Your best ideas do not show up when you are sitting at your desk ready to receive them. They show up in the shower. At 3am. On a drive. And if you do not have somewhere to put them, you lose them, and losing them costs more than the idea itself.

Most high capacity people think their problem is having too many ideas. It is not. The problem is having nowhere to put them. Your brain was never built to be a storage unit. It was built to think. Every time you ask it to also hold onto a half-formed idea you will deal with later, you are asking it to run two jobs at once, and that second job is cognitively expensive even when it is invisible.

This episode walks through exactly how to build a real capture system, using three different proof points. Jess shares her own evolution from a notes app to a Google Doc to Google Keep to a dedicated AI project, and explains the exact mechanics of how she captures, labels, and releases an idea today. Then she shares a story from John Maxwell, mentor in her High Capacity Leaders group, who built a physical filing cabinet system that has supported nearly a hundred books across his career, and who is only now digitizing it after fifty years. Finally, she shares the flip side: a friend who has never used a capture system at all, and what that costs her every single day.

In This Episode

• Why having too many ideas was never actually the problem
• The personal cost of losing a brilliant idea mid-day, and the emotional whiplash that comes with it
• How David Allen's Getting Things Done names a system Jess had already been living without knowing it
• John Maxwell's filing cabinet story, told from inside his High Capacity Leaders mentorship group
• Why even a system that worked for fifty years is allowed to evolve into something simpler
• A friend's story showing what happens when every idea has to be fully built before it can be released
• The exact mechanics of Jess's current AI-based idea parking lot system
• The three-part filter for deciding if a returning idea is main quest, side quest, or back burner
• Why letting an idea go is not failure, it is discernment

The Big Idea

You do not have an idea shortage problem. You have a release problem. The fix is not a better memory or more discipline. It is a trusted place to put things down, fast and messy, so your brain can stop carrying what it was never built to store.

Memorable Lines from This Episode

"Your brain was never built to be a storage unit. It was built to be creative, to think."

"We don't ever have a shortage of ideas. We have a problem with releasing them."

"The release is the thing that I need. It's permission to own the idea, but not hold it."

"Not every idea you have is meant to be acted on. Ideas can be recognized without being executed."

"You don't need a better brain or more memory. You need a better strategy to put things down."

Resources

Book: Getting Things Done by David Allen — https://amzn.to/4v3hE7C

Book: How to Get a Return on Failure by John C. Maxwell — https://amzn.to/4aoFEe0

Your One Thing

This Week Pick one place to start your idea parking lot today. It does not have to be sophisticated. Google Keep, a notes app, a physical notebook, or a dedicated AI project all work. When the next idea hits, capture it fast and messy, label it with a date and a topic, and let it go. Build the release habit before you worry about the retrieval habit.

Connect with Jess

If this one landed, come find me at BigIdeasMadeSimple.com. That is where the newsletter lives, where everything I am building is taking shape, and where you can connect directly. One idea in your inbox every week, nothing else. And if you know someone who is constantly generating ideas and constantly losing them, send them this one. The right idea at the right time changes everything.

Follow Jess: @thejesswebber on Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook

Key Themes

• Capture systems versus willpower
• Release as the primary function, retrieval as secondary
• Borrowed authority through proximity to a mentor
• Main quest, side quest, back burner as a filtering structure
• The cost of having no release valve
• Evolution of a system over time, not perfection on day one

Welcome back to Big Ideas Made Simple.

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I'm Jess Webber, and this is the show where we connect you with the knowledge, tools, and

resources you need to live your most impactful life.

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If you have ever had a brilliant idea somewhere like the car or the shower, you lost it by

the time that you got to where you were going, and then you spent the rest of the day

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mourning it like a death in your family, this episode is for you.

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Here is where most high capacity people get this wrong.

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They think that the problem that they have is that they have too many ideas.

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But it's not.

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It's not the issue.

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The problem is that you don't have anywhere to put those ideas.

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Because your brain was never built to be a storage unit.

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It was built to be creative, to think.

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And every time that you expect yourself to hold on to an idea or a half-formed thought or

a thing you'll deal with later, you are asking your brain to do two separate jobs at the

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same time, thinking and remembering what you need to think about later on.

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And that second piece is cognitively expensive.

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It's invisible until you notice how tired you are at 2 p.m.

