Many folks recommend mindmapping as the way to get those goals or visions on paper.

Mind mapping is a technique popularized by Tony Buzan in the 1960s. Noticing that the humans respond better to images, keywords and direct associations, he developed many of the mind mapping techniques that we see today. And before Buzan formalized it, thousands had used the techniques including journals  Leonardo da Vinci, and Albert Einstein.

Here’s the basics:

1) Set your topic (what you want to brainstorm/mind map) on the center of the page, such as ‘2009 goals’ ‘Business Idea’ etc

2) Create pitcures or words that are themes that relate to the topic. For example. if your topic is ‘Goals 2009′, you might want “Personal Goals”  and “Professional Goals”

3) Continue breaking down the themes until you’re brain can’t work any more.

Do you use mind mapping?  Frankly, I’m more of a list girl. But am willing to try it if many of you think it has merit. Has it helped you?

For more inspiration, here’s Tony Buzan explaining mind mapping.

Image credit: creativeinspiration, on Flickr

Post from: EveryJoe

Can Mindmapping Help Your Business?

But because I am doing other things, I used to forget them.

So just a few years ago, I created a special place to put these ideas down quickly.  It’s called my ’schemes and dreams’ notebook. And I have it everywhere I go.

Once a week, I book myself an hour on my schedule to review it and decide what ideas are still relevant and create a plan for each of them.

How about you?  What do you use to help you keep your ideas from escaping?

Post from: EveryJoe

Capture those ideas before you lose them

I often think of how the long tail concept applies to ideas. What happens during the validation process to see if an idea is worthwhile, and beyond that, when you’re actively working on an idea is the realization of new ideas.

So one idea begets another, which begets another, and so on. Ideas are points on a chain (or graph) not points in space with no reference or connection to anything else.

The long tail isn’t just about one thing coming out of another. It’s the realization that many smaller things combined may be bigger than the most popular or biggest thing in that space. There are a handful of extremely popular blogs; the long tail is everyone else. At the end of the day, “everyone else” is much bigger (and more valuable) than the most popular blogs. That’s what Vernon Lun’s talking about with his site TheGoodBlogs. (Of course, that doesn’t stop many of us from trying to get into that handful of ultra-popular bloggers!)

When it comes to a killer idea, it may pay dividends many times over in terms of your success (regardless of how you measure success.) But its long tail could be even more successful.

Great ideas are meant to spawn other ideas.

Those ideas may be completely new businesses, or they may be corollary’s to what you’re already doing, smaller offshoots that combine to create even more success than the original idea. The blessed long tail.

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Post from: EveryJoe

The Long Tail of an Idea