Capture Your Creativity with a Digital Notebook
When we talk about the problem of driving innovation, we often focus on how to foster creative thinking. But much of the time, the challenge isn’t that we lack creativity — it’s that we fail to capture the bursts of inspiration we do have, or fail to recall our great ideas in the moments and contexts where they can actually be useful. Once you have the right system for capturing your moments of inspiration, and for finding that inspiration when you need it, you can create a virtuous circle in which inspiration fuels inspiration.
I first got serious about capturing my own moments of inspiration in my early twenties, when a friend encouraged me to start writing down what he called my “Alex ideas” — mainly because he was tired of having to listen to them, I suspect. This was back in the prehistoric era before even Palm Pilots had been invented, so I carried around a tiny little notebook and made a habit of writing down my bolts from the blue. There was only one problem: unless I bothered to flip through it later — and was miraculously able to decipher my own handwriting — the ideas went into that notebook, never to return. Most of the time, I forgot my moments of inspiration had even occurred: I might struggle for a great example to put in a document, but it wasn’t until months later, when I was flipping through my notebook for some totally unrelated reason, that I’d recall that great example had been waiting for me all along.
My favorite digital notebook program is Evernote, but other people swear by Microsoft OneNote, and some people now use Google Keep. Each of these systems has its advantages, but Evernote works on the widest range of devices: every major operating system (even Linux), most mobile phones and tablets and even (as of last month) on the Apple Watch. It also offers optical character recognition (the ability to recognize text that’s been photographed rather than typed in) no matter which device you’re using to capture a note. You can get up and running with a digital notebook system (or get smarter about how to use the program you already have) with the guidance in my new book, Work Smarter with Social Media, just released by Harvard Business Review Press.
Fast forward to 2015, and there’s now a solution for that very problem: cloud-based digital notebook programs. I’ve written before of my exasperation with people who still use print notebooks because they’re wasting everyone’s time. But you’re not just losing out on efficiency: you’re also missing out on other benefits.
With a note-taking program you can create an inspiration or innovation system: a process for capturing your ideas wherever and whenever they occur, and even more important, for bringing them back to you at the moment when they’re most likely to be useful. If you keep your digital note-taking application open all the time, and install it on all your devices, it becomes easy to capture anything, because you don’t have to open a new application or even a new document to jot down an idea or a bit of information. Then tags and full-text search mean that it’s easy to find the ideas you’ve captured, just when you need them, on any computer or mobile device.
To tap into all these benefits and harness your own creativity, first set up your innovation system, then use it to capture and then retrieve your ideas when you need them:
Setup
Here’s how to to set up Evernote (or your preferred notebook app) as the repository for all your great ideas:
Capture
Now that you’ve got all the pieces in place that make it easy to record your ideas, you actually need to develop the capture habit.
Retrieval
This should be the easiest part of the process, but it’s the step we often forget: actually looking at our past notes and ideas when we need an “aha!” moment.
The best part of a complete setup, capture and retrieval system is the way it feeds on itself. The more you capture and review your ideas, the more they will flow. That is partly because your ideas can build on one another: looking at a couple of ideas you had weeks apart may suddenly suggest fresh interconnections and possibilities. And it’s partly about learning to recognize and value ideas when they strike, which is a lot easier to do if you’ve got an easy system for capturing them.
But it’s even more a function of getting and staying in a creative frame of mind. When you get in the habit of capturing all your ideas, no matter how small or half-baked, you get away from the self-criticism that is arguably the greatest enemy of creativity. So stop judging your ideas, and start capturing them — and then watch them pile up in your digital notebook.
Capture Your Creativity with a Digital Notebook
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