
How to cope with “idea overflow”? - uladzislau
http://productivity.stackexchange.com/questions/8182/how-to-cope-with-idea-overflow
======
trustfundbaby
I used have this problem and I developed a system for this. Whenever I have an
idea, I'll write it down immediately, either with evernote, clear, or by hand
with the aim of getting it into my trello board.

In my trello "idea" board I have swimlanes designated like this

 _ongoing_ \- stuff I'm working on now

 _next_ \- Stuff I want to tackle next

 _good ideas_ \- ideas that I think could be something

 _meh ideas_ \- not so sure about these ones, I'll keep them around just for
prosperity's sake, so if someone launches a billion dollar company off of one
of them I can kick myself

 _just ideas_ \- not fully fleshed out, just whims at this point.

 _far out ideas_ \- Things I'd do if I had $100 Million or if JJ Abrams became
my best friend (Remake "Battle Los Angeles" for example)

 _done_ \- things I've completed

 _dead_ \- things I tried that didn't work

Ideas start out in the _just ideas_ column with just the title of the trello
card, and every weekend or so, I'll revisit the board and flesh out ideas,
adding checklists with all the steps I have to take to realize the idea, and
adding comments with stuff I find (competitors, stats etc)

items journey from just ideas, to meh ideas, to good ideas to next. Sometimes
moving in the opposite direction to far out, or dead (if I find someone is
doing it better).

Once they get to "next", I turn them in to their own trello board, complete
with swimlanes for things like user acquisition, marketing, competitive
analysis, monetization, features, code, devops, vision/strategy and other
adhoc lanes I need for things like picking a name, or "discussions" (if I'm
working on it with somebody.

So far it seems to be working very well, and I don't worry so much anymore
about losing a really great idea that I had, because I didn't act on it, and I
get to see the progress I've made on stuff at a glance.

The next thing I need to do is figure out how to turn 24 hour days into 28hr
days so I can get more time outside work to hack on the ideas I plan out using
this method :D

~~~
ColinWright

      > The next thing I need to do is figure out
      > how to turn 24 hour days into 28hr days ...
    

For a significant amount of time (several months) I worked on a 28 hour day.
The problem is that you only get 6 of them per week.

~~~
teddyh
XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/320/](https://xkcd.com/320/)

 _Small print: this schedule will eventually drive one stark raving mad._

------
ivan_ah
I have a little script I use to "flush out" and de-romanticize business ideas.
It asks some of the hard questions you need to consider to turn an idea into a
proper business:
[http://ivanistheone.github.io/ideacollector/](http://ivanistheone.github.io/ideacollector/)

Also for community projects:
[http://ivanistheone.github.io/ideacollector/#community](http://ivanistheone.github.io/ideacollector/#community)

And science papers:
[http://ivanistheone.github.io/ideacollector/#paper](http://ivanistheone.github.io/ideacollector/#paper)

