Turning Ideas into Action

Ideas are a great thing, however what is an idea that is not followed by action? Would a great idea fizzle and die away if never to be acted upon? Recently, I've been thinking about the concept of turning ideas into action. What if you had the power to take any idea and make it happen?

As I was researching some of the action terminology commonly used in the GTD system, I came accross a post on Behance's Action Method. This is an interesting twist on an age old concept. Basically the action method proposes that you always end a creative session with three things. The creative session could be a meeting you're sitting in, a magazine article you're reading, or possibly a discussion you're having with a friend about your next great getaway. The proposition is to capture your ideas in the form of three distinct categories: action steps, backburner items, and reference items. This is a pretty interesting and basic concept. Nothing terribly new here, but Behance does a nice job formalizing the process. This is very similar to Dave Allen's description in the GTD book and audio sessions.

Capturing
During the capture process, many ideas are bound to float around, bounce, and sometimes get lost. During this time, its critical to capture, capture, capture! Always strive to capture your ideas with verbs, this is something that will save you time later and make the idea a bit more clear. An example here would be "meet Sue to discuss project x", "follow up with Frank on project y", "review project k proposal" The actual verbs used should have meaning to you, I have a short list of common verbs I use, something I'll post about in the future.

Backburner
Always keep some ideas on the backburner, these are ideas that you might "someday maybe" do. Examples here may be ideas too big to be dealt with at the moment, but need to be captured and reviewed at a later date.

Reference
Many times, I've found ideas or thoughts to be reference. Facts are a good example "Cats don't like to take baths". There's no action here, its simply a reference item that will help us avoid futility later on. Keep the important reference items someplace handy, searchable, and archivable. This information is the meat that will help your ideas become tasty realities.