Ideas are like slippery fish; if you don’t spear them with a pencil they get away – Earl Nightingale

In the first year of college I started keeping an idea book. Initially it was merely to collect ideas and to evaluate them in terms of their potential. But over the years it has turned into much more than that.

I have since collected hundreds of ideas in my idea books. Some of them are horrible, some of them are mediocre and others are great. Today, I can trace all of my successful ventures back to a first spark in my mind that if left uncaptured wouldn’t have turned into anything.

Projects that have made a full-time passive income for almost a decade, marketing ideas that have helped clients generate tens of thousands of dollars in additional business and ideas that have helped me find high-value clients for my own business.

But there’s more to idea books than just writing something down and acting on it later. Keeping an idea book is about cultivating an entire strategy of how to extract maximum value from your most creative times on an ongoing basis.

The Process To Capture Ideas Anywhere

It starts at the point in time when you have an idea. Everyone has these times when you get into the “idea zone”. They are the times when you get excited about an idea. Your brain is buzzing with energy and words start flowing naturally.

These times should be sacred. You need to nurture them and have a process to maximize their potential. Good ideas need to be captured immediately or else they are gone just as fast as they hit your prefrontal cortex.

I have made it a habit that no matter where I am, when an idea hits me I write it down in Evernote. It can happen while I’m waiting for the traffic light, in a coffee shop or while I’m working on something else.

Depending on the situation I might just capture the thought. If I have more time available I will allow myself to expand on it in a completely unstructured way. Free writing, whatever comes to mind.

Once you have fully articulated an idea it’s been reinforced in your subconscious. So whenever you come across something relevant to that particular idea, you will start noticing it.

A good idea, articulated and written down once will improve over time as you challenge it, expand on it and think about it over and over again. A bad idea will not withstand any scrutiny and automatically drops off the radar.

Paper-based idea books

All the way through college and even until relatively recently I have focussed on using Moleskine notebooks for all of my ideas and plans. I have since switched over to almost only using Evernote as my idea organisation tool.

There’s something to be said for using a real paper-based notebook and pencil and actually writing and sketching things in your book as you come up with them. I will often literally have a craving to use a pencil and get things on paper. It’s just such a great feeling to actually write things down.

It allows you to draw things, make little sketches and arrows and do it all as part of a somewhat chaotic process. The main disadvantage is the fact that structuring your ideas becomes much more tedious.

Let’s say you come up with an idea and you list its benefits, features and applications. At the same time you might write a little introduction or brainstorm some catchy tag lines for the idea. In most cases the end result is a great collection of thoughts, but in most cases it’s also a mess.

Once you have done this 50 or 100 times it becomes a headache to sift through the good ideas. You have to re-write the best ideas into another book and structure them.

In short, writing down ideas in a paper-based idea book is amazing; structuring them not so much.

This is why I have transitioned to relying on digital idea books. These days 90% of my ideas and plans are captured in one tool only: Evernote.

Digital Idea Books

Evernote is free and lets you capture text, photos and ideas in a digital notebook that can be accessed from any device and from anywhere.

You can start writing down an idea on your iPhone at the coffee shop and continue to refine it on your computer at home. The process is seamless. That’s what I love about Evernote.

You can also take photos and Evernote automatically makes them searchable.

Most importantly, it’s very easy to re-structure and organize your ideas in Evernote. You can create as many notebooks as you want, move things around and delete bad ideas.

So after the initial brainstorming phase where you just randomly articulate your idea, you can easily go back, re-structure it and add headlines to categorize your thoughts.

After the idea has been structured I will often have additional thoughts that don’t really fit into any of the existing sections. They go into a brainstorming section at the bottom of the note.

It took some time getting used to using a digital idea book but I’m really happy with the process now. If you still want to keep a real notebook you can use a hybrid model as well.

You can take notes using pencil and paper and file them away by taking a photo in Evernote. Evernote ensures that will will never lose your idea and it also makes your note searchable.