In my previous post, I mentioned a long list of topics that I plan to write about here.
But a topic does not necessarily help you to write a blog post (or whatever else you’re writing). A topic is great for a book, but even then you’ll have to narrow it down in order to come up with a structure.
Topics need to be narrowed down. So as I set out today to write the second blog post here I had to come up with more specific ideas.
I’m a huge proponent of Trello. I use it for managing projects and my various teams…but I also use it for managing myself. A Trello board makes a great place to capture ideas.
I created a new board called LC Ideas, and I dropped that laundry list of topics into one column titled Topics.
Then I created a second column for Ideas.
Some people think that coming up with ideas is hard. I beg to differ. Anyone that can’t come up with ideas, just hasn’t practiced it enough. In fact, ideas are easy. Ideas don’t stop coming. And I don’t think you need to be particular creative in order for that to be true, just practiced.
An idea I heard about from James Altucher is to think of ten ideas about some topic, and do this as an exercise each day. Usually the first five or six ideas are easy, but you need to stretch for the final few.
It’s a really good exercise. I could go down each of my topics in turn and generate ten specific post ideas for each one.
But I didn’t do that here…at least not yet.
Just looking at the list, I started to come up with specific ideas.
Now, to be honest some of the things came up could be topics in and of themselves, or at least a multi-part series of posts. Still, some were very specific posts in my ind.
On my 12th idea I happened on this one, i.e. what became this post. Why not share exactly what I’m doing? And so I did.
Here’s the great thing about Trello. I’ll be continuing to use this board for some time now. Any time a great idea pops into my head about something to write here, I’ll save it in this spot.