EP 169: An Idea for Capturing Ideas

inspiration. Like a lot of people, my ideas come when I'm doing something that is undistracted and kind of monotonous. For some people, it's showering. For other people it's driving, my ideas almost always come when I'm walking the dog. For ages and ages in my life, that was something that happened. But I never really took notice of the pattern, it was just the way that my mind

tended to wander. What I realized over time, though, was that the vast majority of those ideas that I was coming up with when I was out walking, Otis weren't ever going anywhere. In fact, most of them just kind of fizzled out and died. So today, I have a really quick episode for you. But it's one that I hope you find really valuable, because today I'm sharing the system that I created to harness those ideas, and set myself up to actually take action on them. Welcome to this can't be that

hard. My name is Annemie Tonken. And I help photographers run profitable, sustainable businesses that they love. Each week on the podcast, I cover simple, actionable strategies and systems that photographers at every level of experience can use to earn more money in a more sustainable way. Running a photography, business doesn't have to be that hard, you can do it. And I can show you how.

So this pattern where I came up with ideas on walks has been going on for years and years in my life, like probably since I started walking. But until a few years ago, those ideas almost always died on the vine. For example, I would be out on a walk listening to a podcast interview, and someone would be talking about like a photo conference or a print

competition. And I would go on this little mental tangent, where I would think, yeah, I should totally apply for that Photo, Print competition or sign up for the conference or whatever the case may have been. But by the time that I got home, you know, Otis needed water, or my mom had called or any one of 1000 other distractions had

happened. And the next time that conference or print competition occurred to me would actually be when I heard about it in the past tense, like, they were announcing the winners of the print competition, and the application period for the conference was closed, whatever. And then inevitably, I would beat myself up about it and be like, Ah, I should have taken advantage of that, or I should have, you know, signed up or whatever the case may have been been, it felt like a missed

opportunity. Now, obviously, a lot of ideas aren't necessarily ideas that I am going to follow through on even if I think about them, while there's still time to do that, right. Like, they may just not be the right ideas, I get lots of bad ideas.And so many of them shouldn't be used or put into practice or pursued or whatever. But that doesn't mean that there aren't some real diamonds in there, right. That's the reason that we want to keep track of

these things. It's the reason that we want to kind of harness them. Sometimes an idea is a good one, but it's not the right idea right now. However, it might be something that is right in the future for you at some point down the road, or sometimes one idea that doesn't really work ends up leading you down another mental path to an idea that does, right, this is how ideas start like a fire like there's this little spark, that's why they call it a spark

of inspiration. And, you know, the spark can just like fizzle out and die or it can catch you know, a little patch next to it on fire. And then the next thing you know, you've got a nice little blaze. But we are all busy, and we're all distracted. And those little sparks can really you know if they land at the wrong time when it's inconvenient for us to capture them. They just kind of it's like a spark falling on bare

granite. So, what happens is that those sparks are happening all the time and then they're fizzling out and then when we have the time, and we're feeling motivated to sit down and write a newsletter to our audience or you know, create a blog post or tweak our offer in some way or work on our pricing or try a new marketing campaign. Like you name it. We sit down at the computer, and we just kind of blank out. Right, I can't be the only one that that happens to.

So one day, it occurred to me that this going on walks and getting ideas really was a pattern in my life. And that that pattern, and the fact that I wasn't doing anything about it was costing me time and money and you know, wasting these potentially valuable ideas. And as I've learned, and as I've hopefully conveyed to you, the solution to addressing anything that happens over and over in life, or especially in business is to create a system for yourself. So that's exactly what I did.

And at first, it seemed kind of silly or almost, you know, ridiculous to try and create a system around, coming up with ideas or walking my dog. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that there were actually a few things that I could do that would encourage my brain to perform this particular trick, and then harnessing that idea generation so that I had access to them for a longer period of time. So I started to become more intentional about

how I prepared for my walks. In a way now, I actually try to plan for inspiration, as weird as that sounds. So the first step in this little system that I've put together is that before I leave for a walk, I decide on like a general question or topic that I'm going

to focus on. And this can be really general, it could be something like marketing or pricing, or it could be a bit more specific, like marketing using a quiz, whatever the thing is, my podcast feed can almost always serve up a handful of episodes related to that topic. So the next step is to do a bit of research and find two or three podcast episodes that are on that topic, or related to

that topic in some way. And I don't go crazy about this, I, you know, I search, I find a few, I just add them to my queue. And, and then I go with it. Like sometimes the episodes are a bit of a dud, no big deal. It doesn't, they don't actually have to be hyper specific. It can be just be near the topic that I want to think about. That gets my brain going. And this time of year, which is summer in North Carolina, I actually try to walk super early in the

morning. So I actually do this step, the first step, the prep step, the day before, as I'm getting ready to finish my work for the day, it's like my shutdown ritual. The next step is to then set yourself up, I tried to do my best to set myself up for IDEA generating success. So in the morning, when I leave the house, I put my phone on Do Not Disturb. I hit play on my podcast lineup that

I've picked out. And I go out on a route that takes Otis and me about an hour so that I'm giving myself some real thinking time. Now, obviously, ideas can sometimes come quickly. But oftentimes, I have to kind of get to the point where my brain relaxes. And to be honest, turns on when I'm walking first thing in the morning, for the idea of facuet to open. I think about coming up with ideas a little bit like those 3d optical illusion posters that we all knew and loved back in the 90s.

