a particular context, I just put my cursor at the end of that @context line, hit return to get a new task and then tab to indent it. This creates sub-tasks for each context.

Since I’m using ‘@waiting for’ as a context, I can easily drag and drop next actions from one context to another by using the mouse to grab the ‘handle’ on the left side of the screen for each task. I can also re-order my contexts by dragging and dropping those context lists; the actions underneath each go with them.

3. Use the notes line to classify individual tasks by project.

Finally, I like to be able to see my tasks as part of the various projects they belong in. That’s easy. I just add a project title, in all caps, to the notes field for an individual Task. That shows up on the Tasks list, giving me a quick overview of what individual project a particular task belongs to.

I admit these ideas are, at best, work-arounds. It would be great if Google would add features such as tags and the ability to move tasks between lists. But until that happens, these ideas help.

Have some more thoughts about how to make better use of Gmail Tasks? Please share them in the comments.

Filed Under: Popular, Productivity, Useful stuff Tagged With: Gmail Tasks, GTD

Five tips for using social media productively

November 10, 2008 By Mark Tosczak 4 Comments

One question (and complaint) that I hear from people who aren’t active using social media online (or who limit themselves to one or two sites) is “Where do you find the time for all that?” That’s a fair question. Being online does take up time, and sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, the millions of blogs out there, they can call consumer a huge amount of time if you’re not careful.

However, you can use these sites and still be productive. Here are some tips on how.

1. Subscribe to your own RSS feeds. Many social networking sites offer RSS feeds of at least part of their content. That means you can subscribe to your friends’ status updates in Facebook or LinkedIn and get those right in your RSS reader. Why do this? If you’re like me your RSS reader is already a major source of incoming content and you monitor it every day. Subscrbing to RSS feeds means you can find out about those updates without going to the site. To participate or see you replies, you’re still going to have to visit those sites, but monitoring the RSS feed allows you to quickly scan what’s going on and choose what conversations you might want to get involved in.

Take-away action: Look for the RSS icon in your browser window or on the web page and decide which feeds it makes sense to subscribe to.

2. Set your account options so you get notifications via email. Social media sites will typically have account settings that allow you to be notified of things like connection requests via email. By setting those up you can ensure you don’t miss important notifications because you didn’t go to the site. Again, I’m assuming that even on days when you don’t have time to visit social networking sites you’re still checking your email.

Take-away action: Go check your account settings and turn on email notifications.

3. Update more than one social media at a time. There are a number of applications and services out there that allow you to update more than one social media service at a time. I use ping.fm and I have an account with, though I haven’t yet experimented with, hellotxt.tcom. That means I can update Twitter, LinkedIn and other services at the same time, assuming I want to give them the same update message. This also allows me to update these sites without actually visiting them all. Because these are web-based services I can use them from whatever computer I might be working on, at home or at work. One word of warning about these: Different sites impose different length limits on your status updates, so a full 140-character update for Twitter will be cut off on LinkedIn because that site has a shorter status message field.

Take-away action: Set up an account with one of the update services and start using it.

4. Measure the value of your updates. The key to effective social networking is to provide value. If you’re like me and you tend to send out a lot of links, then you might want to use a URL-shortening service such as BudURL or SnipURL that allows you to track click-throughs on your links. These allow you to see how many people are actually clicking through on your links. If nobody is, then it’s probably a safe bet that the links you’re offering don’t have much value for the people in your network, which may mean its time to do something different.

Take-away action: Set up an account with a URL-shortening service and put the link on your browser toolbar so it’s always available.

5. Decide on your key services and be diligent. Finally, it is true that you can’t do everything, and there are far too many social media sites out there to be active on all of them — even if you use every productivity tip in the book. So I recommend you choose a handful that are likely to be useful or fun and concentrate on those. That may mean that you choose LinkedIn over MySpace, for example, unless you’re involved in music in which case MySpace might be a better choice. Devote a little bit of time – maybe just 5 or 10 minutes a day – to checking each of your target sites and doing something there, even if it’s just leaving a comment for an acquaintance or reviewing status changes.

Take-away action: Decide on three to five targeted social media services to start with and try to be active in some way most days on each of those sites.

Have more tips on how to use social media productively and still have a life? Leave them in the comments below so everyone can learn.

Filed Under: Productivity, Social media Tagged With: budurl, Facebook, hellotxt.com, LinkedIn, MySpace, ping.fm, snipurl, Twitter

Eight tips to fine-tune your online life

July 29, 2008 By Mark Tosczak 2 Comments

Here are a few tips that I’ve found useful for living online.

Get more out of your web surfing

Use delicious or a similar utility for your bookmarks. Then you have them available to you at any computer – with the power of tagging.
Use delicious to tag what you intend to do with a bookmark – to_read, to_blog, etc. Also use delicious tags to record what you did with a bookmark. I tag blog posts of others that I’ve commented on with icommented.

