Documenting Your Thought Process

This past week has been a little interesting to say the least. One thing that I noticed and really concentrated on was the fact that I was able to catch almost every creative idea I had, and also write it down. It is amazing how many great ideas our brains process when you give it the chance.

First of all, let me explain why it is important to document ideas, and not just place them on the back burner in your mind. When you have one great idea and throughout your day begin to work with it and re-work it again and again in your mind, you begin to lose the original idea. In turn, you come out with something that is, most often, entirely different. When you mentally try to backtrack and figure out what your original idea was, you find that the idea is either gone or that it is insignificant.

Here is the process, if you can call it that, for writing down and documenting ideas. My understanding of the way my mind creates ideas is fairly simple. I will have a stream of great ideas over a short time, and if I don’t document them, I will only remember one or two. So in order for you to catch every idea, you have to be tuned in to the way your own mind works. Whenever I personally have any type of idea, even if it sounds ridiculous, I write it down.

The most important thing that I do to document these ideas is to have at least two or three notebooks around at any given time. One is usually already open and turned to the current page with the last idea. As far as writing the idea down, anything will do. A picture, a word, or even a sentence will work. As long as you have an understanding of what that representation means, you cannot go wrong.

Hopefully now if you had the same problem with ideas as I did, you will be able to catch everything that is going through your mind. The process is indeed simple and may very well be done more efficiently. Yet, for now you can see the importance of documenting your own thought process.

Tagged as: ideas, mind, thought, thoughtprocess