I am a goal-oriented person.
I am also a plan-oriented person.
On most Fridays, I plan my week in advance. I use Google Calendar to do this. I have colour-coded events, timings, appointments, reminders all dialled in. I believe this makes me productive.
My Google Calendar is one of my prized possessions right behind my email inbox.
Hence I am always frustrated when I'll be doing something (anything) and a completely unrelated idea would pop into my head that gets me so excited and frustrated at the same time.
On rare occasions, these ideas would be a one-off i.e. I can finish it in under 10 minutes (like this newsletter) but on other days it would require me to allocate time to accomplish it. The time I don't have because I have already planned my week. And I am frustrated because what if the idea that I have is THE idea? You never know, right?
Today, I think I figured out a solution. And I'd like your thoughts on it.
When you receive such ideas and you need time to work on them - you immediately jot them down in your list (calling it IDEAS BUFFER LIST)
Then you identify the next step and only the next actionable step you need to do to progress in this idea.
This step mustn't be long where you have to sit and research or do for an amount of time
It should be something you can do on the fly; in the toilet, taking a break or productive procrastinating
Once you do it, you move on to the next step
And that's it! The more you explore the idea the more it will be apparent if the idea is worth pursuing or not. So you pick and drop as you please.
The obvious weakness I can think of with this solution is how are we supposed to decide what ideas to put in the above list and what not to? The criteria I can think of is
You should be super excited about the idea
You should immediately be able to think of the end goal (some ideas like "do a business" is too vague to begin)
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