Ep 129: Why Your Best Ideas Disappear
(And How to Capture Them)
SUMMARY
You're in the shower when brilliance strikes. A perfect solution to that client problem you've been wrestling with suddenly appears crystal clear. But by the time you dry off and get dressed? Gone. Vanished into the creative ether.
Sound familiar? You're not alone. As creatives, we experience these moments of insight constantly—during client calls, while driving, right before sleep, in the middle of a workout. But without a system to capture them, these brilliant ideas become nothing more than wasted creative energy.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
⚡️ Choose ONE capture system and commit to it completely – Multiple capture locations guarantee your ideas will be lost. Pick one place that goes with you everywhere, whether that's Apple Notes, a physical Field Notes journal, or a voice recorder app.
⚡️ Give Future You the context needed to act – Don't just write "client portal idea." Write "Automated onboarding sequence that sends welcome video and checklist from day one." Future You won't remember the context without your help.
⚡️ Schedule a weekly 15-minute review to process ideas – Set the same time on the same day every week to review captured ideas using the four-question filter: New for now, new for later, add to existing now, or add to existing later.
NOTABLE QUOTES
💬 "Your best creative ideas aren't lost because you're not smart enough to remember them. They're lost because you haven't given future you a fighting chance to find them."
💬 "Write ideas like you're leaving notes for a team member who needs to execute it without asking any questions."
💬 "Don't let your idea capture system become a museum of ideas. Use it as a filtration system and put those ideas where they belong."
EPISODE RESOURCES
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TRANSCRIPT
Your best creative ideas aren't lost because you're not smart enough to remember them. No, they're lost because you haven't given future you a fighting chance to find them. Let's get into it.
Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy, the podcast where we transform creative chaos into clarity through systems and processes. This is a podcast for all creatives—designers, photographers, writers, all creative entrepreneurs who are seeking practical, actionable strategies to grow their creative business through efficiency.
I'm your host, Dustin Pead, creative process consultant, and I help creatives and agencies know themselves, their process, and their teams so that they can create with efficiency as they scale together. I would love for you to subscribe, rate, and review this episode. If you're watching on YouTube, go ahead and hit the thumbs up button as well. Check out dustinpead.com/free for all sorts of free resources I have for you. And you can follow and chat with me on social media at Dustin Pead. That's D-U-S-T-I-N-P-E-A-D.
The Scattered System Disaster
All right, so let's talk about this scenario, right? You're in the shower and a brilliant solution appears, right? But by the time you dry off, it's gone. It vanishes. Maybe you were in the middle of a client call and an idea strikes. The call continues, the idea evaporates. Maybe it's while you're driving—you can't write it down, so you just say, "I'll remember this," but you don't, right? Right before falling asleep, there were breakthrough moments that are lost during the morning fog. Maybe it's during exercise when the endorphins are flowing and ideas are flowing, and then later—nothing.
This is a scattered system disaster. I want to talk about some ways that you can collect ideas so that you have them when you need them. This is what Todd Henry calls being an "accidental creative"—being brilliant at a moment's notice because you have collected ideas.
Some creatives decide that they're going to write them down so that they don't forget, right? And so what they do is they might create an ideas Slack thread that they're never going to find again. Maybe they email themselves, but those end up going down and down further in your inbox. Maybe you have different random notebooks or sticky notes or napkins—all things that you can't find. Or maybe you have voice memos that you never actually transcribe.
Look, this fails because Future You has multiple six, seven, eight, nine, ten places sometimes to have to go find those ideas and ultimately ends up giving up. Thus the idea is gone.
The Solution: One Capture System
But listen, brilliant ideas don't have to become wasted creative energy. So I want to suggest something to us today, and I talk to all my clients about this: have ONE capture system for your ideas. One capture system that goes with you everywhere. If it doesn't go with you everywhere, it's not your system.
So you can choose your one place. Maybe it's your iPhone Notes app—it's always in your pocket. Maybe it's a digital notepad on your phone like Notion or Evernote. Maybe it's a physical Field Notes journal. I did this for many, many years so I wouldn't be attached to a screen, and I would carry around the little Field Notes. Field Notes are those little notebooks that are about the size of your hand. You can carry them around in your pocket. I loved it because when I put my hands in my pocket, I would feel it there and I'd be like, "Oh yeah, I brought this around to write down some ideas. Maybe I should think about what ideas I have right now," and then I would pull it out and have it.
