Often it’s not a lack of ideas that’s the problem, it’s having TOO MANY ideas and not knowing which to work on.

I'm sure you’ve experienced an overload of ideas in some way, your head in meltdown, new thoughts and variations bombarding you with such intensity that rather than note them down or try to develop them, you simply want to switch off, deflect them and give your poor little head a break!

But then the paradox is that these could be the times when you are most richly creative.

Whether you’re coming up with solutions for a particular issue or creating a new piece of work, you may fear that by focusing on just the one thing you’re working on right now, dozens of great ideas might slip through your grasp and be lost forever.

Different people deal with this ideas overload in different ways.

At worst, the constant flow of creative ideas, rather than be something that’s highly useful and to be celebrated, becomes something negative, maybe even dreaded. The feelings of anxiety and overload become what dominate your thoughts and feelings, rather than the content of the ideas themselves.

One of the best ways you deal with these is to always have a notepad with you.

Whether it’s a paper notebook or a page in a word processor, it provides some way to jot ideas down when they come.

Then when that flash of inspiration comes, you can note it down then and there, then - and here's the crucial part - CLOSE the notebook and continuing doing whatever you were doing before.

You soon build up a notebook full of powerful ideas that are there for you to draw upon in the future when you need to.

This can take some restraint! The natural urge is to follow the idea, flow with it and develop it instantly, dropping everything else in the meantime.

But if you lived like this you’d never get anything done, instead constantly being in that uniquely exciting first tiny steps stage of having an idea you've never had before, hurling your resources into it until another mind-blowing idea comes along 5 minutes later!

Sound familiar?

So try this technique and see what happens.

Catch the magic of a new idea in a notebook and keep in incubation until it's time to let it flourish and grow...