Personal Time Management: Organized Brain Storming may Sound like an Oxymoron

When you think about brain storming you probably associate it with something you’ve done with a group of people at work. At the time you may even have thought it was kind of stupid and a waste of time as people called out ideas that seemed kind of outlandish to you. This personal time management idea will help you to utilize brain storming to increase your performance and creativity.

As you go about your daily life your brain is working. Sometimes your brain is working on pretty mundane stuff, but at other times your brain is serving up ideas that hold potential value for you if you remember them, and figure out how to implement them. The problem is that most of the time you allow those potentially great ideas to come and go without capturing them or thinking about how you might use them. When you do that often enough your brain begins to give you less of those great ideas because you don’t use them.

There is an easy way to capture these ideas and increase the value of your personal time management. Keep a small notebook with you where you can jot these ideas down as they come up. Don’t associate any value on the idea just write it down. Once a week review your list of ideas and decide which ones you should spend a little more time thinking about. These are the one’s you’ll actually do some brain storming about.

Start with a blank piece of paper or Word document and write the idea you want to think about further in the center of the page. You may even want to circle the idea. Now from this idea begin to think about how this idea could be used to create value for you and record these additional ideas around the main idea on the page. You may even start making sub-ideas from each of these ideas, and connect them with an arrow to show how these ideas relate to each other. You want to do this quickly just letting the ideas flow writing down everything that comes to mind. To this point you’ve been entirely focused on capturing ideas, first in your little notebook and now expanding on the ideas on this page that is for one topic and one topic only. The time value from this activity comes from being able to quickly organize these ideas into actions.

Once you have all your ideas and thoughts laid out and you understand how they all relate to each other you’re ready to organize for action. Sometimes you’ll be organizing for immediate action and other times you’ll be organization for action at a later date. It doesn’t matter. The time you spend now is a good investment because when you’re ready to take action you’ll have everything you need to think about all on this one page. From this page of information you’re now able to begin to organize those thoughts into those that you want to take action on, and those you want to discard. For the ones you want to take action on you can determine action order and action steps. Finally you can decide on start and end dates. At that point you’ve taken what could have been an overlooked opportunity that came from an idea that popped into your head, and turned it into an actionable idea that makes that idea a reality.