Do inspiring business ideas keep you awake at night? You are not alone, many entrepreneurs, if not all entrepreneurs experience the exhilaration and annoyance of great ideas coming to mind at the most inopportune times.
Inspiring business ideas simply don’t follow set times. And often, you end up spending hours thinking about them and mocking them up to the point where they almost seem real.
If you are anything like me you may find ideas coming to mind during the day too while you are trying to work. As much as I enjoy coming up with ideas, I still need to get enough sleep and get my work done. As it is there never seems to be enough time in the day to get everything done.
How to Manage Your Inspiring Business Ideas
You might not be able to control when inspiration strikes but you can control how you manage the stream of ideas.
In fact, it is actually really simple to manage your inspiring business ideas and improve your time management.
All you need to do is make sure you have a notebook and pen and pencil handy at all times.
As simple as this is there are a few additional guidelines you should follow to use it effectively.
- If inspiration strikes at night, don’t lie in bed for hours thinking about your ideas. Get up and write down everything that comes to mind until the flow of ideas comes to an end. You need to reach a point where you feel the idea is complete otherwise you will go to bed and carry on thinking about the idea.
- Date every entry you make and put a heading such as the business name the idea relates to or what the topic of the idea is.
- If the idea relates to something you are working on already then make some time during your work day to see how you can apply the idea and work through it until you reach a good point.
- Setaside some time weekly or monthly to go through your notebook. If you have categorised your entries well you might even want to take a highlighter and highlight related ideas. When you are ready to apply some of ideas finding all the related notes will be much easier.
- Try to leave a little extra space at the end of each entry so you can refine them when you have some time to review them. If you choose to write in pencil you can also edit your notes if you want to.
Prefer a Digital Notebook to a Paper One?
Personally, I like the feel of pen and paper and I also like to sketch things from time to time. However, sometimes a digital option is better.
Something I have been experimenting with is taking voice notes. You simply need to take your smartphone or tablet, choose your voice recording app and then hit records as your inspiration flows.
Sometimes it is just faster to get your ideas out this way. There are a few important guidelines for this method too.
- Make sure to date and label your voice entries. This makes it easy to group similar entries and then go back and gather all your related ideas when you have time to work through the use or viability of the ideas.
- If you want text notes you can play your voice notes back to a speech to text engine and then edit your notes. Google Drive has a pretty good STT engine and is free. There are many other apps both free and paid that you can try out.
- If you like to sketch you will need to have a smartphone or tablet that has a stylus otherwise keep a drawing book handly and combine digital and paper.
Conclusion
There is no right or wrong way to make notes of your inspiring business ideas. The main thing is that you make notes. Recording your ideas for when you have time to work on them will help you to get more sleep and get more done.
You will no longer have your attention stuck on an idea or have to worry that you might forget the idea. Using a little discipline and control will make your life that much easier.
Now before you forget about this idea I suggest you get yourself a notebook right away.