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for no other reason.

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Because it doesn't show up on your calendar.

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I know that for me, my best ideas don't show up when I am sitting at my desk ready to

receive them.

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Clock is normal time, time block, calendar perfect, to-do list open.

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They show up, like I said, in the shower or at 3 a.m.

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or

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On a drive.

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And for a long time, I did not have a system to deal with that.

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I would be in the middle of something else entirely, and that light bulb would go off.

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The kind that feels completely obvious and amazing in the moment.

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But then something else would interrupt it.

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You know, a student would need something, or a client, a call would come in.

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Life lifed.

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And that light bulb would just.

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Go out.

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Not dim, but a blink out.

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Gone, no trace of the idea.

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And what really hurt wasn't the loss of the idea itself.

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It was more the emotional whiplash of it.

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You go from Eureka, that's it, that's the thing, to nothing in four seconds flat.

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And that spike and that crash happens enough time.

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That you might even find yourself dreading having ideas, which is the complete opposite of

what you want to use your brain for.

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In the last decade or so, when I stepped out of traditional worlds and into

entrepreneurship, I started getting better with this.

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And it's not because I was more disciplined, but because I started to leverage the power

of my brain and create a space to put those ideas down.

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So for me, it started simply.

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First with like the notes app in my phone, and then it turned into a Google Doc, and then

it turned into leveraging something like Google Keep that's more searchable, which is

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still kind of my favorite low tech version of this.

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I created literally an idea parking lot section.

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I would date stamp it, write down the core idea and enough to give myself the context.

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So that future me could pick it back up without having to reconstruct everything.

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Then I would release it.

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I let it go.

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It's not that I deleted the idea, but it stopped occupying the real estate in my brain.

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And this almost word for word is the entire premise behind the book Getting Things Done by

David Allen.

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It's one of those things.

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Spaces where he argues something so simple that I think a lot of people tend to ignore.

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Your mind keeps score of every open loop that you haven't captured somewhere that you

trust.

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So every, oh, I really should deal with that is a tab left open in your brain.

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And open tabs drain processing power, whether you're actively thinking about them or not.

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So his fix in the book.

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Isn't a productivity hack.

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It's a system.

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It's a system to capture and get the thing out of your head and into something you trust

enough that you can actually let go of it.

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And that's the strategy.

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That's the unlock here.

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The reason this matters more for people like us, the ones who are constantly generating

new ideas, is that we don't ever have a shortage of ideas.

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We have a

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Problem with releasing them.

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We want to hold on to them tightly because we're terrified if we let them go somewhere,

they're gone forever.

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And one of those might be the thing that changes our life.

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And so we try to carry all of it all the time.

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And so it's something that I think we truly need to talk about.

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And it makes me think of a story that I've heard several different times from a mentor of

mine.

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So this is a real world version of something that's even bigger and more um proven as a

process than my Google Keep app.

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But I think it's gonna make the point land for you.

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So I'm in a group called High Capacity Leaders, which is mentored directly by John

Maxwell.

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The foremost authority on leadership and author of nearly a hundred books.

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Somebody who's been doing this for 50 years.

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So he was in the room telling us a story about writing one of his most recent books, How

to Get a Return on Failure, which, by the way, if you have not read it, that is an

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incredible book, his third on failure, and I'll link it in the show notes as well.

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But we were sitting in the room with him, and

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People were asking him his writing process, his authorship journey.

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And he told us that he collects ideas all the time.

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He's always thinking of things, reading things, learning new stuff.

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And so to stay organized, what he did was he literally put filing cabinets in his office

and he would categorize the information and ideas by topic.

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So he would, you know, clip the newspaper clipping or jot it on a piece of paper or a note

card and and categorize it in this massive filing cabinet.

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And then when he was working on a new idea, he could go pull from this repository that he

had created and have all these assets.

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So he didn't start a new book with a blank page.

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He actually started with a folder or even several.

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Of collected resources.

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And like I said, that man has written nearly a hundred books in the course of his career.

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So that right there is the perfect example of a system.

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It's not a quirky habit, it's an infrastructure that has produced decades of work.

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And here's the part that I want to talk about before we keep going is

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While he did it in an analog way for the majority of his career, as he's grown and

expanded, he's started to leverage a team to digitize all that.

