One of the challenges I’ve come across since starting to work for myself is the lack of people to talk to. Yep, it can be a lonely world out there. When you’re the only person working in a business, there’s no one else to share and discuss ideas with and it’s much harder to grow when you’re the only person bringing ideas to the table.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting loads of smart people while working out of the Dojo Coworking space in Canggu. During my short time at Dojo, I’ve been presented with tonnes of new ideas and have had many of my existing assumptions challenged.
I’m now leaving Bali at the opposite end of the spectrum; overwhelmed with ideas and options. Now I’m presented with a new challenge. What do I act on first? How do I prioritise all the new projects? How do I come up with a plan to tackle all these new ideas?
For me, the process of organising ideas happens in Asana. Why Asana? Well, I want to DO something with these ideas, which means I first have to turn them into tasks. If I added these ideas to Evernote or some other note-taking app, they would just get buried in all the other notes. I add my ideas into Asana even if I’m not going to pursue the idea for a while (maybe it’s something I need to ponder for a bit longer). For these ideas, I tag them with “Someday” so I can always find it if I need to.
I use a Kanban board and add ideas to my “planning” column if I’d like to work on an idea in the near-future. Then, when I’m ready, I’ll move the task from “Planning” into the “In-Progress” column when I start work on an idea. The Kanban board acts like a holding bay for ideas and mini-projects that I’m going to work on soon.
Whether you use Asana, Evernote or a good old pen and paper, getting your ideas out of your head and into some sort of system is the first step you need to take if you’re going to make sense and prioritise your ideas. Being overwhelmed with ideas is great, but making sense of them is essential if you want any hope of executing on them.