How do you organize your thoughts?
When you are studying, researching, or learning a new subject, you absorb a lot of information. Then, you might want to share it with other people to teach, persuade, inspire, or just to share your ideas.
I think of many ideas while reading a book or listening to a podcast. I lose many if I don’t write them down, so I do my best to take notes. But when it’s time to put them all together to write a report or prepare a PowerPoint presentation, I often freeze, not knowing where to start or how to organize all the thoughts I’ve had.
Here is how I overcome this stage and share my thoughts to achieve whatever I aim:
I sit down with sticky notes and a pen and follow these steps:
- Put all the thoughts, ideas, or findings on sticky notes. Don’t worry about how important they are or about their order. Make sure to put one thought per note.
- Group similar things together. Using different colored sticky notes for different categories would help. You can also use highlighters.
- Group similar things further. Start putting steps in order, gathering tests to run, listing examples, etc.
- Mark items that are important or critical. Put non-important items to the side. Discard duplicates.
- If you are presenting an idea to excite or persuade people, order the ideas, starting from the problem you will address or your vision for change to your solution, what has been achieved, and what will come next. If you are teaching a procedure, you can order steps in chronological order.
- Add related lists, types, etc., next to the steps ordered in step 5.
- There you have it, the outline of your presentation
I recommend sticky notes and paper over mindmap tools because it is easier to focus when you are away from your computer. But if you prefer digital tools, mindmaps work fine.
When working on a large project, like a PhD thesis, requiring tens or hundreds of items, multiple layers of grouping, and lots of notes for each item, I might start with sticky notes but transfer them to a mindmap tool to continue.
How do you organize your thoughts?