What do you do with all the ideas you have for your business? In this episode, I share the three steps I take to record, assess and implement business ideas – without getting overwhelmed!
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Transcript
Hello, I’m a few weeks into the summer holidays and one of the things I found about taking time off is that it allows your brain to relax. Which means for me – all of the ideas. All of the ideas pop up in my head, every single day. I have three to four new ideas, at least! I think it’s the ADHD part of my brain to be honest, constantly looking for fixes, easier or better ways to do things. And to be honest, novelty. If you have a look at my Amazon buying list, it’s fairly good evidence of all the random ideas I have and the impulsive buys that I have that match those ideas. But I wanted to talk today about, what should you do when your brain is constantly coming up with ideas, but you’re not sure if you have the time or the energy to do them, especially in your business. So, I’ve got three steps that I tried to stick to. And I’m not saying I stick to these every single time. A month ago, I had a crazy idea that I would buy an inflatable dinosaur costume to wear to my dinosaur mad nephew’s birthday party. Logically, probably not the smartest investment I made, but I’m glad I made that random decision because he absolutely loved it. My sister got a stegosaurus one and I had a T Rex one. And it was incredibly fun and funny. So sometimes you’ve got to throw these rules to the wind and just do something. But I’m mainly talking about business here.
So, first step, record the idea. So, you have the idea, write it down. So, write it down in their notebook. If you use Notion or Trello, or Asana, I have like a brain dump section where I dump in ideas. You could also try brain dumping it into Otter, if you’re someone that likes to verbally process things. So, I often actually do this in the car, I get in the car, and I set up Otter, I’ve actually got a command now that I use to start recording because I often have ideas in the car, mainly because I’m not on my phone or anything like that. So, it means my brain is just free to think. So, make sure you record it. Now I have a team, I now share these ideas with them. Which brings me on to my second thing.
My second step is, assess the idea. It’s a lovely idea, but do you need to do it? I recently read one of Jessie J Anderson’s extra focus newsletters, which I highly recommend if you have ADHD. And he quoted Steve Jobs. And the quote was “People think focus means saying yes to the thing that you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the 100 other good ideas that there are.” Just because an idea is good, this is by the way, the quotes over, this is me now. Just because an idea is good, it doesn’t mean that you have to do it. Maybe it’s an idea that you’re going to put on the backburner for another time or to share with someone else to do. The question to ask yourself is, does this align with my goals? The vision for your business? And if that’s a no, put it in the lovely ideas for someday pile. You never know the perfect occasion might arise in the future to do it. And if it’s really bugging you that you haven’t done it yet in a few months, maybe then it’s time to revisit it. If you find this quite challenging, find somebody else who can talk you down from the crazy ideas, the big investments, things like that, someone that you know, you can go and speak to who will be able to see all sides of it and give you a really rational response. I definitely have friends who I do this with, when I need to be brought down to earth a little bit sometimes. I don’t always. I don’t often speak to my husband about the crazy things I’m gonna buy on Amazon because I know it’s often going to be ‘no you don’t need that’. But it’s fun. Sometimes it’s fun.
Right, number three. So, you’ve got the idea. You’ve assessed the idea. You think the idea was actually something that you could potentially do that will work with your goals and align with everything. Next step is to schedule it in. So, break it down into steps and schedule it into your diary, schedule it into your calendar. This is a really good way as well to assess whether you should focus on the idea. And if you’re struggling to find the time to do it, maybe it might be worth looking at your priorities. It might even be the case that you realise that’s a bigger priority than some of the things that you’re working on. And so those are the ones you downsize, and this is the one that you focus on.
Now, like I said, I don’t always do this, but these are generally the kind of steps I try and do with the ideas that I come up with. And sometimes just writing it down and getting it out of my system is enough. I don’t always need to follow through these ideas. And I try and share them with my community if it’s something that I think someone else can do really well or would work really well for someone else’s business model. I give it to them instead. They don’t have to do anything with it. There’s no pressure, but it is something I’d like to share in case it might be useful for other people.
I would love to know how you get on with this kind of thing. If you are someone that is always coming up with new ideas, I’d love to know what you do with that. So, join us in the usual places, the Facebook group, which you’ll hear about in a moment, or have a look in the bio and you’ll find details of Instagram. I’d love it if you sent me a DM with some of the crazy ideas that you’ve had recently. I’m always keen to hear that kind of thing.