Many people, and especially entrepreneurs, are full of awesome ideas. Do you find yourself always full of ideas, but you still feel stuck. You can’t start implementing them. You feel overwhelmed with awesome ideas.
Have you had one of those days where you felt completely overwhelmed with too many awesome ideas around your head, and you didn’t know where to begin? It’s not that you are a noncreative person, because you already dream, you already have many ideas. But, the fact is that it means you lack the systematic innovation process in your company.
The problem for many of us is not that we can’t come up with ideas. Ideas are an easy part of our personal and professional life. So, we often have too many ideas, and we can’t decide which one to execute first. Here are five things you can do when you feel overwhelmed with too many awesome ideas.
1. Use Innovation Systems In Your Company
If you don’t have an innovation system, you will probably not find it important in a situation where you are overwhelmed with awesome ideas. But, if you have an innovation system in place and you still find yourself in such a position, it means that your innovation system is not good enough for you and your small business. So, you will need to fix it.
Having an innovation system in place will mean that you have documented all the important innovation processes. Starting from brainstorming to testing the innovative solutions with customers.
2. Check Your Focusing Habits
You will need to focus on execution, and not on the generation of ideas. So, simply start doing things and stop dreaming.
If you spend more time on the idea generation process, you will have less time on the idea execution process. Start implementing the most awesome ideas immediately, then analyze them and adjust them.
I have seen many entrepreneurs trying to make ideas better before they try to make them a reality. This is something that will take more time for the execution side. If you start with the execution, your customers will help you understand possible improvements to make an idea become a successful idea.
3. Check Your Prioritizing System If You are Overwhelmed With Awesome Ideas
One of the biggest enemies of your ideas execution process is not having or simply having a poor prioritizing system in place. Once you come to ideas and write them down, you need to start processing the ideas, even with small incremental things as prioritizing them.
When you want to prioritize your business ideas list, start with the urgency and importance of each idea’s execution. What will you get from the execution of a specific idea?
Mixing importance with urgency will define priorities for your ideas. High-level importance with high-level urgency will mean high-level priority. You can use the following simple formula to calculate the priority related to each of the ideas on your list.
(I + U) / 2 = P (where I is importance, U is urgency, and P is the priority).
Sometimes it works best to get rid of the ideas that are not quite useful at the particular moment. This allows your brain to identify and focus on the ideas that are used more quickly.
At the end of this process, you will probably have many unnecessary ideas, but you don’t need to discard them at this stage. Set them aside for something that will need to be checked later. Checking these unnecessary ideas can be part of your weekly, monthly, or quarterly routine.
4. Reject Oldest Ideas From Your List if You are Overwhelmed With Awesome Ideas
Using earlier described three steps to cut your feeling of overwhelmed with awesome ideas, you will drastically reduce execution pressure. But, as you probably know, you already have large ideas that once were classified as unnecessary ideas. If you find ideas on the list that take so much time for implementation, you can discard them and continue with the most priority ideas.
5. Execute One Big Idea at a Time
Some ideas will need one day to be implemented, but some will probably need more than one day. On the other side, if you want to keep your focus on execution and execute the best business ideas in the best possible way, you will need to follow this simple rule. If you are overwhelmed with awesome ideas, implement one idea at a time.
If you start working on two ideas simultaneously, you will finish with the implementation of these ideas at the same time as if you work on one idea until the finish and then starting with another one. The difference is that you will postpone the execution of the first idea for two units of time (days, weeks, months).
How can these two examples impact your cash flow?
Let’s say that a month-long work on the first and second idea will cost you $10.000,00. When you execute the ideas, each of them can bring you $20.000,00 per month. So now the graph would look like this.
You can see that a delay of the first two months of the project will lead to $40.000,00 less money to come inside your business.