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Not because his analog system failed, but because the tools available to him have gotten

better.

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And so even a system that's worked for half a century is evolving into something that is

more leveraged and more accessible.

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And that's exactly what I was describing in the arc of even my own parking lot example,

from notes in my phone to Google Doc to Google Keep to where I am now.

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So it's the same kind of instinct of evolution.

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It's a sharper tool every time.

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And yet, if the man with the number of books under his belt is still upgrading his capture

system.

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I think it's proof that the rest of us can stop pretending that we have ours perfected

from the beginning.

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And so on the other side of this, I think you need to see what it looks like for somebody

who doesn't leverage a strategy like this.

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And I have a friend, incredible human, who is an idea generator, just like you and I

probably are.

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But

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The thing that fascinates me about her is the fact that every time she has a solid idea,

she has to see it through to completion.

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So it's not have an idea and go, that's a good idea and put it somewhere or release it or

even share it.

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It is full-fledged architecting, building, and launching it.

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Not just to sketch or jot it down, but build the entire product start to finish before she

can let that idea go.

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Her brain has developed a singular way to close the loop, and that's execution.

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It there's no release valve on her pressure cooker in between having the idea and

finishing the idea.

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And so a while back, I asked her, I was like, have you ever leveraged this concept of an

idea parking lot where you place it and you release it so you can still reference it, but

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you're not carrying that weight.

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And

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She acted like I was nuts.

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I mean, truly from another planet, because she had never used a strategy like that.

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And this is a genius who is focused on strategy.

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Like that's that's the core of who she is.

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And yet it had never really occurred to her that you could store an idea instead of

building it the second that you had it.

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Think about what that means for somebody who has ideas constantly, just like she does.

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Every single one either lives inside your head, taking up space, or it takes up capacity,

time, and energy through the build process.

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There's no third option, no way to set it down and lighten the load, whether indefinitely

or in the short term.

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And

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I'm gonna push back and say that is an exhausting way to operate.

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Not because of a lack of discipline or focus, but because a piece of the infrastructure is

missing that lets you separate the idea from the action.

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And that's the cost of skipping this process, this strategy.

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It's not that you might just lose a good idea, it's that every idea becomes mandatory

because you never.

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Create an option to set it down.

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So if we look at what that looks like in my world, I think it's important to tell you a

little bit about how I do this because I've given you John Maxwell's example.

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I've given you the flip side of the coin.

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Here's what I do.

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And I want you to hear all of this and understand that I'm not telling you that my way is

the right way, but it is an opportunity for you to.

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learn from somebody and potentially find an opportunity for yourself to find to create

something that works for you and your brain.

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So when an idea hits me now, like it did probably at it was about 1 a.m.

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this morning, I am not sitting there opening some big structured template in Claude.

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I am not pulling out a notebook and writing it down.

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What I have done is I've created a really simple system for myself.

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I go open a brand new chat.

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Right now I'm using Claude, could be any other AI tool that you're in, and I just dump

unfiltered in this brand new chat.

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So there's no prompting, there's no formatting, no trying to make something sound smart

yet.

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I literally verbally vomit every piece of it out because the goal in the moment is speed,

not

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Clarity or execution.

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I don't want to lose the details while the light bulb is still lit and I'm busy trying to

chase the right language.

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So once I just dump all of that out, then I go back in, and it doesn't have to be

immediately, but sooner is better than later, and I rename that chat thread with the date

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and the core topic.

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So it's something that I can scan at a glance six months from now and still kind of

roughly remember what's in there.

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Without having to open up and read whatever the thread is.

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And that's it.

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That's the entire capture step.

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All of those chats that are threaded and named are held in a singular project in Claude

called Idea Parking Lot.

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There is nothing fancy about this.

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But the reason that I've done this is because most of the time.

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The act of dumping is the entire thing that I need.

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I don't have to go back.

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I don't need to.

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My brain wasn't asking me to execute or build that idea.

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It was just asking me to let it go, stop holding on to all the pieces of it and trying to

juggle an extra plate.

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And so once that concept is externalized somewhere that I trust, that open loop closes for

me.

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And it could be that I never do anything with that idea again.

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But it could be that it becomes something that I pull over into my other projects and

actually work with later on.

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And because I've dumped it somewhere, I have all of that detail.

