How to cope with “idea overflow”?

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

Also for community projects: http://ivanistheone.github.io/ideacollector/#community

And science papers: http://ivanistheone.github.io/ideacollector/#paper

Inspired by ZeFrank: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sHCQWjTrJ8&feature=youtu.be&...

* 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.

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.

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.

* 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.