You can use the voice recorder app for when you're driving or exercising, but if that's the place, that needs to be THE place. The key to success here is to pick one place and commit. No exceptions. If you're going to do the voice recorder thing, do the voice recorder thing. If you're going to do the Field Notes thing, do the Field Notes thing.
And the reason that this is important is because if you don't have one place, like we talked about earlier, you have all these different places to go back and find. Where did I put that idea?
The Future You Framework
I love Seinfeld—the show, I love Seinfeld the comedian. I used to watch that show religiously all the time, and there was an episode where he woke up in the middle of the night and wrote down this concept or a punchline to a joke or whatever. And the next day he woke up and he's like, "I don't know what this means. Is this anything? I have no context as to what this means."
And so that's where the Future You framework is applied. When you capture an idea, if you leave out the context of that idea, then you're setting yourself up for failure.
So if you have an idea about a client portal, don't just write "client portal idea." Write: "Hey, client portal idea looks like this—it's an automated onboarding sequence that sends a welcome video and checklist from day one." You go, "Oh, well, that's an idea I can get around." But if you just had an idea written somewhere on a voice memo somewhere that said "client portal idea," you'd be like, "I have no idea what the context is."
The Future You framework or methodology that we talk about is specifically designed for context because you're not expected to remember the context of all these things. You remember little bits and pieces. You remember "client portal idea," but later you want to know what that idea actually was, fully fleshed out. And so you give Future You enough details to act on it without having to reconstruct your thinking.
It's the same principle that applies to our project task methodology, where we have a clear verb, specific outcome, and all of the necessary context.
The Weekly Review Process
All right, so now we've got our ideas in one place. What do we do with that one place? What I suggest is a weekly review. Now you can do a daily review if you'd like. If you're in a high-idea environment where you constantly need to be pumping out ideas, you can do that. I found for me and most creators that I know that doing that daily gets exhausting because there's a lot of things to start and not a lot of things to finish. And there's really no time to marinate on the idea.
We have ideas as creatives—sometimes we just need to sit on them for a little while and kind of marinate through those ideas and kind of stew on it. Maybe we add a little bit more context as we begin to stew on it. But I like the weekly review because it gives us time to marinate on it, but not so much time like a monthly one where we begin to really kind of lose passion for that idea. It's not that we're losing context for the idea—we're losing passion for the ideas, usually if we wait longer than a week to review those ideas.
So I like to have the same time, the same day, every single week. Usually for me, it's Friday afternoons where I'm going through and I'm looking back at the week of all the ideas that I wrote down in my one spot. For me, it's my Remarkable notepad that I use, the digital notepad that I use. I write all my ideas down in that. And so every Friday afternoon, I go through and I look at that.
The Four-Question Filter
And when I do that, when you review these ideas, I want to give you four questions to filter through each idea. Because you need to—when you're looking at these ideas weekly—you need to ask yourself the question, "Well, what do I do with this idea now?"
And there are four questions that I want you to filter through each idea that you wrote down, and the four areas are this:
It's either a new idea for now
It's a new idea for later
It's add something to an existing idea now
Or it's add something to an existing idea later
And then as time goes on, you may look at that and you go, "You know what? That's actually just creating more work. We really don't need that." Or "That actually belongs a little bit more with this other idea"—you're adding something, adding to an existing idea.
So new for now doesn't need immediate action? Then you move it to your task list immediately. New for later? Maybe this is a future project. You're going to create a project placeholder in Asana or wherever you create project placeholders, and you're going to go, "That's where this is going to go and I'm going to come back to it." And put a date on it, obviously, so that you remember to come back to it.
Thirdly, maybe it's adding to something new now. Maybe you're adding to a new idea and you're going to add it right now. Does this enhance a current project? We've all had that—you get halfway through a project and we go, "Man, you know what would make this project great? You know what will really take this to the next level?" That's this category. You're adding to something. You're adding to an existing idea and/or existing project that already exists.
