How to cope with “idea overflow”?

http://productivity.stackexchange.com/questions/8182/how-to-cope-with-idea-overflow

by uladzislau • 12 years ago

131 40 12 years ago

productivity.stackexchange.com

roskilli• 12 years ago

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.

300• 12 years ago

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/

nathancahill• 12 years ago

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

coldtea• 12 years ago

How Do I Cope with "Idea Overflow"?

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

jlongster• 12 years ago

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.

ivan_ah• 12 years ago

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/

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&...

Timothee• 12 years ago

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.

rtpg• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

terabytest• 12 years ago

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.

mkr-hn• 12 years ago

Put the ideas on a spreadsheet and find a good RNG

andyidsinga• 12 years ago

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... )

trustfundbaby• 12 years ago

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

bane• 12 years ago

I really like this. I'm thinking of adopting it myself. I think it's also really important to track ideas that don't work out and use them as a heuristic to help weed out future bad ideas before you put any effort into them.

sophacles• 12 years ago

I have a similar, but not as well organized system.

* If it is an idea for the thing I'm working on, I just file a ticket in the tracking system. It contains enough text to remind me of what it is, and let other team members iterate on it as well. It definitely infuriates some of the team members because the granularity of them can be tiny or huge, but the point is tickets can be refactored if needed. It also allows the whole team to discuss bigger things and gives the junior devs something to dive into when they need direction (e.g. lets refactor this like so... ).

* I make a todo to flesh out an idea in my todo list if it is unrelated to my current project. Then during review my life times I can make a document about each idea, or add the idea to an existing idea.

* i have a rough ranking for idea documents of "do it now", "do it sometime soon", "do it sometime (usually never...)", and "wtf was i thinking".

If you ever figure out the 28h days thing - please share, I'll pay well for it.

ColinWright• 12 years ago

  > 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• 12 years ago

XKCD: https://xkcd.com/320/

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

fenesiistvan• 12 years ago

I have mostly the same, but in clean text todo.txt with some minor changes:

-done tasks are marked with + prefix

-dead/failed tasks are marked with - prefix

-both migrated in a separate done.txt file to keep my todo file short

Good ideas, just ideas, meh ideas in a separate file (because these are not really todo -s and it is inspected only time to time)

So i have only the following sections:

-now: current work

-todo: list in priority order (reprioritized frequently)

-next: my next project(s) (categorization, ideas, timings)

This is how i track my life in a few simple text file:

-todo.txt -mentioned above

-done.txt -mentioned above

-notes.txt -people names, phone numbers and lots of other uncategorized stuffs

-passwords.txt -all my passwords

I am using two other important tool:

-browser bookmarks (carefully categorized)

-email (including 10 year history)

These are so important for me that I would never think about using some external tool such as trello. I want to be able to read my stuff in all circumstances, even after ww3 :)

debt• 12 years ago

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.

WWKong• 12 years ago

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.

codingdave• 12 years ago

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.

Ologn• 12 years ago

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.

kendalk2• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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 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.

kendalk2• 12 years ago

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

computerslol• 12 years ago

Ritalin and a little self discipline.

aufreak3• 12 years ago

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.

zackmorris• 12 years ago

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.

publicprivacy• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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

h1karu• 12 years ago

trello

gregpilling2• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

gregpilling2• 12 years ago

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

lowglow• 12 years ago

One of our members launched 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.

zaroth• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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

hyp0• 12 years ago

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.

elsamuko• 12 years ago

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.

dev360• 12 years ago

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.

How to cope with “idea overflow”?

Related Stories