[vmoore]

> Do you follow a process?

I journal. Taking notes (usually at night) on my phone, and then execute on ideas in the morning. Not sure how common a tactic that is, but it works for me. Ideas at night, and execution in the morning.

[accepting_chaos]

So generate as many ideas and execute on them, that does make sense. What have you found to have helped you in generating ideas?

For example: do you look for inspiration from the problems you face? or read about problems/products from somewhere? and generally what has worked well for you in generating ideas? and what have you found to be obvious pitfalls to avoid?

[vmoore]

> do you look for inspiration from the problems you face?

I find ideas occur naturally and percolate to the top depending on their urgency. I don't execute on 100% of my ideas, just the ones that seem important at the time.

As for external sources for inspiration, I find my own subconscious is a good well to draw from, as 'external' ideas get implanted there over the time, the more I read and absorb from the web & podcasts etc.

I find when I pay attention to some topic for prolonged periods, I feel compelled to act and do something about that topic.

[jlokier]

(I'm not the person you replied to.)

I find I generate executable ideas much faster than I can execute them, and that can get burdensome, so I don't particularly look for ways to get more ideas. But here's a method that may work for some people.

For about a year I wrote down the most inspirational ideas I had in the evening before going to sleep, on my phone (with real mini-keyboard, a Nokia N900). Only when sonething popped into my head, not on demand

Writing them down was to capture them for later reading, to pick out the best ideas that were actually useful, and flesh them out a little during those moments of insight. I thought that might produce better results than just letting them all go.

I found that as I wrote I had a lot more insights than I'd first expected. Little flashes of connected insights, that were worth capturing too.

Often when I started to capture one idea, I'd still be writing the spin-offs that seemed worth capturing for 1, 2 or even 3+ hours, starting with a single image or sentence that had popped into my mind as I'd been drifting to sleep. I wasn't particularly trying to write for long, after all I wanted to sleep! But more things worth writing down seemed to pop up, until "done" somehow. As though accessing a chain of memories.

After I started this practice I found the rate of new insights increased until it was hours every day. I already knew I tend to have useful ideas, especially technical ones, regularly each day, but with this practice they seemed to increase a lot in frequency and depth.

As you can imagine, getting long bursts of writing inspiration in a state of mental alertness, each time I had an idea that seemed worth keeping while falling asleep, was not good for sleep long term. It became really tiring. So I stopped writing down my ideas after a year, and have never resumed.

A handy takeaway, though, is that this method showed a very effective way, for me anyway, to generate and make concrete long chains of interconnected ideas. Perhaps it will help other people:

1. Have some way of taking notes to hand when sleeping. 2: When something that seems insightful and relevant to your interests just sort of appears in your mind while drifting to sleep, wake and write it down, along with things that follow from the initial idea. 3. Practice doing this regularly, and if your mind is like mine, the writing activates the process somehow, so that over time (days to weeks), the rate of ideas, insights and connected details increases. 4. Read them back a few days later, to sift through and find the good ones for realistic use. 5. Stop when it's too much, or go to bed a few hours earlier to make time!