I’ve always wondered about Bay Street here in Toronto. Some trick of geography combined with the most imposing architecture in the downtown core causes Bay Street to funnel an incredibly powerful blast of wind that shoots air out over the harbour, much to the chagrin of pilots and sailors who’ve dubbed this the “Bay Street Blow”.

What is stopping someone from stringing eggbeater-style turbines up between buildings, harnessing all that nuisance wind and converting it into something more useful? Surely even low-efficiency turbines would be able to pull enough energy out of that blow to make it worthwhile. Any thoughts?

The key to going from little ideas to big ideas is the same as developing any other skill: practice.

Probably the best work on building your creative muscles is a 50-page booklet by Advertising Hall of Fame inductee James Webb Young called “A Technique for Producing Ideas“. This book may be hard to track down, but try in college or marketing-focused bookstores. (Alternatively, try “How to Get Ideas“, which is essentially a more verbose version of “Technique” that has illustrations.)

Young puts forward a five step process for getting ideas that is so common-sensical, most people will completely discount it.

1. gather raw material (by reading, experiencing, watching many varied things)
2. think about those raw materials a lot, and go deep in them
3. go do something else for a while as this stuff marinates
4. be open to the idea when it suddenly appears
5. implement it, working out the hidden flaws you didn’t see during the “eureka” moment

Obviously I paraphrase. I really hope you track down this book and read it for yourself.

There’s one part of “practicing” that Young left out: having lots of ideas. The more ideas you have, the better you’ll be at having them, and the more of them will be winners. Realizing this, I came up with a little hack. I call it “Ten Things Today”, because I was able to doodle up a little logo for that in my sketch pad. The goal is this: write down ten ideas every day in a notebook. They can be about anything at all, and they can be as daft as you want. You can write down the missing link in cold fusion, or you can think of the practical applications of a chocolate settee. Just as long as ten things are going in that book every day. Keep these things, and watch the progression in the quality of your ideas.

Don’t worry about having a paper trail of ridiculous ideas. Apocryphal tales abound about superstar CEOs who show up to every meeting with 100 ideas, 99 of which are terrible. It only takes one!

I mapped out quickly what I wanted my categories to be:

• Blessings: This is a tip I cribbed from the amazing book “Learned Optimism”, by Martin Seligman. Are you upset about something? Are you just feeling down in general? As fast as you can, write out a list of a couple-dozen things that are really great. You’ll feel way more positive
• Flame: I refer you back to the magnificent 43 Folders
• Gripes: negative journal postings. Keep these separate. Why dwell on the negative?
• Ideas: I’m going to be posting on my idea-generating games later. For now, use this whenever you think of something, however ridiculous, that you could refactor down the road into that killer project
• Life: it ain’t work
• Links: some stuff I don’t want to check out at the office, and I don’t want to post to del.icio.us in “_read”. There are all kinds of reasons for this, like it may be NSFW, it might be loud, it might be something you don’t want to push traffic too. That stuff goes here.
• Notes: doesn’t need much explanation. Snippets of stuff I want to keep on hand, but don’t need to go into a more formal knowledgebase
• Site: the birthing place of blog posts. Certainly not getting enough traffic these days, but that will change
• Work: it ain’t life
• YayMe: anytime I get a complimentary message, it gets forwarded to this file

The next step was to create a spreadsheet in OpenOffice. This is my list of contacts for my journal categories. I used three headings: First Name, Last Name, Email. If you need more info, you can follow Google’s instructions.

All these new contacts have the first name “Journal”. As soon as I type “Jo” in the “To” line of a new Gmail message, I see a list of all my Journal categories. Last names correspond with the categories I defined above. Email addresses are “aw.journal+category at gmail.com” (obviously I’ve mucked with this to try and throw off mail harvestors.) Mail servers ignore everything between “+” and “@”, delivering to the username that preceeds the “+”. (Bonus points: clever application of the “+” can help you figure out who’s sending you spam. But again: that’s another story.) I saved this spreadsheet out as a CSV, but left the file open. Its so much easier to copy and paste from this spreadsheet than trying to remember all my categories. I imported the CSV into my contacts, following the instructions at Gmail.

I headed over to the aw.journal account, and created labels and filters for all my categories. You can follow the instructions from Jim’s Gmail Tip, but replace “Notes” with your categories.

… And done. That’s all there is to it. Now anytime you need to write in your journal, pop open a new message in your Gmail account, and type to your hearts content.

The nice thing about this is you’re kind of doing Google a favour. In the brief time I’ve been toying with this hack, I’ve found more keyword ads and related sites I’ve wanted to click on than at any time using my regular account.

The GTD nerds in my readership may already be seeing another application. There’s nothing keeping you from setting up a mail account, and using your contexts for categories. In fact, I’ve been considering creating an “Inbox” category to hold my unsorted to-dos.

UPDATE: In my original post, I neglected to credit the site The Slacker Manager. It was this site that gave me the “Yay Me” idea.