personal brainstorming

for creativity, planning, presentations, decision-making, and organizing your ideas

Personal brainstorming - just by yourself - is very useful for the start of any new project, especially if you can be prone to put things off until tomorrow.

Planning a new venture, a presentation, or any new initiative, is generally much easier if you begin simply by thinking of ideas - in no particular order or structure - and jotting them down on a sheet of paper or in a notebook. Basically this is personal brainstorming, and it can follow the same process as described above for groups, except that it's just you doing it.

Sometimes it's very difficult to begin planning something new - because you don't know where and how to start. Brainstoming is a great way to begin. The method also generates lots of possibilities which you might otherwise miss by getting into detailed structured planning too early.

A really useful tool for personal brainstorming - and note-taking generally - is the wonderful Bic 4-colour ballpen. The pen enables you quickly to switch colours between red, blue, black and green, without having to walk around with a pocket-full of biros. Using different colours in your creative jottings and written records helps you to make your notes and diagrams clearer, and dramatically increases the ways in which you can develop and refine your ideas and notes on paper. To prove the point, review some previous notes in black or blue ink using a red pen - see how you can organize/connect the content, still keeping it all clear and legible. This simple pen is therefore a brilliant tool for organizing your thoughts on paper much more clearly and creatively than by being limited to a single colour - especially if you think in visual terms and find diagrams helpful. For example, using different colours enables you to identify and link common items within a random list, or to show patterns and categories, or to over-write notes without making a confusing mess, and generally to generate far more value from your thoughts and ideas. Keeping connected notes and ideas on a single sheet of paper greatly helps the brain to absorb and develop them. Try it - you'll be surprised how much more useful your notes become. The principle is the same as using different colours of marker pens on a flip-chart. Other manufacturers produce similar pens, but the Bic is reliable, widely available, and very inexpensive.

The usefulness of different colours in written notes is further illustrated (please correct me or expand on this if you know more) in a wider organizational sense in the UK health industry. Apparently, black is the standard colour; green is used by pharmacy services, red is used after death and for allergies, and blue tends to be avoided due to poorer reprographic qualities (thanks M Belcher). As I say, correct me if this is wrong, and in any event please let me know any other examples of different coloured inks being used to organize or otherwise clarify written communications within corporations, institutions or industries.

Additionally I am informed (thanks T Kalota, Oct 2008) of a useful brainstorming/organizing technique using coloured pens when reviewing a written specification, or potentially any set of notes for a design or plan.

Underline or circle the words according to the following:

nouns/people/things	black	(entities)
verbs ('doing'/functional words)	red	(relationships)
adjectives/adverbs (describing words)	blue	(attributes)

This technique was apparently used for clarifying written specifications or notes for a database design, and was termed 'extended relational architecture', advocated by a company of the same name, at one time. (I've been unable to find any further details about the company or this application. If you know more please tell me.)

This method of colour-coding notes (using underlines or circles or boxes) to help clarification/prioritization/organization/etc can itself naturally be extended and adapted, for example:

nouns/people/things	black	(entities)
verbs ('doing'/functional words)	red	(relationships)
adjectives (describing a noun/thing/etc)	blue	(attributes)
adverbs (describing a verb/function)	green	(degrees/range/etc)
timings/costs/quantities	yellow	(measures)

The colours and categories are not a fixed industry standard. It's an entirely flexible technique. You can use any colours you want, and devise your own coding structures to suit the situation.