Inspired by ZeFrank:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sHCQWjTrJ8&feature=youtu.be&...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sHCQWjTrJ8&feature=youtu.be&t=7s)

~~~
Timothee
This video by ZeFrank is really great. It's a problem I certainly suffer from,
with ideas from two or more years ago that I still kind of plan on executing
on at some point… later… when I have time… but it will be great, I can tell
you that much! Just wait, it will be worth it!

…or not.

------
zackmorris
A few thoughts on this from my own life, after spending 11 years writing a
video game and failing to finish a dozen others:

* The one time I used agile methodologies in the workplace, we had a team (implementation is more expensive than idea so add workers)

* I have over 200 column ideas for my upcoming blog, but will have to let 90% of them go and find peace with that (can't do everything)

* Profit, in fact income itself, generally comes from finishing things so I have to decide between optimization and eating (good, fast, cheap - pick any two)

* Consider looking at your ideas from a meta level, see if you can project out where the ideas will finally fall (see the forest for the trees)

* If it's troubling that you form a solution that invalidates the current problem, perhaps try to see that as a positive (work at your level)

There are probably a bunch more but I don't want to get quippy. I struggle
with a preponderance of ideas to the point where I alienate people and am bad
with time management and money. It's a bizarre first world problem that most
people don't seem to understand. That's why I love Hacker News! And kind of a
P.S: I'm realizing as I get older that my short game is terrible, for example,
I struggle with the timed skills tests on freelancing sites but throw around
esoteric computer science concepts easily, so a big part of my inability to
finish anything is that it's hard to communicate what I see to other people
and I get outvoted. Then when my heart isn't in what I'm working on, I
procrastinate. I'm trying to find projects that I'm passionate about because
challenge isn't the problem, it's my own attitude.

------
kendalk
Emacs Org-mode.

I have a massive to-do list that is 8,917 lines long. It includes everything I
need to do, remember, or think about. But it isn't unmanageable at all -- it
is a .org file with code folding. The visible lines take up only two screens
on my monitor.

Every project or business idea is in (parens) like Lisp. This keep my projects
visibly separate from daily to-dos. I color-code the ()'ed projects by type by
adding each one to my .emacs file like this:

(font-lock-add-keywords nil '(("(publish)" 0 font-lock-warning-face t)))

This lets me choose a color for each project. (I have yet to figure out how to
assign custom faces. Still working on that.) My to-do list is a blaze of blue,
green, pink, and red for the urgent items.

I format the top row of tasks like this:

* _1_ this is a task

* _2_ another task

* ___ yet another

* ___ lorem ipsum is boring to read

* ___ another task

* ......................

* (project)

* (business-alpha)

* (business-beta)

* (publish)

* (startups)

* (reading-list)

* (HN-reading-list)

* ......................

* ___ periods make a good visual divider for the list

* ___ another task

Projects are in (parens) and individual tasks have a ___ in front. Optionally
I can rank the tasks with a 1, 2, 3 or 4 following the I-II-III-IV ranking
model of Stephen Covey.

I highly recommend org-mode. I feel organized and on top of things even with
so many things going on.

Edit: Edited to correct newlines.

~~~
klibertp
Org mode is great. It took me some time to learn to love it, and I'm still not
done customizing it - for example I just learned about org contrib modules and
I need to go through them and enable what seems useful. I got some inspiration
from this site: [http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html](http://doc.norang.ca/org-
mode.html) and from some "tutorials" focused on "Getting Things Done"
implemented in Org. One great feature Org provides is time logging, which
let's you easily see how much time you spent on a given task. It's a blessing
since I need to enter this data into Jira anyway - I just generate clock
report from org and paste bits of it to Jira (I'm in the process of writing
more automatic integration for this, too).

