Flow tip: park your ideas for better focus

I’ve been ruminating a lot lately on focus and what makes me most productive. Here’s a technique that I find effective for enabling you to really dive into one task without stifling your creativity.

My mind comes up with the craziest things while in the middle of other tasks, and I don’t want to follow every rabbit down its hole, nor lose track of these moments of inspiration. So a spin on GTD is needed to get the rabbits under control.

The solution: a parking lot.

(I’d say “car park”, but it doesn’t really sound right. This time, the Americans win.)

In brainstorming and planning sessions, a parking lot is an area — flipchart, whiteboard, post-its — where ideas and avenues whose time is not yet now are held for future consideration. When you’re done discussing whichever task is at hand, you return to the parking lot and pick out something else to discuss.

The parking lot for ideas works in much the same way.

In practice

I implement this pretty simply. I have a Google Doc titled “Parking Lot” (yes, I am a font of originality) and when I’m diving into a specific idea, anything that crosses my mind as a potential avenue for further explanation gets added to this doc.

For example, today’s parked ideas include ways to manage multiple Twitter accounts more effectively, a note to redesign a site I’ve been sitting on for some time, a reminder of an idea I’ve documented elsewhere but need to pull together, and the suggestion “create a parkinglot site to manage ideas better”.

I used to keep all this in a Moleskine notebook, and love the tactile feeling of scribbling exploratory notes down, but the fact I didn’t always carry it around — and couldn’t easily search and access its content — deprecated it in favour of the online doc.

Successful parking

Discipline is the hardest part of this process for me. When I’m on something really juicy, I want to abandon what I’m doing to really get stuck into the idea. If I revisit it a day or so later, the spark is often gone (which in itself is a great test of an idea, no?).

As with GTD methodology, the important part is knowing you’ll check and follow up on the parked concepts, whether at the weekend, at a hackathon or just late at night when you have itchy fingers.

Another important thing I’m personally aware of is that notes make a lot of sense when I write them, but less sense in future. Context, URLs, notepads or other docs with supporting thoughts (don’t want to clutter the lot too much) are all helpful so when I look back and see “Improve Twitter”, I can dive back into exactly what I was thinking when I wrote it.

Tools and platforms

This’d be an awesome first use-case for my robot brain, but that’s in the parking lot for now. (Ah, self-reference!)

Google Docs, as mentioned, works great but is pretty unsophisticated.

Evernote might well work for you, especially if you already have it in your workflow. Tie together a snapshot on a mobile phone with a note from a Chromebook with a full business plan .PDF…

Sometimes a bookmark manager like Pinboard with a note-to-self is all you need to rediscover an idea.

Moleskines and paper or post-its could work — I sometimes write notes and ideas in whiteboard marker on mirrors and windows around my house. Just be careful about cataloguing them!

Dropbox-based text editors across platforms would be an interesting spin on the Google Docs. You could drop supporting documents into the Dropbox folder, too, but it’s less full-featured than Evernote.

Update: Jay on Twitter points out Workflowy, which is an online list-writer app that looks good for this sort of thing, too.

Or for the console-savvy, text files on a remote server accessed with vi and screen over ssh could be all you need.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what tool you use — it’s what you put in that counts. As always.

So, park your ideas, focus, finish up and revisit the parking lot. With practice, this becomes second-nature, and you get a great list of things to do when the aforementioned itch strikes.