I am. My brain is constantly throwing out ideas for the next great web site. All I have to do is walk into the living room and give my family "the look" and they groan, and say, "What now?" And I always say, "Well, I have an idea..."
The problem is that I have just too darned many ideas, and not enough time to devote to any one of them. The latest 4 ideas I've had are really great ones. I just know that with some time and effort, they could truly fly. So what do I do? Spread a bit of time amongst them all (while still dealing with the other umpteen I've already got going)? Pick one or two and forget the rest?
If you are like me, an "I Have An Idea" person, how do you handle all the great ideas that pop out of your head? Obviously, if you have a large staff, you don't have to worry about it. Just delegate. But if you are a one-man or one-woman show, what do you do? I'm very curious to know how others handle this.
Donna,
I’ve been strugling with that same issue. A ton of great ideas and no time to implement them. For now I am saving them in hopes that some day I will have the time or staff to get them done.
A couple of them are real money-makers too. They just take time to develop…
I’d love to hear some other ideas on how to handle this “problem” too.
If you have what you think are 4 good ideas…stop coming up w/new ones and start working on them. Move them along.
My advice is to get some feedback on them from people w/some expertise in those areas…that don’t or can’t directly compete w/you. Test them out. If anyone seems more promising than the others start moving it forward at a more rapid pace.
4 good ideas is a lot. Don’t work on any others. Start fertilizing the ones you already have.
I’m terrible about them – I have great ideas, then I forget them a day later. It’s only the very best few that I manage to write down and attempt to implement 6-12 months from now… For example, the ranking factors survey was something I had been thinking about doing since January of 2005, and it didn’t get published until October.
Same here – and I usually register a domain or two for each idea…meaning I have a lot of unused domain names….
I think the answer, though likely an unpopular one, is discipline (at least it was unpopular with me).
To quote Steven Covey, you have to make first things first. Get an idea. Evaluate it. Sit on it for a couple weeks and go back to it. If it still seems like a good idea, and not a project whose evaluation was “flavored” by a little too little sleep and a little too much caffiene, then work on it. That whole evaluation might only take a few hours over those couple weeks.
But then decide where it’s going to fit in, and where it sits on the hierarchy of projects. Maybe it should be #1. Maybe #7. Just make sure it gets all the (and only the) attention that a project of that priority level deserves.
I’m in a unique position to create 2-3 truly hub-worthy sites in the genre I work in – even have about 50,000 words of copy written for one of them, a template roughly built, and had some nice logo work professionally done… But my first priority site is beginning to turn into a money-maker, so I have to give it top billing.
By the way, I’ve boon-doggled enough this afternoon…time to get back to work.
Good points, all. I’ve gone ahead and gotten 3 of the 4 started. I’ve decided to give each of them a small amount of time per day, and then make decisions later as to which receives the most attention based on how well I think each will do. The fourth is still in the planning stage. It is by far the biggest of the four ideas, with the most possible potential, so it may be a while before it gets off the ground.