Highly creative folks have a gift and a curse.

We constantly come up with ideas, and either end up with a pile of half-formed that-would-be-nice-to-do things, or a head so full of stuff that it’s hard to figure out what to do next.

Until I decided to start capturing those ideas, they’d just pass through my head and disappear or knock around until they drove me crazy. I now write down every one, no matter how odd, incomplete, or insignificant.

You never know which one will turn into a work of pure creative genius.

So here’s how you can rope in all those brilliant ideas swimming around your head:

Have a Ubiquitous Capture Device on your person at all times.
You can use a stack of 3×5 cards like the Hipster PDA or a small notebook. Make sure you also have a pen or pencil with it. There’s nothing worse than trying capture an idea without something to write with.

I carry around a pocket moleskine and a bag of pens in my purse wherever I go. I also have pen & paper ready in every room of my house. There’s a journal on my night stand, in my office, in the kitchen, on the bookshelf in the living room. The bathroom is a great place for pen & paper, too. You never know when inspiration strikes.

Start an Idea Book.
At least once a week, go through all the ideas you’ve written down and when you come across one that really speaks to you in that moment, take some time to flesh it out.

Do a “brain dump” of everything that comes to mind when you think about that idea. Plans, dreams, processes — anything and everything. No censoring!

My Idea Book is a 9×12 leather monstrosity I made with almost 300 pages of blank cream-colored paper that takes every kind of media well. This way I can be as creative and wild as I want to be with all kinds of pens, markers & even paint.

I’d recommend getting as large a book as you can with blank pages. That way you’re not artificially limiting yourself with lines. Hard cover sketch books from the art store would work nicely.

Do this often enough and you’ll have a huge repository of ideas you can pick from whenever you want to start a new project.

And you’ll find yourself coming up with even more ideas because you’ve had a chance to clear your brain of the things that were taking up precious brain space before.