7 Tips for an Effective Idea Journal

There was a time when I would stumble upon a great creative idea, write it down, and then promptly lose the paper it was written on. Or I’d write an idea in my daily journal, and then promptly forget which page I’d written it on. Finally, through trial by error, I’ve stumbled upon an easy and effective way to organize my creative ideas.

Every creative project starts with an idea. An idea journal is an excellent way to organize those creative thoughts so they’re handy and ready when you need them.

And it can be used for any type of creative endeavor. I primarily use my idea journal for keeping track of ideas for blog articles, but recently I’ve been experimenting with ways to record and organize ideas for poems and stories.

7 Tips for an Idea Journal

Here are seven tips for developing a simple, yet effective idea journal:

1. Decide on your tools. Some people like to keep a bound journal handy for those burgeoning ideas. What’s great about a bound journal is you can personalize it and take it with you wherever you go. However, keeping up with a bound journal can be challenging and organizing coherent notes in one can be difficult. Personally, I’ve found it much easier to organize my ideas into a computer document. If you need a free word processor, then check out Google Docs or Writer which comes with Open Office Suite. With a computer document, you can expand and move around ideas in a fairly coherent manner. When I don’t have access to a computer, then I place my idea in my daily journal, mark its location and later add it to my computer document.
2. Let it flow. Every once in awhile, I brainstorm in a single session, simply letting my ideas flow, no matter how whacky or impractical they may be. Other times, ideas come to me one at time, and I write them in my journal as they appear. The point is to let your ideas come and go and to avoid censoring. Just write what you’re thinking and let your ideas be free-flowing.
3. Get specific. After I’ve written down ideas, I elaborate on them, sometimes in the moment of their conception and other times later after they’ve brewed a bit. It’s important to elaborate enough on an idea so that you can remember your own trail of thought. These elaborations might be an outline, references to researched articles, quotes, or the actual lines or sentences I will utilize later in my writing.
4. Prioritize it. What are your most important ideas? Which ones do you feel most passionate about? Create a way to set your best ideas apart from the rest. You can create a special section in your bound journal or you can create a separate computer document. Personally, I have one document, and I place all my best ideas at the end. There’s no particular reason for this; it just works for me. So find a way to prioritize your best ideas in a way that best suits you.
5. Keep adding to it. Peruse your idea journal on a regular basis and keep adding ideas or elaborating on previous ones. Taking a few minutes for a brainstorming session is a great way to generate new ideas. But simply remembering to place your ideas in your journal as they come to you works.
6. Update it. If you’re using a computer document, then keep your idea journal up-to-date by removing ideas and notes that you’ve already pursued or by deleting ones that you no longer feel interested in. If you’re using a bound journal, this task becomes a bit more difficult, but it’s easy enough to mark or fold those pages which bear ideas that have run their course.
7. Experiment. The key to an effective idea journal is to experiment with what best suits you, your personality, and your projects. For instance, a bound journal holds few constrictions for how you can organize your notes. For instance, you can draw-up lists but you can also create mind maps and add pictures and sketches. A computer folder with different documents is also a great solution. You can utilize free mind-mapping software or add images or clips of articles.

Ultimately, an idea journal can take several forms and can be organized in a number of different ways. So, get creative and develop an idea journal that works for you.

How do you organize your creative ideas?

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Flickr photo courtesy of paperbackwriter