The 6 Step Process for Organizing Too Many Ideas

As I sit here and type this post, we are three months into a (hopefully temporary) new way of life due to Covid-19.  Most of the country was under shelter in place orders, but now things are starting to open back up.  Three months of being home was sure to cause many days and nights in deep thought on a variety of topics.  You may have thought about so many things and came up with some awesome ideas and now you don’t know what to do with them.  I experienced the same.  I had a long period of time where I didn’t think about business or blogging because I was mentally exhausted.  I then had a period of time where many ideas came to mind (I believe this is because I took that needed break and made room for new ideas to come in).  I had so many ideas, I needed to figure out what to do with them.  If you find yourself in that situation now and want guidance on how to move forward, I will be discussing the 6 step process of how to organize your many great ideas and what to do with them.

1 / Data Gather

The only places you likely have been while shelter in place orders were in effect were the grocery store, a drive-thru, a gas station and work if you held an essential position at your job, so this step shouldn’t be cumbersome (maybe just the part of searching through the house for all of the papers your ideas are on, ha!). Gather all of your notepads, sticky notes, napkins, etc. that you wrote your ideas on because you need to get an idea of what your thoughts were and put them together.

2 / Group

Read through all of your ideas and group them together based on the topic.  If you had ideas for new courses, put them in a pile together.  If you had ideas for new blog posts, group them together.  This will help you see if there are more ideas on a specific topic than others and guide you on what to work on now and what to save for later.

3 / Filter

The important thing about content creation is that it all needs to align with your goals. This means to focus on topics that will continue to show your expertise.  This doesn’t mean that an idea you had that may not fit in with your current goals isn’t good to keep.  On the contrary!  From these piles, pull out the ideas that are not aligned to the topics you already post about, or that do not fit into the puzzle when thinking about what you need to do to accomplish your ultimate business goals.  You need to filter the ideas down so you don’t waste time working on something that is not directly related to your goals and so you don’t overwhelm yourself with what you want to do.

4 / Digitize

Once grouped and filtered down, it’s time to put these into a digital system so you won’t risk losing them.  Add the ideas to something like Trello, Evernote, etc. Utilize a tagging function for your notes so you can easily find them in the future.  The notes that you removed from your pile should still be added to your digital note tool because you don’t want to get rid of the ideas.  They may fit into your strategy in the future, so add a Future tag (or something similar) to them for later.

5 / Apply a Realistic Timeline

You will also need to create a realistic timeline for executing these ideas.  A realistic timeline means don’t try to launch a brand new course in two weeks.  You want to allocate a realistic timeline to these tasks because although you still may be in self-quarantine or just not going too many places away from home, you still have regular, daily activities to do such as work, cook, clean, decide which pair of slippers and pajamas to wear for the day, etc. (ha!), so you don’t want to overload yourself.  Though I’ve been home for the majority of this time, I still find myself exhausted at the end of the evening.  I still need to use Trello to organize my blog tasks and schedule things out, otherwise things just won’t get done.  I also feel like we have a false sense of time right now.  If you tell yourself, “Eh, I’m home all day, I have all the time in the world to work on this”, you will likely push it off and find yourself at 11pm with nothing on your list complete for the day.  So just be mindful of having a realistic timeline to complete your tasks.

6 / Create Content

Now comes the fun part- working on the tasks you’ve deemed important to reach your goals…content creation! There are so many mediums you can create content for.  You can also re-purpose content for different platforms!  Here are a few things you can create from the ideas you had:

a. Blog posts

b. Instagram content (feed, stories, IG TV, Live)

c. Email marketing content

d. Products/Services

e. Podcast topics

f. YouTube content

g. Online or email courses 

h. Free and paid downloads

i. Email marketing content

There are so many ways to put your ideas into fruition!  Sometimes half the battle is knowing what topics you will create content around.  When I hear someone say I have too many ideas as if it’s a burden, I have to disagree and spin it so they will see it as a good thing!