As for your workflow: do you know you could create "TODO types" instead of
wrapping your projects in parens? You could style them to have different
colors. There's "TODO keywords as types" page in Org info docs which describes
this. You could also use priorities (but there are only three if i understand
this correctly) or tags for this, but since I don't use any of them I can't
tell you how exactly.

~~~
kendalk
Thanks! I'll give the contrib modules and TODO types a look.

------
debt
The first answer is the best. Stick to a strict two or three week sprint or
iteration. Assume any new ideas are bad ones and jot them down somewhere.

It's important to sleep on ideas. So many times I think I've come up with
something brilliant and unique; I buy domains, Google Apps accounts, start
projects in Xcode, etc. As time goes on, I passively estimate the amount of
work and level of potential success of the end product. Typically I come to
the realization that idea doesn't seem worth it given all the calculations I
make off the top of my head.

"Idea overflow" can be avoided if you sleep on new ideas for a bit. The real
issue is that there are seemingly no bad ideas; that is most seem worth
pursuing in the age of uber's and snapchats and instagrams because success is
a crapshoot.

I think it's important to determine your end goal. Are you trying to make a
very successful and popular app? Well, if that's the case then it's a
crapshoot and you'll have some sort of productivity schizophrenia making
every, single, app that comes to mind. Alternatively, is this idea something
that you personally need? that would increase your personal productivity?
something you're not focused on other people using? I'd sleep on that a bit or
do some research to see if it already exists.

I think it's important to qualify "good" ideas vs "bad" ideas. This way, the
idea firehose can be tamed.

In my mind, good ideas are an intersection of something you would personally
use, that adds value to your life, and something you think other people may
get use out of as well. Another good idea is one that makes you healthier;
either mentally, physically, socially, spiritually even.

With any idea, you should ask why you would want pursue it and how would you
feel after completing it? Pursuing creative interests is important, but it's
also important to identify why you're doing what you what you're doing.

------
roskilli
I use a really simple spreadsheet to handle this backlog for my small dev
team, it allows us to select the really critical things to work on for a
sprint as we can sort the backlog depending on what is happening that month by
weighting different attributes, such as:

* How much does the feature align with our vision

* How much joy will this bring our customers

* How long have customers been asking for this feature

* How equipped are we to tackle this feature

* Will this feature help bring us more revenue now or later

With all these scored we can dynamically weight each attribute and sort and
select the top features to attack each sprint based on the needs to address
revenue or customer satisfaction at any point in time.

------
aufreak3
Switching from giving importance to "which idea to pursue?" to "which problem
to solve?", can greatly help ... as it did during my phd. Changing from
"interesting ideas" to "interesting problems" not only forces you to think
about things that have some worth pursuing, but can also give you a clear view
of priorities - i.e it is easier to tell the relative importance of problems
(at least for me) than of ideas, it is easier to formulate questions that you
don't know the answers to and can therefore focus on collecting data about
before you begin working on it.

If you have an idea along the way that sounds interesting, just ask yourself
"what problem would be solved if I work on this?" ... and pretty soon you'll
gain tremendous clarity, often discarding many useless ideas very early on.

This shift has perhaps been the biggest learning of my phd years. Compared to
the effect this has on me, I find the "agile methodologies" etc tips
relatively useless.

------
hyp0
The stated problem is pretty easy to solve: jot down just enough information
to trigger the idea. Don't explore it. Don't try to articulate it or
communicate it or define it. The idea will remain safely in your head - the
only danger is that you won't be able to access it. So, all that is needed is
a trigger; a couple of evocative words will do.

But I think the underlying problem is not the attraction of new ideas, but the
repulsion of the old. New ideas are fun; old ideas are hard work. And the more
progress you make, the more discipline is needed to finish. I don't think the
answer is simple willpower, but seeing some meaning in the result - that this
_needs_ to be done... the world _needs_ that first idea, and _it needs you_.
Even, Victor Frankl's perspective that the work calls you. If you abandon it
for every shiny new idea that flutters its eyes at you, what will become of
it?

Paraphrasing JFK: ask not what your idea can do for you, but what you can do
for your idea.

------
jlongster
I bet formalizing your process won't help most people. You'll just end up
seeing how many "sunk costs" you have, which might be good, but you'll still
churn through ideas.

Here's a more realistic solution: thoroughly research your competitors before
you begin implementing your ideas. You should be doing this anyway! You need
to learn from their mistakes and leverage your position of starting something
from scratch as much as you can.

What I've learned is inevitably you end up scrapping most of your ideas after
a few days of research. You realize how tough the competition will be, how far
ahead they are, and how much work your idea really will take to implement. A
quick dose of reality will make you happy to move on to other ideas before
wasting weeks or months working on it. When you are still excited about an
idea after knowing the market, you're on to something that might stick.

------
rtpg
It's the last point in the article, but I think it deserves special mention:
writing your ideas down is a great first step in coping with them.

In a way writing ideas down serves the same purpose as rubber duck debugging,
in that you can figure out if you have a "real" idea or if it's just some sort
of dream-like emotions that make you think it's one.

Techniques described in Allen's book (Getting Things Done) and stuff like the
Pomodoro technique works wonders for me on this sort of issue.

