The outlandish idea list
If you ever find yourself thinking: "wouldn't it be cool if…" — you should write that idea down!
I just marked an idea as "done" — something that's been on my list for years: I created a new IRC network, and wrote a bot for it to help automate some of my routine.
(Yes, really, I'm still using IRC in 2024, but that's a subject for another article.)
I've been keeping a list of pie-in-the-sky, never-going-to-happen ideas for nearly a decade now. This list has taken many forms — right now, it's a spreadsheet, ranked by idea feasibility — but it's also been a word doc, and a channel on a Discord server.
If you ever find yourself thinking: "wouldn't it be cool if…" — you should write that idea down!
It doesn't matter what form or medium the idea takes. I have some ideas that are purely digital and some that are almost entirely based in the physical world. Some ideas would take far less than a day (for example, copying and pasting my code for Philly Tech Calendar to create something like a "Philly Indie Rock Show Calendar") and some would take probably over a year — or simply never work at all (like creating a non-profit which lets homeowners get solar panels for free by selling the cost of installing them as carbon offsets).
When you're regularly reminded of these ideas, you will regularly transform them. Sometimes, a cool idea will beget another cool idea. Sometimes, you'll think about a problem so hard that you'll just sit down and execute the plan that you didn't really realize you'd been working on for years. (This is what happened to me last night with the IRC thing.)
It doesn't matter what it is, as long as you get in the habit of writing it down. This list can have whatever features you want, but my advice is: start small, and start now.