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As we slowly try to get back to some sort of normalcy (let’s be real, some things in our reality are not things that we want to get back to), just remember that being restricted to your home and essential places is not a terrible thing.  Ideas will continue to come to you, but now you have the steps to help you organize and execute them!

So tell me…how have you been handling this time at home? Have you had plenty of ideas that you are acting on, are you slowly getting back into the swing of things or are you taking a mental break from everything? Leave a comment below.

5 Things to do While Going Through Social Distancing

With everything going on now and the uncertainty and anxiety that people are feeling, I think it’s important to talk about things that you can do while you find yourself participating in social distancing.  I mentioned in my IG story that I posted over the weekend that although some people feel that everyone is going crazy and taking this too far, it doesn’t matter because decisions that are being made affect everyone regardless how people feel about it.  So today, I want to share 5 things that you can do during this unforeseen time of social distancing.

1. Give Yourself Grace

   This is the most important thing to do, so I’m spending the most time on it. Our lives are changing everyday...our norm is quickly becoming the abnorm. This means a lot of thoughts, doubts and fears are running through people’s heads.  If your children are home from school and you are working from home, don’t have negative self-talk about the type of parent you are if your kids are getting more TV or iPad time than usual. It’s difficult to care for kids while still having to work, so be kind to yourself and do whatever will keep your household running as smoothly as possible.  Also, there are so many people posting about the right way to eat. This is great information, but don’t let it stress you out. If you have food that people don’t consider healthy (could be a number of reasons including maybe all the “healthy” food was gone when you tried to buy it), don’t get down on yourself. The more important thing is that you and your family have food to eat.  So overall, give yourself grace and practice any of the following things to help try to ease your mind-

   • Limit or stop social media activity- the various amounts of real and fake news being posted is enough to make anyone’s head spin and anxiety levels skyrocket. There’s nothing wrong with keeping up with the news/status, but don’t overwhelm yourself.

   • Catch up on sleep (maybe even take some Melatonin to help you sleep deeper)

   • Have an intentionally slow, lazy morning routine

   • Read a new book or finish one you haven’t finished yet

   • FaceTime/video chat with friends and loved ones

   • Write down your thoughts and feelings

   • Listen to your favorite music that makes you smile

   • Draw, paint or even color in a coloring book

   • Meditate

   • Listen to deep sleep music

   • Get outdoor time in your backyard or take a walk and inhale deep. Cleansing breaths are awesome for the body!

   • Let the sun shine on you for a little bit

   • Scream into a pillow to let out your pent up emotions if you’re feeling the anxiety growing.

2. Regroup

   This is a good time to think about your blog/biz and consider if what you’re doing is still aligned with your main goals and objectives.  Do the products, services and info you share still truly bring you joy? Are you meeting the numbers you planned for whether it’s dollar wise, email list member wise, traffic wise, etc.? If you answered no to any of these, it’s a great time to fine-tune your strategy or maybe even totally pivot to something different.

3. Content Creation Machine

   You know those blog post drafts that you never completed? It’s a great time to go through them, see if the info in them is still good enough to complete and post or if it can just be deleted.  Also, for new blog post ideas that you have in the pipeline, go ahead and get a head start on them. Content creation can also be for social posts, email marketing, podcast episodes, IG Stories, etc.

4. Organize Behind the Scenes

   Take some time to organize and update your behind the scenes, back office things such as filing paperwork (digital files and physical paper), updating your accounting transactions, updating pages on your website or even the entire layout, etc.  Show your website some love. We always tend to deprive it, so this is a great time to give it the attention that it needs.

5. Stockpile Photos

   If you are home all day, it’s a great time to take advantage of the daylight and take lots of photos to use for your social posts, blog posts, your website, etc. Now that we also have that extra hour of daylight thanks to daylight savings time, take full advantage of the natural light as much as you can.

I hope some of these things will help you out if you don’t know what to do or you need to find something to take your mind off of all the madness going on.  The overall feeling I’m getting when looking at the feeds of the people I follow is an abundance of love, friendliness and wanting to genuinely help people. All of this is bringing us closer together in our distancing...isn’t that ironic?