Making Ideas Happen – Follow Up!

I recently read Scott Belsky’s “Making Ideas Happen”, and I have to highly recommend it to anyone who’s ever felt like they have a surplus of great ideas but very few of them come to fruition. This seems to be a common problem amongst creatives, and Scott aims to address this. He breaks “Making Ideas Happen” down into three main components:

1. Organization/task management – This part of the book felt very GTDish, with a couple ideas I hadn’t heard/thought of before
2. Communal forces – Focused a lot on things having to do with the community, both in terms of friends/family to support you, people in your field to give you feedback/collaborate with you, etc
3. Leadership ability – Focused on how to lead others and yourself

I thought the entire book had a lot of good insight and useful anecdotes throughout, but one idea that has made an immediate impact on my personal productivity is the notion of religiously following up.  Scott talks about this and gives some stories related to it, but I’ve begun using Things to keep track of every time I send an email and am waiting to hear back, or am expecting a call back, or anything of that nature.  When I send the email or whatever it is, I simply create a new todo with the tag “followup”, describe who and what it is I’m following up about, and select a date that I want to be reminded about the followup.  At this point I simply hide it and its out of sight/out of mind.  Its brilliant!  For the last two weeks I’ve not had to worry a single time about “who was it that I needed to email?” or think while shopping for groceries (or some other activity where I can’t do anything about it) “oh yeah I need to call so and so back!”.  Things just takes care of it for me.  So simple and yet so powerful.

There were many other ideas in Scott’s book that I’m still simmering over and will probably influence me at some point, but I just wanted to share this particular one which has been so simple and so powerful for me personally.