Idea Capture Fail: The Ones That Get Away

Capturing ideas is the most important task of a creative person (a Maker). It is part of a more involved system I call Capture, Catalogue, Review. First you make sure you write down—or digitally collect—your thoughts and inspirations (Capture). Then you file and store them in such a way as to access them again easily. This can be done with physical boxes, digital folders, and applications with labels, and tags (Catalogue). And finally, you make time to browse through your ideas on a regular basis to see if they serendipitously connect to anything you are working on, or spark a new project or idea (Review).

I’ve had trouble collecting lately. I’ve found my iPhone too slow for typing, I’ve had applications crash (I’m looking at you, Evernote), and my Jawbone UP—which was collecting my walking and sleeping patterns—randomly and intermittently lost data. It has been frustrating, and reminds me of all the things that can go wrong when you want to capture your ideas:

TECHNOLOGY

• Failure: Sometimes things just don’t work. My Jawbone UP is a perfect example. It was fully charged, and I was wearing it all day and night, and suddenly it stopped collecting data consistently. I have no idea why, except that things don’t always work.
• Power: Batteries run out. When you rely on something that relies on batteries, it is inevitable that they will let you down some day.
• Crashes: Applications (and apps) can just quit without warning, hang, take forever to boot up, or act temper mental. I don’t mean to pick on Evernote, but it crashed 3 times in a row on my iPhone, and I had to open a different app (Pages) to capture my idea.
• Offline: You won’t always have an internet connection, and if you are using the mobile version of Evernote, it might not allow you to launch at all. Connecting to Google Docs, or Dropbox also becomes difficult or impossible. If you are writing live on a website (like WordPress), it may not save and you could lose everything you have written. This has happened to me scores of times—including a few times on this very post. (This is why I SELECT ALL and COPY to the clipboard before ever saving a live document. I’ve been burned too many times by shoddy internet connections.)

DISTRACTION

• Driving: This includes operating heavy machinery, or doing anything where most of your attention is required. You might not physically be able to capture your ideas. This is why services like Siri are embraced so enthusiastically. Even though they never seem to work as well as advertised.
• Family: Whether it’s your mom nagging at you to take out the garbage, or your kids bouncing around for attention, or your partner needing help taking in the groceries; these things happen all the time. Your family, your friends, and random strangers, will continue to interrupt you at the most inopportune times.That’s life.
• Work: You need to pay the bills, right? Sometimes you won’t have a chance to capture that fleeting thought because you have an obligation to your employer or client that needs taking care of.

MULTIPLICITY

• Platforms: Paper vs Smart Phone vs Tablet vs Work Computer vs Home Computer. What device did you capture your last idea with? It might also be captured in video or audio or stills on your camera.
• Applications:  At one time, I was using all of the following: Writeroom, TextEdit, Stickies, Notes, Evernote, Backpack, Email, Gmail, Google Docs, OmniOutliner, OmniFocus, Pages, Microsoft Word, Keynote… and others. When I wanted to find something I wrote, it became very difficult to remember where it was located.

UNPREPAREDNESS

• Nothing: Sometimes you forget your notebook or your phone and have nothing to capture with. Other times you are in the bathroom or in the shower, and have no way to capture your thoughts.
• Out Of: You can run out of paper, ink, space, batteries, memory, time.

To battle these and other capture disasters, it pages to follow these few simple advisements:

CAPTURE BEST PRACTICES:

• Capture Plan: Have a capture plan for most situations. Voice record in the car, Evernote when online, pencil & paper in the subway. Be consistent and persistent. Iterate and perfect your plans.
• Pencil & Paper: Have pencil & paper backup. Always. Everywhere. Pencils never crash or run out of ink. If you are always losing the pencil, then buy a quiver or to fasten your pencil to your notebook with a rubber band.
• Now: Write (or speak) things down as soon as they come to you. Get into the habit of fast captures, even when you are distracted. You can always return to them later and flesh them out as long as you have the core idea down. Ideas are like dreams; you always think you will remember them, and then suddenly you don’t.

Follow these simple instructions and you will get better and better at capturing you ideas. The more you perfect it, the faster and more effective you will become. Don’t let the big one get away (again).