Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

Team 256

What started as a monthly challenge is now fast turning into a social network daily ritual, which isn't a bad thing when it comes to the fast and furious world of social networks.

Back in September, I started a challenge of writing a 256 character post everyday on App.net. Aside from missing a single day's post I completed the challenge. It was a refreshing use of my time on a social network. Rather than simply typing the first thing that comes to your head and posting it, filling the post with 256 characters means you need to spend a bit of time editing, re-wording and ensuring your post is correct and uses all character space available. It's this time spent on getting the message right that makes my 256 character posts so different from every other post I make.

Social networks are often seen as a cheap and fast way of getting messages across to people, so few people think before they post. While they are great for short bursts of information, social networks are mostly places where masses of un-edited information stream by us every day. My #team256 posts on App.net are not wildly profound or better to read than other posts on App.net, but they do provide me with a chance to write something a bit more detailed.

What started as a monthly challenge has fast become something of a daily habit. I'm still keeping the habit going to post 256 characters a day on App.net and while I might have missed the last couple of days, I did look forward to writing my post for the day. I hope that it continues and gathers pace on App.net in the future.

Techniques like brainstorming try to sell a way of generating ideas in a short space of time, but is there a better way?

Out of the blue you have an idea for something. A product, a book, a service, something. What do you do with it? The obvious answer here is to write it down. Anywhere. Whatever comes to hand, get that idea down. Give it an hour or two and you might simply forget it even existed.

Great. Now what?

The next step for many is to re-visit this idea at some point in the future and decide whether to act on it or not. The down side to this is that while the idea might have sounded great on its own, it is only one idea. One single good thought.

If the idea is so good then you might be thinking that it would be a challenge to improve upon it. What's better than a single idea though? How about two, three or even seven ideas that support this one single idea?

The problem is that while we might want to set aside a 30 minute session to brain storm more ideas to support this new idea of ours, the new ideas we want might not simply be there. You can't force yourself to come up with new ideas. You might be able to expand on an idea but limiting yourself to a time period will only leave you with a couple of new ideas.

If you're the patient type then how about trying a different approach?

Let your ideas incubate.

I've wrote before about incubating mind maps in the past. Rather than starting and finishing a mind map in a single session, I would re-visit my mind map on a weekly basis to give myself time to allow the central topic of the mind map to sink in. The benefits to this is that you allow yourself time to think about the central topic of the mindmap thereby allowing associations to that central topic to develop over time.

The same can be said for new ideas.

By allowing an idea to incubate over time, it gives us a chance to think about the idea. Thoughts and ideas often come at the most inconvienent of times. When you're walking the kids to school, when you're out on a bike ride, when you're anywhere other than on your computer to execute the idea.

This is a good thing though. Being away from your desk or your workplace means that you don't act on a sudden impulse to test the idea. Just make a note of it and then carry on with your day.

At the end of the day, make a more permanent note of your idea so that it can be easily found later along with any other ideas that you have had that support this idea.

Give it a couple of months and you should start to see that single idea develop into something more. And this is the benefit to incubating your ideas. An incubation period of two months can yield more positive results than a single brainstorming session could. It's not for everyone though, but I'm more of a believer that slow and steady wins the race.