Ep 207: How to Sort and Stack Your Ideas and Tasks to Transform as a Writer and Person

[Ep 207] On my drive to Minneapolis to serve on the faculty of Northwestern Christian Writers Conference, I listened to podcasts: one after another, back-to-back. I welcomed that stream of input filling my mind with ideas, strategies, and solutions that I can apply to my writing life. But it’s easy to listen and then forget what I heard. What a waste if I devote hours to listening but never remember or apply what the experts recommend! Life is short. I want to learn and grow and transform—I want to become wiser and more discerning. I’m committed to implementing those ideas! Sort and Stack So first I capture the information. Later, you know what I do? I sort and stack it. I’ve done this for years without having a name or phrase to put with it, but author Robin Jones Gunn said it in her keynote address: we must learn to sort and stack. Sort and stack. Sort and Stack Conference Notes Sometimes conference attendees report that by the end of the weekend they feel like they’ve been drinking from a fire hose. They’re blasted with so much new information in session after session, they feel hit with input and ideas and vocabulary and concepts they've never heard before. It’s overwhelming. It would be easy to set aside the notes from those sessions and return to status quo when they arrive home. But life is short. Those attendees came to learn and grow and transform, so I hope they’re committed to implementing those ideas. Avoid the Overwhelm Hopefully they scribbled down copious notes, captured them someplace—to sort and then stack them into logical, usable groups. My breakout session offered probably 30 ideas, maybe more, of ways people can put some heart, soul, and a little laughter into social media. Another session may have offered 20 or 50 more ideas. Soon, the writers will have filled a notebook. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. We don’t have to do it all, and we don’t have to do it all right away. But we don't want to lose those ideas. The conference attendees don’t have to implement every idea the day they get home from the conference, and I don’t have to implement every idea I heard on the drive home in those podcasts I listened to. We want to sort out what to do when so we try things out in an order that makes sense. Create a Master Stack If we successfully capture the information, we can create a master list and continue to work through it, sorting and stacking over time. We can convert our notes from the master list or “stack” into more lists, labeled however we wish: Research Try next month Archive As you sort notes from your master list into these sub-stacks, you can label them in many ways. Use the nomenclature from the organization, time-management, or productivity systems that make sense to you. Again, think of each new list as another stack. Move notes to one stack or another, sorting as you go. Sort and Stack Based on ROI The Writer's Guide to ROI series helps with sorting and stacking. By thinking through return on investment of any given idea, I can comb through the stack of ideas I collected from my podcast marathon and sort them based on values and goals and efficient use of time. Then I can sort them into new stacks or categories to figure out how and when to implement them. This moves me closer to action I’ll take—specifically the very next step. What’s the Next Action? Long ago I read David Allen’s book Getting Things Done, which explains his productivity methodology. He recommends a Next Action list formed by asking, “What’s the next step?” For a long time I stuck a Post-It on my computer monitor with that on it: “What’s the next step?” Asking that helped me sort all the possible actions I could take and zero in on the very next one to do. The rest could remain on the Next Actions stack. I learned to phrase each item with a verb so the task or action would be expressed as a specific,