Email like a pro

Most email programs (even the one on my BlackBerry) have a spell-checker that you can set to automatically run before the email is sent. Make sure that option is activated. It prevents you from forgetting to spell-check a message and making a mistake that makes you look dumb, or at least unprofessional.
Entering email addresses in the To:, CC: and BCC: fields should be the last thing you do when composing an email. Write it, review it, revise it. Entering email addresses last ensures you don’t accidentally send off a half-written email.
If you don’t need a reply, say so in the message. If you can get your message across clearly in the subject line, do so, and add <eom> for “end of message” to the subject line.

Be a better online publisher

If you’re going to write anything about sex, politics, religion, personal relationships, using illegal drugs or drinking heavily on any web site – your blog, Facebook, whatever – think twice. Then think a third time. I’m not saying not to post it, just consider it carefully. Current and future employers, customers, investors and others may see it. You have the right to say whatever you want, but you also can’t escape the repercussions of doing so.
If you publish a blog, subscribe to your own feeds, via both RSS and email. This allows you to get the same experience many of your readers will, and when the experience isn’t very good you, you’ll know it. Then you can fix it.
Also, if you publish a blog make sure you have your comment options set so that when you get a new comment on your blog, you get an email about the comment. In my early days of blogging I failed to do it and discovered only after several days that enormous amounts of comment spam were being published on my blog.
Buy your own domain name, as in “JoeSixpack.com.” If you don’t, someone else might, and you might not like what they do. Heck, it’ll only run you $10 or $15 a year, depending on what registrar you use.

What are your top tips for making life online a little easier? Please let us know in the comments.

Filed Under: Blogging, Career, Email, Productivity Tagged With: del.icio.us, tips

How to use Circa for tracking tasks

July 18, 2008 By Mark Tosczak 4 Comments

In my review yesterday of Circa notebooks, I promised I would explain how I use a Circa notebook to keep track of all of my projects and tasks. This approach works for me, and if you’re struggling to keep track of a lot of tasks, projects and information, you might want to give this a try.

I have divided my Circa notebook with tabs into four sections: Work, household, personal and notes.

Work is for all of my projects and tasks that are related to my job. Household covers everything related to my family and home life — paying bills, cutting the grass, etc. Personal is for a handful of projects that don’t directly involve my family or my job, including this blog, my efforts at writing fiction and exercise plans. The notes section is for taking notes when I’m in meetings or wherever — it’s just a handy place to store that stuff until I file it.

Pretty much every task and project in my life can be put into the work, household or personal categories. Each section has a page that’s titled “Projects and Tasks: Work” (or Household, or Personal). That page, and most of the 8½ x 11 pages in my notebook are annotation quarter-inch sheets from Levenger, though I might occasionally put in other types of paper depending on my need.

On the first sheet of each section, I write a list of all of projects and all the individual tasks, usually one per line. Projects I highlight with a orange highlighter, tasks don’t get any highlighting. (By projects I just mean anything that’s going to take more than one action to complete.) I use a pencil for all of this, making it easier to go back and make changes. The annotation column makes it easy to add little notes later on, like a “waiting for” status. That gives me one sheet of paper in the “Work,” “Household,” and “Personal” categories that list all of the projects I’ve taken on, plus any individual tasks that don’t fall into a particular project.

Following that first page in each section, I have one page for each project. Individual tasks for that project are listed top to bottom. I include important details, like deadlines, here. Many of my projects don’t have enough tasks to require a full page, but with all that space I can make notes, do a little informal brainstorming and planning, and record reference information such as phone numbers or web sites.

As I complete projects and tasks I cross them off the summary sheet for each section. Individual project sheets can be recycled or filed away as projects are finished. Periodically I replace the cover sheet when it gets filled up, but this OK. Rewriting that list of projects and tasks forces me to re-assess them, and perhaps scratch off items that are no longer relevant.

Finally, in the front of the notebook, I have one of Levenger’s compact size Things to Do sheets. I put a new one in each day, write the date at the top, and list all of the tasks I want to get done that day. I’ll draw those tasks from my various project pages in the notebook, but also add emergent tasks as they arise during the day. At the end of the day I figure out where any undone tasks need to go — maybe on the next day’s list, maybe on a project page some place — and then recycle it.

The beauty of this system, I’m discovering, is that I can add more pages or extra reference information for individual projects. I could add more tabbed dividers if I found it useful to further subdivide the notebook. For instance, I’m considering adding a tab for MarkTzk.com to keep track of post ideas, design enhancements, the editorial calendar and so forth.

I’m sure I’ll continue to enhance and tweak this system. But I don’t see myself changing this anytime soon. Having everything written down in one place gives me considerable peace of mind.

What do you think, would this work for you? How do you organize your tasks and projects?

Filed Under: Popular, Productivity Tagged With: Circa, Levenger, project management

Review: Circa notebooks from Levenger

July 17, 2008 By Mark Tosczak 2 Comments

For the past few weeks I’ve been using Circa notebooks from Levenger on a daily basis as a planning tool. I’m going to share my experience with these so far and tell you what I think about the product.

What’s Circa

First, it’s worth explaining what Circa notebooks are. The Circa system uses plastic disks of various diameters to bind together notebook covers, tabbed dividers, and a wide variety of pages. Pages have to be specially punches to fit on these rings, which function similarly to the way Rolodex cards are attached to a Rolodex.

