Brainstorming versus focusing
Greetings from Raleigh, North Carolina. I just arrived this afternoon and have four days of corporate training at McClatchy Interactive starting tomorrow morning. During one of the flights today, I was reading Getting Things Done by David Allen. It’s an interesting book and probably a topic I will return to from time to time. What I want to write about today is what I see as the competing disciplines of brainstorming and focusing. This dichotomy should make sense shortly.
I’ve always been very good at brainstorming and generating new ideas. I think of new things in the shower, while exercising, during the morning commute, while washing dishes, and any number of other random times during a typical day. Sometimes it’s all I can do just to write them down before I forget anything. Brainstorming is not difficult for me at all. Where I tend to come up short is in moving one of my ideas from concept to reality. Part of the problem is that I keep adding other ideas in the meantime.
Now don’t get me wrong. I am very focused when it comes to my job and the work I do for clients. I know exactly what needs to be done and I do it well. It’s with my own ideas that I find myself in a different situation entirely. As of right now, I have great ideas for five websites, six WordPress plugins, and four Firefox extensions. The sheer number of ideas makes it difficult to triage them effectively. And they just keep rolling in!
So that in a nutshell is why I’m reading Getting Things Done in the first place. I don’t want to have to pick and choose among my ideas. I want to do them all and eventually I believe that I will. In the meantime, I think a little triage is in order. Stay tuned. Readers of this blog will be the first to know when I actually deliver on one of my ideas.
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