I've been writing for almost two hours now on a series of articles. I talked about this in one of the posts I wrote at the beginning of the week called "Reversing the working schedule" in which I mentioned that this week is going to be a bit different. Instead of working in the workweek and relax in the weekend, I'll do the opposite - I'll work in the weekend as much as possible to reduce the amount of things I have to do during the week.
This worked great so far. I finished writing four articles, this being the fifth one. Theoretically, I don't have to write any other article for Hive for the next 5 days, which is great.
The way I did this was by taking advantage of a motivational "boost" in which I was really in the mood to work, especially to write articles. It's how I wrote so much in such a short amount of time.
However, during all this time I made one mistake - I didn't properly write down all the ideas that came to me. I had a few short breaks for bathroom and showering, and in those breaks I got multiple ideas that I just didn't stop to write down.
Therefore, I forgot them.
I said I forgot one idea in the title because it sounds better but I think I forgot more than 3, and some of those were actually fairly good, but now they're gone and they won't come back to me unless I'm lucky.
So I just lost more than three possible articles because I was too lazy to stop what I was doing and write them down, or to do it as quickly as I finished. And this happened to me a lot in the past.
This post is one of those in which I'll tell you to avoid making the same mistake based on a very recent unpleasant experience - don't let yourself forget ideas. Make sure you write them down and you keep them somewhere because you never know when you might need them.
I like the term "cemetery of ideas". I don't really know why, because it doesn't really fit what I have in mind. A cemetery of ideas would be a place where you send ideas to die, to be forgotten, to be unused for the rest of your life, surely not a place in which you send something just to go and look for it again when you need it.
But maybe I'm a bit too much into RPGs and fantasy video games and so a cemetery became, for me, more of a "resting place" from which spirits / undead can come back to the real life when needed.
Let's call it a "bank of ideas" or an "archive of ideas". A place in which you store whatever goes through your mind that you think has value, enough to possibly become something important in the future. It might be an article, a new project you want to work on, hell, even a business idea.
Whatever it is, make sure you put it in your "bank" or "archive" and keep it there for the future, because it really sucks when you think of something cool and you're excited about it, just to forget it 3 minutes later and be annoyed with yourself.