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

Keep an Eye on Your Energy Line

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

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

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.

The way you organize projects, prioritize, and manage your energy is arguably more important than the quality of the ideas you wish to pursue.

Time is very limited, and with the demands of family, friends, work, and sleep, most ideas lose traction immediately.

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

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.”