The Barter Project

Purging: Ideas

My computer’s been dead for about a week now, and I’ve continued on my journey to make life simple…and I think this next one might be a Stage 3 purge (see my purging stages here). 

This week I purged all of my ideas. This does not mean that I stopped having ideas, because that would be pretty bad. What it means is that I wrote down, to the best of my ability, every idea I’ve ever had and not used. 

Sometimes it’s easy to get in a funk where you have so many ideas floating around that you cant grab one and expand on it. I was in one of these funks, and decided to put an end to it. I grabbed a notebook, and started writing all of my ideas down. They ranged from thoughts I had in 4th grade, like a heated driveway (so you don’t have to plow snow) to things I had randomly thought about, like an R2D2 umbrella (the bubble umbrellas that wrap around you, with R2D2 on it). I later found out that these exist, but they were down on paper. I also wrote down how irritating tabbed browsing was, how I didn’t like choices, and how I liked limitations, later expanding on them and posting them here. 

This isn’t an exercise so much as it is a habit to get into. At first, you may have to spend an hour a night just flowing ideas onto paper to get yourself up to speed. However by getting everything out of your head and onto paper, or into a Word document, thoughts become real and archived. Later on, you can go back to them, or flip through them, or add to them. Like storing your movies on an external hard drive, you free up space in your head to do other things. 

I once read an interview with musician John Mayer where he said something like “Even if your songs are bad or you don’t like them, write them down. You’re not a song writer if you don’t write songs.” I think writing down your thoughts and ideas is very similar. It doesn’t matter what you’re idea is; if you don’t do anything with it, then you might as well stop thinking. This is the first step to doing something with those thoughts, and letting yourself think more freely.