When you start publishing content regularly, you’ll probably run into the writer’s eternal question:
What the #$&%! am I going to write about today?
Our brains are beautiful idea-generating machines, right up to the moment when we need to sit down and get words written.
The answer is to catch ideas before you need to get the writing done. I always recommend keeping a nice, fat running list of things you might write about, so at any given moment you can pick something that has some energy for you.
I call this my idea stash, and it’s a lot like yarn for a knitter or fabric for a quilter: It’s the raw material we make cool things from.
Ideas take up less storage space than yarn or fabric (thank goodness), but there’s still the question of finding them again when you need them. Here are a few ideas.
Your favorite note-taking app
Most of us have an app we use to store information on the fly. I like Evernote, other people prefer other solutions.
The key to using these for your stash is to make sure your content ideas are tagged consistently or put into some kind of folder. It’s also nice to include a few more specific keywords, so you have some chance of finding it again.
The GetPocket app is one I’ve started using for articles and other resources on the web. (Brian Clark turned me on to this one.) I use it to save pages that I want to refer to for content, and again, there’s a tag function so I can find things easily. GetPocket can even save Tweets, if you’re so inclined.
The only problem with note-taking apps is there’s usually a lot of other stuff in there, and it can get hard to find your content ideas specifically. Here are some other tools I find useful:
A physical journal
I’ve mentioned before that I’m big on paper journals, and they’re a great place to maintain an Idea Stash. Some people keep notebooks exclusively dedicated to ideas, and others go the route I do, and include ideas with other journal components.
Paper is particularly nice for developing ideas because you can add drawings, doodles, color, glitter pens, stickers, or anything else that might help you to get more clarity on your idea.
Austin Kleon is another paper junkie. I really liked his piece about a notebook being a good place to have bad ideas.
Stefanie’s low-tech content calendar
Stefanie Flaxman, my always-brilliant former colleague at Copyblogger, recommends keeping a low-tech content calendar to plan out what you’ll be writing over the coming weeks or months.
She walks through her process here: A Low-Tech Content Calendar to Plan, Share, and Organize Your Ideas
The absurdly simple system I use now
Lately, for content on a Big New Seekrit Project I’m working on, as well as for these notes to you, I’ve been keeping a gigantic text document.
(Google Docs would be a wise place to do this, because it’s on the cloud, but I just use a text file that’s saved in Dropbox.)
I started a numbered list, and just started writing ideas down.
- OK idea
- Potentially pretty good idea
- Complicated idea that will probably be a series when I write it
- Stupid idea
- Another ok idea
You get it. When more ideas come to me, I add them to the ginormous list. If I want to move them around, the list will automatically re-order everything.
This is fun because you get a running count of just how many ideas you have.
I don’t delete from the list when a piece of content gets written, I just keep adding. When I sit down to write, I work on the next item on the list, unless it truly feels like a huge Ugh. Sometimes I insert new ideas between the old ones.
Eventually I’ll have to start a new list, but for now, it’s quite fun to watch the ideas stack up.
The challenge: Keeping them corralled
One of the most common challenges I hear with ideas is that we have them all over the place.
The official Bullet Journal app has an intriguing twist that I’m finding really useful. I can record thoughts, notes, and tasks into the app on the fly. But if I don’t transfer them to permanent storage within 72 hours, the note goes away.
This keeps me in my official system (my text document for content ideas, my paper journal for everything else) regularly. And it works a lot better than having 1000 ideas on post-its, index cards, note apps, and scrawled on the back of my hand in Sharpie.
How do you do it?
How do you keep your ideas organized? (Or do you?) Drop a comment below and let us know. 🙂
That’s The Fierce for this week!
Sonia
