Friday, February 08, 2008

Great Concept ... an Idea Incubator ....


Another of my daily reads is Lifehacker and today Gina featured a link to a posting on the 3rd by LifeDev which is a personal productivity site ... the article featured a great read on the use of an idea incubator and used the parallel to watching a chick incubator and how life is life whether viewed as a chicken or an idea (lol ... my attempt at humor for the day ...) ... as I went through the discussion I could see how this parallels a lot of my efforts and it gave rise to an old tool that I could use to make the capture of the idea almost spontaneous ... I subscribe to the idea that the best work needs to flow ... like a stream, the flow is best where it is unimpeded, so disturbing thoughts as they are flowing are like putting stones in a stream, disturbances at best, dams at worst ...

I typically rely on MindManager to capsulize all of my thoughts, but after reading this, I configured it to be the catchment or incubator ... here is a quick screenshot of the map ... the trick is how to implement the system ... I have Gyronix GyroQ loaded in my computer and resides in my tray so I can call it up at any time ... well, it is a simple one line entry that I have configured to go directly to my map ... see the entry posted as an idea today ... I simply typed the idea in and sent it to the map ... the map shows another idea in the current section, I had sent that earlier and so as a review function, I simply moved it to the current branch ...

The settings for what you send are configureable, so this is really an open ended capture mechanism ... you could have ideas, refinement to ideas, additional info to ideas, etc ... you then simply move things to the proper branch or idea as part of the review process. The culmination is to hatch the idea. Simply create a new map and cut and past the branch into it to turn it into a project ...

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