And the fourth category is you're adding something later. Still, you're adding to it. Does this fit maybe a planned future initiative? And so you add a note to that future project going like, "Hey, I had an idea for later that we might do something, and when we do, it's going to be like this."
And so your one place is to be the place that you capture the ideas and you review the ideas, but then after that you send the ideas where they belong. You send the ideas where they belong.
What Now? Your Action Steps
So what do we do with this now? It's a pretty short episode, but I wanted to get it out there for you. What do we do?
First thing you do is choose one place for these notes today. Don't research this out the yin yang, right? Just pick something that you already have access to. Because if it's a new—if it's too far of a reach of a new thing that you have to incorporate, a new tool that you have to incorporate—you won't do it. Resistance will set in and you'll go, "You know, it's just out of arm's reach, and so I can't really get to it, so I'm not going to use it."
So make sure you have one place to decide that's within reach of you already, within your grasp, within your world, within your realm already, so you don't have to create a new habit around this. It's something that's going to be super easy and natural for you to do.
Number two, set up your weekly review—literally 15 minutes every, the same time on the same day, every single week. Go ahead and create it on your calendar. Open your calendar right now and create that recurring 15-minute block every single week when you know that you're going to have the time and the mental energy to review those ideas.
Thirdly, now it's time to build the habit. Now we have the tools that are in our midst. We've scheduled the thing to happen. We have the tool, we have the time and date and the place, and we're just going to show up. So now we have to start building the habit.
So in the first couple of weeks, maybe the habit is that you just need to capture the ideas. Just work on building a habit of writing those ideas down wherever you decided to write them down or verbally speak them into. After a couple of weeks of doing that, then you can start to go, "Okay, now I'm going to work in this weekly review that's on my calendar, and I'm going to really start to get this flow going."
And as you do that, track your wins when you're looking through it like, "Man, I had that idea. I came back and revisited it. I added it to the thing, and the project was so much better because we actually followed through on an idea."
Imagine that, creative. Imagine you actually follow through on some of your ideas. Doesn't that sound amazing? I want that for you so, so badly.
Fourth, make sure when you're writing these ideas down, make sure that you're giving Future You the context that it needs. Write ideas like you're leaving notes for a team member who needs to execute it without asking any questions. And we've talked about this multiple times in the Future You methodology shows that we've done, so you can go back and listen to those things. But essentially it boils down to, like I said, writing ideas like you're leaving notes for a team member who needs to execute without being able to ask any questions. What's wrong? That is Future You context.
And then lastly, get your ideas into action. Use the four-question filter every single week. Don't let your idea capture system become a museum of ideas. Don't let it become a museum of ideas. Take it, use it as a filtration system, and put those ideas where they belong and get them into action today.
Resources to Help You
So a couple of things you can find on my website to help you with this is the Future You methodology framework. It's dustinpead.com/free. You can find that there. You can also find the DO versus DUE framework for scheduling those weekly reviews and what to do with your ideas afterwards.
Check out Field Notes—it's a great option for analog. Apple Notes, Notion, Evernote (if that's still a thing, I'm not sure—I used to use Evernote like crazy back in the day). There are some great digital options, and of course Asana or any other type of project management system to be able to move your ideas into completion.
Your Ideas Deserve Better
Listen, creative, your ideas aren't the problem. It's not that you don't have good ideas or have enough ideas. It's your system for capturing those ideas. And Future You and your future business and your future team deserve better than the scattered sticky notes and the voice memos that you've lost.
So choose one place today. Schedule the weekly review and start treating your ideas like the valuable assets that they are. So stop by dustinpead.com for the Future You framework and methodology. Click on the free resources section and find other tools to help you as well.
Next Episode Preview
Next week, we're going to be talking about one of the most underutilized leadership tools in creative business—the effective one-on-one meeting. I'm going to share the exact talk that I taught at the Solk Conference this year, this October. Actually, as this episode releases this Thursday, October the 9th, I will be at the Solk Conference in Nashville giving the talk on how creative leaders can have effective one-on-ones with their team.
So if you've ever wondered what to talk about in a one-on-one meeting or you feel like they're a waste of time, next week's episode is going to change everything for you. I cannot wait to talk to you then, next time on Creativity Made Easy podcast. Have a great week.