Making Ideas Happen

My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned to myself for each one of my undertakings. I shall go even further: my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes

Consider making a recurring monthly “Backburner Review” appointment in your calendar. Ritualize the time you spend revisiting the half-baked ideas that may someday transform your work or life. It is easy to forget your Backburner (and, most of the time,

While you may enjoy generating brilliant ideas and imagining new possibilities, you must approach every occasion of creativity with a dose of skepticism and a bias toward action. Brainstorming should start with a question and the goal of capturing something specific, relevant, and actionable. You should depart such sessions with more conviction tha

The most important, and most often neglected, organizational element is structure. We tend to shun structure as a way of protecting the free-flowing nature of ideas. But without structure, our ideas fail to build upon one another. Structure enables us to capture our ideas and arrange them in a way that helps us (and others) relate to them. Without

As you decide where to focus your precious energy, visualize all of your projects along a spectrum that starts at “Extreme” and goes all the way down to “Idle.” How much energy should your current projects receive? Place your projects along an energy line according to how much energy they should receive.

Taking and organizing extensive notes aren’t worth the effort. We have found that notes are seldom used and can actually get in the way of capturing and following up on Action Steps. The process of excessive note taking actually interferes with the bias toward action that is necessary for a productive creative environment. If you simply capture and

A relentless bias toward action pushes ideas forward. Most ideas come and go while the matter of follow-up is left to chance. Next steps are often lost amidst a mishmash of notes and sketches, and typical creative tools like plain blank notebooks only contribute to the problem. For each idea, you must capture and highlight your “Action Steps.”

References obstruct your bias toward action. It is common that Action Steps get lost in the shuffle of nonactionable stuff. The more energy you spend on scribbling down notes, the more liable you are to miss the opportunity to capture valuable Action Steps. Even if you do manage to write the Action Steps down, they often become obscured amidst sket

Specifically, we discovered that the most productive creative individuals and teams have a lot in common when it comes to (1) organization and relentless execution, (2) engaging peers and leveraging communal forces, and (3) strategies for leading creative pursuits. While many of us spend too much energy searching for the next great idea, my researc