The blog

Bril­liant ideas can appear at any time — often when we are doing some­thing entire­ly dif­fer­ent from sit­ting peace­ful­ly at our desk, try­ing to think of bril­liant ideas. We might be dri­ving, out for a run, stand­ing in line and — there it was! — sud­den­ly we know with vivid clar­i­ty how we want to for­mu­late that dif­fi­cult email we have been mean­ing to send for a while, what to do next in the rela­tion­ship with a client that has not been going so well for some time, or what great new ser­vice we want to devel­op next (you can hard­ly believe you haven’t thought of it before!).

Easy come, easy … you know the rest
But, ideas can be fleet­ing and if you, like I, have expe­ri­enced hav­ing a great idea but lost it and can­not remem­ber what that stroke of bril­liance was about more than once, we need to catch the idea quick­ly so that we can take advan­tage of these moments of clar­i­ty and take action on our ideas. Our com­put­er might not always be avail­able and it might not be the best time to write down a long note on our phone, so how do we catch sud­den ideas in moments like these before they are gone?

With the press of a button
I have found an app that solves this prob­lem in a smooth and easy way.
When I open RecUp (avail­able for iOs, mean­ing iPhone; here is an alter­na­tive for Android) I am faced with a sin­gle red but­ton in the mid­dle of the screen (you can’t miss it). I press it, record the idea I want to cap­ture before it is gone, and press the but­ton again. Done.

After the sec­ond press­ing of the but­ton, RecUp uploads the sound file (in mp3-for­mat) to the Drop­box-fold­er I have des­ig­nat­ed as the loca­tion I want the file to end up in. The Drop­box-fold­er syncs with my com­put­er as usu­al, and the idea can be safe­ly filed away.

Since the record­ing is done with just the press of a dis­pro­por­tion­al­ly large red but­ton, we can be sure that we catch fleet­ing ideas even in sit­u­a­tions when we are not in a posi­tion to write lengthy notes on the phone.

Take the idea fur­ther automatically
If you want to make sure that the sound file does not get for­got­ten in a dis­tant Drop­box-fold­er, you can allow the automa­tion-ser­vice Zapi­er to send you an email with a link to the file so that you are remind­ed that you got and record­ed an idea not too long ago. Or, let Zapi­er cre­ate a new to-do-task in Todoist (if that is where you keep your to-do-list) or a new card in Trel­lo, that con­tains the first step of man­i­fest­ing your idea.

Do this
If this sounds like a good idea to you — down­load RecUp and try it out. At the moment it costs $2, which I con­sid­er a rea­son­ably low price in exchange for cap­tur­ing more of those great flash­es of inspi­ra­tion and excel­lent ideas.

Free trea­sures
If you in this (or some oth­er) way make sure to catch your ideas before they are gone and for­got­ten, you will get a lot of work done with­out any effort. Ideas come to us for free, like trea­sures bestowed upon us at unex­pect­ed moments — sud­den­ly they are just there — and sure­ly they are valu­able, and worth gath­er­ing and sav­ing as quick­ly and eas­i­ly as possible.

How do you remember?
Do you have some oth­er way of quick­ly cap­tur­ing fleet­ing ideas? Please share in a comment!