I mentioned in an earlier post that I am an “idea” guy, my ultimate job would be getting paid to dream up new ideas all day long. In the past my biggest problem is that having all these ideas resulted in my focus being spread thinly over each one. This practice of thinly spreading my focus resulted in the creation of a feeling of lack of accomplishment, which in-turn lead to an elevated level of stress as I struggled to get more results out of a finite amount of time.
After reading Seth Godin’s The Dip, I developed a few strategies to help me deal with my ideas and decide which ones merit the dedication that is required to push through the dip. Here’s what I came up with,
- Step 1. List out all my ideas in a central location.
I am famous for having tons of notebooks with all sorts of scribblings in them. I decided to go and buy one more notebook, and consolidate all my ideas there. You could do this digitally, but I find the process of writing helps with the other steps I am going to talk about. - Step 2. Prioritize the ideas.
I used a similar setup with my ideas as I do with my goals. Using A,B,C I prioritize my ideas. I reserve the A priority to ideas that I am very passionate about, and have the required skill set to be a leader in that area. Items classified as B’s are things that I have a remote interest in, but really don’t have the required time to explore. C’s are the really crazy stuff that I should not think about at all! - Step 3. Get to know your A’s
Now I really spend some time the with ideas on my A list. I research the heck out of them, and really take a hard look at whether or not I am willing to push through the dip. I rely heavily on my gut feeling for this reclassification and I am ruthless on paring down this list. Anything that I don’t feel comfortable about immediately gets reclassified as a B.
At this point I have a really focused list of the ideas that 1) I am passionate about, and 2) feel that I have the skills to push me to the front of the pack.
You may be wondering what happens to the B & C list items. Well I don’t get rid of them (you never know what may change), but I do enter them into a document on my computer and revisit that list every 6-8 months just to see if my goals and/or values have changed and if these changes have affected my feelings about the B & C items.
Seth’s book is a quick, and easy to understand read and I feel that it should be on the reading list of every entrepreneur (or aspiring entrepreneur) out there.
Tags: ideas · managing your time · seth godin · the dipNo Comments
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.