What if you could instantly tap into your past brilliant ideas, anytime you needed them?
We’ve all had those lightbulb moments of inspiration, only to lose track of the idea later when we actually need it. But what if you could easily reuse your past insights over and over—like building blocks for whatever you’re working on now?
In this post, Matt Ragland takes us through his simple yet powerful system to continuously repurpose his best thinking. With just a few key steps, you’ll be able to instantly access your old ideas whenever inspiration strikes.
Soon you’ll have a personal database of your greatest hits, ready to slot into any new project or creation.
Actionable Items from the Video
Using Notion, we follow a note from initial inception through to final communication with his six C’s system:
- Capture – Capture highlights and sparks of inspiration right when they happen using tools like Instapaper or Kindle. This distributes your creativity over time.
- Critique – Critique your highlights later to make sure they still resonate. Not every captured thought will pan out.
- Customize – Customize the keepers into your own words and perspective. Make your thinking unique while still citing sources.
- Context – Add context tags to relate notes to each other. See how your ideas connect to build clusters and categories.
- Curate – Curate your customized notes before creating something new. Gather the building blocks you need.
- Communicate – Communicate your thinking to others in courses, videos, newsletters etc. Repurpose your notes endlessly.
Our Takeaway
Capturing notes has become so easy… but it gets more and more difficult to curate/add context to them as they pile up.
The key is having a system to smoothly move an idea from initial capture to a customized building block you can use again and again.
Matt uses Notion—my favorite tool project management/note taking tool—for most of this process, and I use a very similar system in my own ideation process.
In my opinion, Notion’s ‘synced block’ is the game-changing feature.
With some practice, you’ll get better at capturing important insights, connecting ideas, and creating custom databases of your best thinking over time. Then you’ll always have solid blocks to build from whenever inspiration strikes.
Give this system a try and watch your productivity and creativity grow.
Your Turn
I’m curious, what does your capture/customization/context/communication look like?
Do you use Notion, or a different app for your note taking, organization, and writing?
