Light Bulb Moments — How Do You Deal With Them?

October 13, 2010

Each and every one of us have light bulb moments; times of particular clarity when it seems that you’ve thought of something that will help develop your freelance writing business immensely.

For some people, these moments come now and again. They aren’t something that happen on a weekly basis, but they do come.

For others, they’re a regular occurence and you can seem to have a never ending stream of ideas, all of which appear to be able to help your further yourself as a freelance writer.

When you get a moment of brilliance, how do you deal with it?

The reason I’m asking this is I’m one of those people who fall into the category of not having regular light bulb moments, but last week I’d reorganised my workload so that I had around 2 hours free for the first few days of the week, time I hadn’t had available for months.

Now, I don’t know whether it was because I had this free time to do the one thing I don’t get too much regular time to do these days — thinking in any great depth — or it was just a coincidence, but my mind went into overdrive.

I came up with angles for blog posts for my clients and myself; ideas on how I could develop my own blog; scheduled a selection of posts for all of my clients so that I should always now be one week ahead; furthered my thoughts and progress on a volunteering / charity project I’ve been looking at putting together for a few months now and I got the ball rolling on developing and expanding the small business consultancy arm of my work.

Simply put, it felt fantastic to have all of these ideas.

The problem was that as I’m not used to having regular moments like this, I wasn’t particularly prepared for all of these ideas and midway through the week I had post-it notes everywhere, a selection of Notepad documents open on my laptop and my iPhone was full of new entries on the ‘Notes’ application.

It was nothing short of an organisational disaster. And it stayed like that until the weekend, when I took on a new project and it somewhat forced me into organising my thoughts.

I knew that if I left the post-it notes out and the Notepad documents open, I’d simply end up putting post-it notes over the top of post-it notes and saving the Notepad documents to one folder to which I’d just add more, meaning that I’d eventually lose track of them all.

I stayed up late for two nights and got everything together. I drew up an action plan, give myself approximate deadlines and started utilizing the one thing that would help to organise everything — a simple, single notepad.

I now have a notepad full of thoughts and ideas on freelance writing and small business consultancy and an action plan-cum-things to do list that details everything that was once a thought or idea but which has developed into something that can be acted upon.

It might not be the best way to deal with light bulb moments and I dare say that there’s probably an electronic process or piece of software that makes it a whole lot better, but at the moment, for me, this works perfectly and I’m now fully prepared for my next burst of freelance writing clarity!