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Planting: Keep Track of Your Ideas · The Daily Writer

• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Daily Rider, where we share a lesson each day to help you cultivate the habits for creative success.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: We've been talking about the importance of a growth mindset.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: If we look at growth as a natural byproduct of good habits that we practice on a regular basis, the first habit is preparing the soil of your mind.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about that yesterday.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: The second one is planting.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: We writers deal with thousands of seeds, and those seeds are ideas.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: These are scraps of stories, they're bits of articles, parts of books that we want to write, there are speeches or workshops that we want to deliver in the future.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Ideas come and go by the dozens every single day, and it's hard to tell in the moment which ones are worth keeping and which ones we should discard.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why we need to make a habit of planting those seeds.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, we have to keep track of them.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Much has been written about different systems to organize your ideas and your thoughts.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: You can use printed journals, you can use computer apps, note card system, or any of a dozen other ways to store and organize your ideas.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: The system doesn't matter as much as your consistency in recording those ideas and keeping them somewhere where you can retrieve them.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now, a good option is to use a combination of tools, maybe a small notebook you carry with you, plus computer or mobile apps where you transfer those ideas and then search for them later.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: If you want a harvest of good writing, you have to plant your ideas in some kind of system where those ideas can take shape.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: And also where you can just plain old find them.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Don't trust your memory because a lot of great ideas have been lost because people forgot to write them down.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: I've done that many times myself.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't have a good system for where to put your ideas, here's a simple assignment for you.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Ask three of your writer friends what they use and start implementing a system within the next day.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: I promise you won't regret it.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for listening to today's episode.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: For more, you can visit us at dailywriterlife.com.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, and I'll see you tomorrow.