~~~
atom-morgan
I agree with this completely. Ever since I've started writing down my ideas
I've found that I've come up with _better_ ideas. When you have a list of
ideas they begin to have "sex" as many people have said in the past. You think
on them, let them fade, and then rise again when you have another idea that
complements it.

It also helps to share your list with someone else as well. I share mine with
a good friend in an email that we have titled as our "Idea Bank" and it's been
very beneficial.

------
dev360
I have become better at executing on projects by spending a lot more time
thinking through the execution of potential projects instead of actually
executing on them.

I ask myself things like what kind of technologies or 3rd party libraries I
might want to use, what the data model would look like, and how many REST
endpoints I would need, and how difficult it would be to find a nice UX
abstraction for what I want to build.

This allows me to better evaluate how long it would take to finish and to
evaluate the complexity and perhaps pick a better project to tackle in a short
amount of time. Most projects that I have started will take between 1-3 months
from start to finish (in my spare time).

Before, I was never able to finish anything and I have a project folder that I
worked up over the last 8 years that has probably 15 half finished projects
that I never got a chance to complete. Heh and lets not talk about all the
domains I have bought through the years for ideas that never went anywhere. I
suppose I've been practicing idea squatting.

------
WWKong
You have to go into a lockdown mode. How long is the lockdown mode? It is a
variable that is part of your initial plan.

Here is how the process looks like: collect ideas, quantify it against your
key metrics (hint: most of the time it is revenue), stack rank, pick the top
one. Your quantifying formula should already have a length-of-time component
and opportunity cost which are the investments you are happy to make to hit
the goal. Go into execution mode for that length of time.

The ideas that pop up during lockdown goes in a list that will go through the
same process at the end of lockdown. At that point you have hit your goal or
ready to abandon ship per the original contract.

------
terabytest
What I do personally is keep a simple Google Doc (which I call a Spark File)
where I just write down ideas as soon as I get them, in the most pristine way,
and then forget about them.

Sometimes I get very interesting ideas, note them down, and after a while I
come back to them and decide to build them. While I'm building I'll also note
down any idea I get (be it related to the project I'm working on or something
else) and just forget about it for the time being. Once I'm done with what I'm
supposed to do, I'll open my Spark File again and scavenge for interesting
ideas to either expand my project or start a new one.

------
codingdave
I find it most important to clearly define what your goals are. Then you just
need to honestly evaluate which ideas best move you closer to those goals,
including a reality check on if you can really accomplish the idea.

------
gregpilling
I write down my ideas, and try to include enough detail to make them
understandable by myself 6 months later. Then I can forget about them, which
eases the mental load.

Once in a while I will go through the written out ideas and see if the time is
right to implement or test them. About half of the ideas are lousy in
retrospect, and there are many that are already being done well by someone
else - so I don't do those either.

The good ideas persist, and eventually I try them. But I have really found
just writing them out helps my peace of mind a lot.

~~~
brc
I have been doing this for over ten years. I have a quality notebook, in which
any 'burning' idea is copied down. Looking back through, some are comical,
some got done by other people, some are still out there.

The main thing is to ease the burden of your brain. You need to 'kill the
process' by dumping it onto a page.

I don't recommend computer files, trello, or anything like that. A quality
notebook or journal, and sketch down the ideas properly and date when you had
it.

~~~
gregpilling
I agree. I use an artist sketch book with 9 x 12 sheet of paper in it. I found
a notebook to small.

------
zaroth
Very surprised NOT to see "this question was closed for not being a question."