The beauty of this system is that it allows you to create custom notebooks. This is more than just a fancy version of a three-ring binder. Because there are generally several Circa disks involved in creating a notebook (11 in the case of a full-sized 8½ x 11 notebook), pages of different sizes can easily be inserted into the same notebook. This turns out to be surprisingly useful.

What I ordered

There is a wide variety of Circa products available from Levenger, but I started out by ordering a Circa Simply Irresistible Sampling Kit. This is a very low-risk way to start experimenting with Circa. The package is $40, but comes with a $40 Levenger gift card, so you end up paying just for shipping (assuming there are other things Levenger sells you might be interested in if it turns out you don’t like Circa). This kit includes the disks, a variety of different sized papers, notebook covers and other items.

I liked the first sampler pack so much that I ordered a second one, plus a packet of 300 letter-sized 8½ x 11 sheets with the special Circa punching. I ordered the note taking style sheets, which I find are useful for not only taking notes, but lots of other things, too. On my second order I also ordered some additional compact size “Things To Do” refill packs. I use these for my daily to-do lists. (In another post I’ll write about how I use a single Circa notebook to manage all of my projects and tasks at work and at home.)

What I think of Circa

A number of people have said to me that Circa is simply a fancy, expensive, overpriced version of a three-ring binder. I suppose that criticism is fair in some respects. You could do what I do with my Circa system with a much cheaper three-ring binder, mostly. But I think Circa does have several characteristics that make it superior to an ordinary ring-style binder.

The rings in the circa notebook are more compact, and the whole package is more compact — more like an actual notebook, less like a binder.
The pages can be moved about the notebook more quickly than if you were using rings you had to snap open and shut repeatedly.
The ability to easily insert multiple sizes of paper into the notebook, which is difficult with a ring-style binder, is both useful and attractive, and allows me to create a notebook that does exactly what I need it to — no more, no less.

In addition to the qualities of the Circa system itself, Levenger does a great job of providing paper sheets that are ideal for organizing, brainstorming, taking notes and planning. The paper is beautiful and a little heavier than run-of-the-mill filler paper from your local office supply store. It comes with a variety of unusual and useful printed forms, like the notes style sheets and various planner inserts — calendar pages, to-do lists, etc.

There is one big downside to the Circa system: The Circa punch. The punch that’s required for you to punch your own Circa paper costs $58 from Levenger. That’s a lot of money for a hole punch. I’m looking for alternatives that aren’t quite as pricey, and for the moment am fairly happy ordering inserts from Levenger. The quality of paper and the preprinted templates are worth the extra cost. But it would be useful to have a punch (though my boss has one that I could probably borrow if needed). If I stick with Circa in the long haul I’ll probably end up buying one.

Bottom line

If you’re not a big paper person, you may find the whole set-up a little over the top. That’s fine — different strokes for different folks.

If you like to organize on paper and take notes on paper (and I do), and if you appreciate the quality of the paper, pens and other items you’re actually using, I would definitely recommend Circa. It’s attractive, functional and flexible. For my money, given how it allows me to be better organized and gets me off the computer, it’s worth it.

Any experiences with Circa or similar products you’d like to share? Let me know in the comments.

Filed Under: Popular, Productivity, Reviews Tagged With: Circa, Levenger

Don't let a good idea slip away

July 15, 2008 By Mark Tosczak 1 Comment

Where do you keep your ideas? You know, the ideas that pop into your head while showering, the notions that wake you up in the middle of the night, the inspiration that comes out of nowhere when you’re stuck in a traffic jam or a dull meeting.

You do keep those ideas someplace, right? No? You mean you just let them slip away, unrecorded? Well, I’m sure they’ll find a home. The idea will occur to someone else, and if it’s a good one, that person may even act on it. Too bad you missed that opportunity.

OK, OK, so you get the point. Back to the original question: Where do you keep your ideas?

Here’s what I’d suggest: Create an idea file. Open up Word or Google Docs or your favorite text editor and create a file. Call it “Idea File” or something original like that. Put your ideas there. You may want to use Jott, or emails to yourself, or a message left in your own voice mail to capture that idea if it occurs to you when you’re away from that computer. If you’re in the shower, you’re going to need to remember it at least until you can step out and scribble it down on a scrap of paper. Once captured, you can then record it in your idea file at a more convenient time along with the date that it occurred.

What do you do with this idea file? Review it from time to time. After a while you’ll find that some of those ideas end up getting transferred to some place where they’re actionable — on to your to-do list or your projects list, into that list of ideas for blog posts you keep or on to the list of ingredients on a shopping list for that special recipe you want to try.

There are other ways of doing this besides a file on a computer, of course. You could keep an idea journal in a notebook, or file pieces of paper in a file folder, or send yourself emails and file them all in an “Ideas” folder (or tagged with “Ideas” in Gmail, if you prefer). But whatever you do, stop letting those ideas slip away.

Have other tips for making sure you hang on to your ideas? Contribute in the comments.

Filed Under: Creativity, Productivity

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