Steven King has said something that I've come to support, that note/list-keeping is a great way to let bad ideas survive. He claims that a really good idea will survive in your head on its own, and a bad idea will die. And that by writing down every idea, you are polluting your landscape of possibilities by immortalizing ideas that are better left forgotten.
I would disagree with Steven King here. Once you write down ideas, it allows you to reconsider them later in a different light, a difference context. I believe that is extremely valuable because it is crucial to analyze an idea from various perspectives before embarking on implementing it. Embarking on an idea not well thought out can be extremely expensive.
Yep, definitely. The process of writing anything out (ideas, emotions, plans) lets you separate out the roles of describing the idea vs criticising it. Trying to evaluate them in your head requires you to do both simultaneously.
Kevin Kelly, when the creative director at Wired, said something similar about choosing which stories to write about. He would never write a story himself until a topic had been passed up by too many writers that it began to frustrate him.
This is a great strategy when you're working with the unknowns of creativity and artfulness. When you're trying to make a technology product, I argue, the situational context is so different that no such logic can really apply.
Additionally, it is important to keep in mind how many bad ideas become well-funded enterprises. Sometimes an idea is carried out just as an opportunity to arrive at a better idea.
My ideas directory is so full of trash that it's pointless to list it... I don't think putting stuff there is a drag to me.
Anyway, I've had plenty of cases where I take notice of my original idea, and weeks later with a more worked-out solution in my head, I look at the notes and realize that my original idea was indeed much better than what I had on my head.
I tried googling King and failed to find him saying that but came across this quote
“Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”