Where you have to relax your eyes in order to see whatever it is that's in the, in the optical illusion, it's like in order to come up with ideas, you almost have to stop thinking about coming up with ideas, right? You have to go into that flow state. So in order to do that, I just like hit play and stop thinking about it. I try not to put any pressure on myself. I don't you know, it's not like I go into it with like, I want to come up

with three ideas. And that is Nope, I just say like, Okay, let's go and we'll see what happens. But almost invariably, at some point, some kind of light bulb goes off. So this step really is all about creating that pressure free space for your mind to wander. The third step is that when I have those aha moments, I pause the podcast and I turn over to my voice recorder. And I hit record on the voice recorder on my phone, and I just talk through whatever the idea is. So this is total stream of

consciousness. I am often like huffing and puffing. There's noise in the background, whatever. I'm only making this for my Self, but I try to reference like, you know what I'm listening to and what I'm thinking. And, and I go into as much detail as I feel like is necessary for me to hold on to that thought. Because sometimes, if I go too short, then when I listened to it even a short period of time later, I'm like, What was I talking about. So I try and make it a complete

thought. But then once I've got it down, that's it, I just turned the podcasts back on and keep going. Now, sometimes this happens once on the walk, sometimes it doesn't happen. Other times, I end up with three or four or five ideas over the course of that hour. And, again, these ideas can be I don't put any pressure on what the ideas are, they can be little things,

they can be big things. They can be inspiration for podcast topics, or emails, stories that I'm going to share, like little stories for my personal life that the podcast reminded me of, there's all kinds of things, I don't put any thought into it at the moment, I just talk it out on the voice recorder. And then that takes me to the fourth step of the process. And this one is

the real clincher. So the minute I get home, before I shower, or you know do anything else, while my brain is still focused on the topic at hand, I sit down at my computer, and I listen to my voice memos, and I make notes on them in my computer. So what I find is that if I wait too long, if I go up and take a shower, and then sit down at my computer, I often can't really remember where the idea was

going. You know, it's like when you wake up and you have this really vivid dream and you're like, I'm going to tell my partner about that over breakfast. But by the time that you like, get dressed and go downstairs, it's gone. Right? When I am making the voice memos, like I said, I try to add as much detail as possible. But even still, those notes really do make the most sense. If I can write them down while they are

as fresh as can possibly be. And something for me about taking them off the voice recorder and putting them into like a written document solidifies them more. So then I find them easier to to go back to later the voice memos. It's like they have an expiration date of an hour. And then finally, the fifth step is that I organize my notes. Now, you can obviously organize your ideas in any way that you like. But just to share a little

bit more of my own process. Over the course of the past year, I have started using clickup, which is a project management tool, you can get a free account. The free account is great and works really well for almost any photographers needs that I know. And so inside click up, I have different folders that are dedicated to the different areas of my business. And inside each one, I have a document for ideas. So I don't just have one giant idea document because I find that

that's too. It gets too big, like the document gets too big. And every time that I need an idea or want to find an idea, like I'm sifting through too many things. So I tried to silo those under things like marketing, or sales or product ideas, things like that. So I go to that folder, that category. And I open up my idea document and I put the note that is

relevant to that in there. And that sometimes they apply to multiple things, and I duplicate it, I put it in both so that I'm not like having to hop around. And this last step means that when I am in that action mode, when I'm ready to sit down and you know, build that quiz, or like write to my email list, or whatever the case may be, all I have to do is open my marketing ideas document and I can easily peruse all of my old ideas so that I can jumpstart the

process. So to recap, here is my process for capturing ideas. Number one, you need to take note of when and where you tend to come up with ideas. And then you need to plan for that period of time, right? So before you go on a walk before you leave to go on a long car ride, whatever the case may be for you. I don't necessarily know how you would manage this in the shower. But maybe you take really long showers and you can have your phone in there and dictate notes

in the shower. But anyway, so back to step one before you go on that you're doing some preparing and you're giving yourself like an auditory stimulus list where you're you know, you're listening to an audiobook or a series of podcasts or something like that on the general top that you are interested in sort of ruminating on the next step. Step two is to set yourself up for IDEA generating success. So you are creating time and space, you are hopefully putting your phone on

Do Not Disturb. And then beyond that you're not putting any pressure on yourself to come up with ideas like you're just letting go, and trusting the process. The third step is that when those ideas happen, you capture them using the voice recorder on your phone, just stream of consciousness capture them. Step four is immediately when that process is over. As soon as you arrive at your destination in the car. As soon as you are done with your walk.

You sit down at your computer, you listen to your voice memos, and you put them into written notes in a document so that you are you sort of harvesting them while they're fresh. And then the final step is to organize those notes into silos so that you can quickly and easily find them when you are ready to work on that at some point in the future. And that's it. I know that this seems kind of silly. I have been doing this for a long

time. And it occurred to me like maybe I should maybe I should make a podcast episode out of this. And I almost talked myself out of it because I was like, well, capturing ideas seems like kind of a dumb topic. But hey, it took me a long time to come up with this like to realize that I should be doing this. And since I have I have been able to take so much more advantage of the ideas that come across my brain and and so if it can help any of you do that, I would love

for that to be the case. Have a great week. Well, that's it for this week's episode of This can't be that hard. I'll be back Same time, same place next week. In the meantime, you can find more information about this episode, along with all the relevant links, notes and downloads at this can't be that hard.com/learn If you like the podcast, be sure to hit the subscribe button. Even better, share the love by leaving a review in iTunes. And as always,

thanks so much for joining me. I hope you have a fantastic week.