All your ideas won’t come when you’re at the keyboard.
I had no idea what I’d post today. Then I straightened the little table next to my desk and saw multiple slips of paper. Suddenly, I had my choice of nine ideas.
I opted to keep them for later — and consider how to save ideas at risk of getting lost.
You know the kind. They come at inconvenient times or in awkward places. Like when you’re stuck in traffic or when you wake in middle of the night — times there’s no handy keyboard. How do you save ideas too good to lose?
When you wake at 3:20 with a great idea, do you shout out to Alexa?
As someone who keeps his technology simple, I’m curious what high-tech solutions you might use. When you wake at 3:20 with a great idea, do you shout out to Alexa? Activate your smart phone’s voice recorder? Trust its voice-to-text app? (Any of those might endanger the sleep of your spouse.)
For decades as I’ve worked in publishing, I’ve been getting ideas in the night: sometimes at bedtime, sometimes hours before dawn. So I keep a pen and scratch paper on my nightstand. There’s nothing worse for my sleep than hatching a writing idea, then fearing I’ll forget it by morning. Thankfully, at dawn my nighttime penmanship remains legible.
There’s just one downside. If I don’t immediately include those notes in my work-in-progress, that little paper can get misplaced. Then those ideas accumulate, waiting for rediscovery. Like yesterday when I straightened my office.
