We all get excited by some fine ideas from time to time, only to find that a day, a week, a month later the idea seems a bit stale. However, you can still make these stale ideas work for you effectively by refining them, and using the already spend input for something productive.

I believe that when you have a good idea you should sleep on it, but if you still find it great the next day, go for it. Sure, it might turn stale after a week, but if you don’t give it a go, you will miss out on a potentially great idea which could make a lot of money for you, you never know.

After a month you might find you don’t think the idea is great anymore, you might find better ideas, who knows, but don’t think your efforts have been in vain! You can turn a bad idea into a great one with some thought, some added ideas and a hint of work.

You could, for example, integrate it with a different project. You might have started a blog in a specific genre and failed with it, just take those posts and integrate them into another blog. Perhaps they won’t bring you more money, but they will add to your content.

At the very least you are sure to have learned a great deal from your failed idea, be sure to build upon these failures. I had a lot of these when I was organizing my pictures. I started in one particular way, spend about 4 hours on them, only to find that the method I developed was utterly useless. However, the way I tagged was quite cool so I kept that, and built on that to get a different system. That system also failed, and in the end I scratched the tagging, but I was able to find a file structure/category combination which worked very well and used that.

Overall, all your ideas have potential in them. If not the potential for success, then the potential to take other ideas to the next level. Be sure to refine everything you do, take the best of each project, idea and inject these into other existing projects. Take a look at why some of your ideas are bad and try to identify these aspects in other areas of your life, perhaps extracting them if necessary.

If you struggle with keeping in mind all the little ideas that come to you, try out a solution I found which works well at home, at my desk, and makes sure I get everything down before it goes away for good.

As I’ve mentioned before I myself struggle a lot with the heaps of ideas that come to my mind. I was designing a theme when I visited Hack Your Day to take a look at the styling of one of my elements and the thought occurred to me that it would be awesome to have the number of comments appear inside the speech bubble icon for the comments section.

These small ideas come to mind a lot, and I bet this happens to you too, so what do you do? You can open your favorite app, which means opening a tab, navigating to the url, writing in the task, and saving it, possibly even adding contexts and tags. This doesn’t take long, but takes too many actions and will deter your train of thought.

My solution was to prepare a small basket and some very mini pieces of paper (or index cards work fine). When an idea comes to mind I just stop typing or clicking, write down my idea and toss it in the basket. This enables you to resume working in seconds with only taking a very minor detour.

This also works well because you aren’t creating yet another list, and you can easily review later on. At the end of the day, just go through the pieces of paper thrown in there. If you still think the idea is good, keep it, record it, and if time has taken its toll on it, then throw it in the bin, simple.

Yes, I know, it sounds a bit weird, but I’ve gotten into the habit of taking notes using Firefox’s Goggle search field. Basically, a few thoughts on posts came to my mind and I didn’t have any pen and paper at hand and I didn’t want to open a notepad.

I came up with a solution that proved to be a great way of jotting down some thoughts in a productive way. All I do is when something comes to mind, like writing a post on Adobe Buzzword (coming up), is I open a new tab (Ctr + T) and type “Adobe Buzzword” in the search field. I don’t even wait for it to load, I go back to what I was doing immediately.When I am ready to “process” these thoughts, I go to the tab with the search and I will remember that I wanted to write about and in addition, I have already started some research by searching for it. When you process you can decide to write it down somewhere else, save the page as a bookmark, or just delete it.

I actually have a separate Firefox window (Ctr + N) open for this because it keeps my thoughts separate (I work a lot in Firefox) and I can also batch bookmark all my ideas at once. You can do this by the bookmarks menu and selecting bookmark all tabs (Ctr + Shift + D). When you are ready to make another pass at them, just go to the bookmarks menu, select the folder where you stored them, right click and select open all in tabs. Be careful, because your current tab will also load one of the bookmarks.

You can play around with setting up folders for this as well, or maybe posting some of these to del.icio.us or some other bookmark site, there are quite a lot of possibilities. For now I just use this casually, but I will look into it a bit more when I get the time. If any of you have any ideas please do share.