Is SO actually getting better keeping the content we want it to keep, or did
they just miss this one?

~~~
Twisol
This question is actually on the "Personal Productivity" Stack Exchange, so
it's actually perfectly appropriate to the topic.

------
lowglow
One of our members launched
[http://ideas.techendo.co/](http://ideas.techendo.co/) for idea validation
from a pretty good community and group of experts. They offer an insight,
help, etc.

Check it out if you're trying to figure out what to do and if anyone is
looking to help.

------
andyidsinga
Im amazed that the answer pointing to "the cult of done manifesto" was
downvoted!! ( [http://www.brepettis.com/blog/2009/3/3/the-cult-of-done-
mani...](http://www.brepettis.com/blog/2009/3/3/the-cult-of-done-
manifesto.html) )

------
300
I have idea overflow every single day... Doctor told the that I have a
"startupitis" \- yes, it's a virus :) more on it here:
[http://startupitis.com/2014/01/starupitis/](http://startupitis.com/2014/01/starupitis/)

~~~
nathancahill
Symptoms include buying a ridiculous number of domain names, to use once you
have time to build the idea.

------
elsamuko
Write prototypes. You can implement these very fast, and see quickly, if it
works.

E.g. I'm using Octave to test various imaging algorithms before implementing
them in C++. Also, it helps verifying the C++ implementation and I can
visualize the results.

------
publicprivacy
I pre-categorize my ideas into trello boards, and stored the email to each
board in my phone's contacts. So storing ideas is as simple as emailing my
"board" and it is already going to the right board.

~~~
schrodinger
In case you hadn't tried it, trello has a great mobile app too...

------
coldtea
> _How Do I Cope with "Idea Overflow"?_

Well, in most cases you don't really have an idea overflow, just an
implementation underflow.

------
mkr-hn
Put the ideas on a spreadsheet and find a good RNG

------
Ologn
I think the Lean methodology has some good ideas, and I often follow it
myself. Someone once compared it to aspects of scientific methodology, and I
agree and think it is something to think about.

You do not have ideas, you have hypotheses. You might feel you have very good
hypotheses that will pan out, but there is one great unknown which you do not
know about and that is user reception. If someone like Steve Jobs had a 100%
batting average at such things, then Lisa and NeXt would have been runaway
hits. You are preparing to do experiments, and that experiment is what no one
can predict, public response. You have not done any experiments yet, you are
just modifying hypotheses before you start, which is fine in some
circumstances.

I can't help but think it is psychological. People don't want to put their
effort into a product they think will be great and have it rejected by the
public. They take the rejection personally, as if they themselves are being
rejected. This goes back to the discussions on HN about how San Francisco is
one of the few places where failing at a startup is not seen as a badge of
shame. The normal view is that releasing a product which is rejected is a
failure you should be ashamed of. This standard view you probably hold,
perhaps unconsciously. The lean view that a bad launch is not a big failure to
be ashamed of is not a normal view for the average person. I don't think
you've taken proper account of how different the lean, Bay Area startup view
of failure is different than almost everywhere else. You're acting "normally",
which is what the problem is. Most people avoid failure, while you're working
to increase your chances of failure.

"Improvements of existing ideas" \- yes an improvement, but is it an important
improvement or an uninmportant improvement? Important means the public wants
it, unimportant is a "nice to have". I have released minimal viable products,
with my hand still containing a list of features I left out of that lean,
minimal first product. I was always sure customers would demand these features
first. They usually did not. They usually asked for things I would have never
thought of. Sometimes their requests and suggestions were very good. Sometimes
I would have three separate people request a feature I had never thought of.
Yes, those "improvements" I thought of myself before releasing, I could have
implemented them by postponed the first release of my minimal viable product.
They would have been nice to have. But no one ever asked for those features
any how. And the features everyone asks for I had not even thought of.

You might be smart, but you are not smarter than the combined brainpower of
dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of your customers. The bottom line is the
best product your customers will want is one released minimally viable at
first, and ultimately shaped by their requests. By locking yourself away and
building what you think they should have, you're not giving them an awesome
product on first delivery, you're cheating them of input into the process. The
features you think are so necessary are not. No matter how long you take to
ship version 1, it will be lacking features users want.

------
computerslol
Ritalin and a little self discipline.

------
h1karu
trello