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I have all of that background.

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And so that is what is so different from a lot of capture systems.

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It the the uh point is that you're gonna go back and reference them.

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And sometimes that might be true, but for me.

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The release is the thing that I need.

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It's permission to own the idea, but not hold it.

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So the retrieval of it is optional, but the release is not.

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And again, every every once in a while, one of those ideas might come back.

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It might recur even though it's been parked.

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And if I keep thinking about it or it relates to something else that I'm working on, I go

use it.

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I'll pull it over.

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I check it first though.

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This is the other key, my friends, against the vision and goals that I'm currently

striving for.

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So before I go build or execute, it moves from the parking lot project into the vision

project, the goals project.

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And I stress test it.

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And so I want to give you the three questions that I typically use to make sure that there

is alignment.

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before I expend my capacity in executing.

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So here's the questions.

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Is this idea actually part of the main quest?

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It's something that belongs in the work that I'm already doing.

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Or is it a legitimate side quest, useful, energizing, worth a defined chunk of time, but

clearly not the main thing?

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Or thirdly, do I need to put it back in the parking lot and just let it go?

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So those are how I filter.

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That third category, that third question matters just as much as the first two.

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So main quest, side quest, or back burner are all viable options.

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And the back burner is not failure.

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It's discernment.

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You are allowed to recognize an idea as good and still choose on purpose not to act.

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On it immediately.

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So one last piece on how I really use this.

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When I am starting something brand new and I get a hunch that I might have already thought

about a piece of this before, I can either go scroll the parking lot and grab the thing

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that I'm thinking about or ask the AI because it has the memory and the ability to

reference all of that.

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I do want to point out though that that's not often.

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It's an occasional thing, it's not a routine thing.

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I don't treat that parking lot as a place I'm constantly mining for material.

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It's not the archive that I work from, but it's that release valve that I was talking

about earlier.

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And it's there again to give myself the permission.

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So if you're trying to listen to all of this and go, my gosh, I have never had an ideal

parking lot.

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I want you to start simply.

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Pick one place.

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One tool that you are already in.

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So this is what I was saying earlier.

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It doesn't have to be my process of using Claude and projects and chats.

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It could be Google Keep.

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It could be the Notes app.

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It could be a physical notebook like John Maxwell's filing cabinet.

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What matters is that you start with one thing, one place, not four half-used tools or

systems that you never go back to again.

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So once you've picked the place, the second thing you need to do.

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Is capture it fast, capture it messy.

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Do not feel like it has to be organized in the moment.

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Organizing it is another step.

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And trying to do both at the same time is how people talk themselves out of using the tool

of capturing anything.

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Once you've got it down, label it just enough to be able to find it later.

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So a date, a topic, a key point, kind of like Maxwell's folders, is plenty.

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You are not writing a massive report for somebody else.

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You're leaving yourself a small breadcrum to find your way back.

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Fourthly, let it go after it's written down.

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This is the spot that my friends struggle with.

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It's a one that many people skip, but I promise you it works.

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If you write it down and you keep chewing on it anyways, then you haven't built a system.

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You've just added a step to your life.

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And then if you've done all of that and you start building that habit, you do have the

ability to build a trigger for yourself for the rare idea that doesn't stay parked.

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Like I said, for me, that trigger is really simple.

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If it keeps coming back to my the top of mind unprompted, that's my signal to stress test

it against my current main quest or the side quest versus letting it just sit

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indefinitely.

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So before we

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Close this up Not every idea you have is meant to be acted on.

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Ideas can be recognized without being executed.

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You can think something is excellent and choose to not build it right now or not ever, and

that is not failure.

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That is discernment.

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The parking lot isn't just a capture tool.

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It's the thing that lets you have the difference between an idea that deserves more of

your attention and the idea that deserves to be witnessed once and released so that you're

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not emotionally distraught by it in the future.

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You don't need a better brain or more memory.

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You need a better strategy to put things down.

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So if this is a system that you think that you needed and you had no idea, go build your

parking lot today.

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One placed fast capture and then let it go.

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And if you want more of this kind of thinking in your world every week, go head over to

bigideasmade simple.com and get on my email list.

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I'm Jess Webber.

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Again, this is Big Ideas Made Simple, and I'll see you next week.

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Thanks for listening.