If an idea is worth pursuing, it reoccurs in several ways. For instance, with my current project I can have a casual conversation with someone around a pain point and instantly see how my idea could help.
Many of my ideas seem brilliant when I first have them, but then fizzle the more I think about them. Even if they are wonderful and viable, your motivation to build them out is also a factor.
I get a lot of ideas. I keep track of them. If they fizzle, I remove them from the list.
I simply don't always have the time to jump on implementation of the ones I consider "good" when I have the idea. Also, keeping track of them means that I'll basically never have a point where I'm going "hmmm nothing to do, wish I had an idea!"
An idea you can't execute is worth about as much to you as no idea at all. The concept of an idea being so timeless that it will be both relevant and somehow forgotten in the future if not recorded is not one I accept.
Either your idea is so great that you'll a)make time for it or b) remember it in the future, or it probably isn't as wonderful as you initially thought after all.
hmmm nothing to do, wish I had an idea!
A person who generates so many ideas that he's considering recording them won't find themselves in this position: You'll always have more ideas than time to implement them, so don't sweat it.
Not recording ideas is both a way of validating them and focusing your mind on implementation. "Idea people" like us can easily lose ourselves in the mental masturbation that is the generation of "ideas". The last thing we should be doing is encouraging staying in that stage longer than we have to.
In terms of generating more ideas - yes you'll keep generating them but surely you want to pick up on the best ones rather than just what you happen to have come up with recently.
Besides, the way ideas work and interact aren't always straight forward. Sometimes you might be in the mood to act on something fitting a particular brief when that's not what you've come up with lately. It's like reading a book - you don't just pick up the first one you see, you look through the shelves and see what appeals.
but surely you want to pick up on the best ones rather than just what you happen to have come up with recently
That's my point though: the best ones don't really go away; they are annoying in their persistence to be executed on. Wait long enough and the landscape that the idea lives in has changed as well; an idea from 1989 will need to be re-imagined so much that it won't even really be the same idea.
Sometimes you might be in the mood to act on something fitting a particular brief when that's not what you've come up with lately.
If you have this much of a time luxury I am truly envious, I must say. But in this case you're speaking more of hobby projects, not true business ideas. True business ideas will need to be worked on consistently regardless of your daily attitude or they will fail, unfortunately.
For me, I jot down ideas, keep them in a file, and then implement the ones I want to when I have time to do so.
I forget shit all the time, and really -- I don't want to hear any philosophical fluff about how that must mean that the idea just wasn't all that good. It's an attribute of my memory, not the idea.
I'm not an "idea person". I'm a "getting shit done" person, who happens to have quite a few ideas, and who also happens to work full time and attend 12 credit hours a semester. I'd rather make a note of them, review them in my free time, and implement when I feel like I can, or when I choose to than rely on keeping some spark of inspiration kindled for an indefinite period of time.
Not recording ideas is both a way of validating them and focusing your mind on implementation. "Idea people" like us can easily lose ourselves in the mental masturbation that is the generation of "ideas". The last thing we should be doing is encouraging staying in that stage longer than we have to.
Yeah, luckily I'm not talking about just sitting around thinking of ideas and not implementing them. I never sit around trying to come up with an idea, and I get no satisfaction from just having an idea, which cuts out the masturbation.
I'll agree that we shouldn't encourage people to sit around thinking of hare-brained schemes, but please don't assume that everyones lifestyle and mind are structured the way yours is.
There's no universal truth to be had about tracking ideas or todo items -- it's too subjective of a territory -- and when you talk as if there is, it makes you sound like a jackass.
If you never find yourself in the position of wanting to jot down ideas because you "remember the good ones", wonderful. Don't tell me that it's not a useful thing for me to do, because seriously -- if I don't do things like that, I do not remember them. I don't remember what's in my ideas file right now, but I guarantee you that some of those ideas I will start implementing later.
Yeah, I'll always have more ideas than time. That's fine. I'll also know that the ideas I've saved but haven't had the chance to work on are ones that I'm actually interested in -- and I'll know that I didn't just forget some bright idea that I've had.
Look at the number of comments in this thread suggesting a personal favorite technique. My comment introduces the option of looking at the problem in a new way; one that removes the issue at its source.
I'm not assuming everyone has my lifestyle, certainly. However one thing I have learned in my 35 plus years is that most people overvalue their own ideas, and the concept of an "idea" in general and undervalue the execution. Not recording ideas promotes the things you do execute on over the actual ideas.
That doesn't mean you don't act on any idea, never write anything down or extend this basic model to ridiculous degrees.
The animosity towards this approach in your comment is curious.
I got the impression that you felt that if someone had to write down an idea to remember it, or if someone wasn't immediately capable of implementing an idea, that the idea itself must not be worth saving or implementing. I didn't get the impression that you were saying "this works for me, this might work for you" -- rather, I heard (or saw) "the problem you're addressing is a non-problem. tracking ideas is a wasted effort. period.". If that's not what you meant to imply, apologies.
I don't think that your solution removes the issue at its source if the issue is remembering ideas that you want to examine or implement in the future, either. If the issue is only having those ideas on hand that you felt were good enough that you remember them no matter what, then your solution works fine. If that's not the issue, then your solution only works in the sense of repainting the issue as a non-issue, unless I'm missing something fundamental about what we've been talking about.
I don't disagree that most people overvalue their own ideas, that's pretty inarguable.
I probably overreacted a bit -- as an explanation, this is a bit of a personal topic for me. I struggle quite a bit with remembering to do things, or remembering things I want to do -- and I also don't have very much time to devote to pursuing what I think are good ideas.
Without a means for me to jot down stuff for me to think about or work on in the future, I wouldn't ever come back to scratch any of the things that were making me itch in the past -- and scratching those itches tends to be better for more than just me.
This is probably partially because I, like a lot of "hacker types" am ADD. I don't mention that as a crutch or anything, but it is something that went undiagnosed in myself for a long time, and that definitely contributes to the "problem". I can not rely on my memory alone.
I can't really express the difference in how I'm able to "be productive" when I'm medicated and have a system for idea tracking versus whenever either of those are not present. It's a big, tangible difference, and this is the case for a lot of developers I know even when you take medication and ADD out of the picture.
Perhaps another semantic thing that should be mentioned is that the vast majority of my ideas are "change functionality of library X to include Y", "write script to do Z", "little app that does this", "configure app FOO to work with input BAR". I'm not necessarily talking about larger ideas.
Anyhow, I hope that clears some stuff up.