manage my ideas

Okay so you’ve got a notebook and dozens of 3×5 cards full of ideas. How do you organize these ideas so that you can review them and develop them? Technology has helped a lot in this area. You can now take your hand written notes and file them electronically. I asked several people how they organize their thoughts and ideas. Here are a few of their responses:

Ideas kept on hundreds of note cards and slips of paper become useless clutter. Years ago I started copying my ideas into a Microsoft Word document. Entries are organized by date, like a diary. This way I can search for an idea. I read through my notes looking for patterns of thought and lost gems. -Isabel

This may be time intensive on the front end, but I would suggest inputting them into your pc however you can and then using google desktop search when you need to locate a specific one. -Jennifer

The internet gives us the option to record our ideas on-line. Most of my ideas are things that I may never share with other people either out of fear of embarrassment or fear that they will steal my idea. This is why the ManageMyIdeas framework establishes all new ideas as private ideas. They can only be seen by the author. However, you might want to share certain ideas with other people or even share a few ideas publicly (for everyone to see and comment).

Take your ideas from your notebooks, 3×5 cards, napkins, word processor documents, emails, and compile them on ManageMyIdeas. It is easy to enter new ideas at any time. In addition you can share ideas with anyone, anywhere in the world (all you need is their email address). If you ever decide that you would like to do something else with the ideas you have stored on ManageMyIdeas, you can download your ideas (in XML format) to your computer.

Now that you have your ideas stored on ManageMyIdeas, you can assign “tags” or keywords to each idea to make it easy to find later. Just click on a tag and every idea with that tag will come up. Ever wonder where you put that napkin with that million dollar idea you had last year? Yeah, I use to lose my ideas too…that’s why ManageMyIdeas is a handy tool.

Get your ideas organized! Use ManageMyIdeas! It’s free!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 22nd, 2007 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Manage Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.