Making ideas happen

The Smashing Magazine has recently published an article that includes 5 tips on how to make any ideas happen. The author of this article, Scott Belsky, has spent over 5 years studying exceptionally productive people and teams in the creative world and has published a book titled “Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming The Obstacles Between Vision & Reality” that makes suggestions for taking your ideas and making them reality.

Apart from proposing that anyone can strengthen their ideas through being organised, nurturing connections with one’s community and developing leadership capabilities; Belsky also gives the following suggestions:

1. Avoid a Reactionary Workflow
   Instead of spending most of your working hours each day on email, text messages, tweets, Facebook posts, phone calls, instant messages etc., try for a few hours per day to avoid any incoming communication and focus on your list of long-term projects that require research and deep thought.
2. Strip Projects to Three Primary Elements
   The three primary elements include: action steps, backburner items and reference items. Actions steps are tasks that begin with verbs and can be implemented in life almost immediately.  Backburner items are essentially ideas that are the result of brainstorming or some other creative activity and although they are not actionable in the time of their invention, they have a potential of being acted upon in the future if recorded appropriately. Reference items include articles, notes and other stuff around you. In order to make the best use of them try to organise them chronologically in one big file.
3. Measure Meetings with Action Steps
   To get more out of your meetings with clients and colleagues, conduct at the end of each meeting a quick review of the items discussed and capture the action steps.
4. Reduce Your Insecurity Work
   We are often insecure about the different things in our lives such as website’s traffic or bank account and we often loose a lot of time using the existing technologies to check the current status of these things. Therefore, to be more productive in your working day try to reduce your insecurity work by becoming self-aware and introduce some discipline in your daily life.
5. The Creative Process is about Surviving the ‘Project Plateau’
   In general, we are all good at creating new ideas, but most of us are not so good at sticking with our ideas and making them reality. Most ideas get abandoned at what is called the “project plateau”, that is the point when creative excitement evaporates and the pain of deadlines and project management becomes kicks in. To prevent your ideas from disappearing from the daylight show them some respect and spend some energy executing them.

Hopefully, Belsky’s tips will help many creatives convert their exciting and innovative ideas into reality.