I remember Ed Sheeran saying in an interview that writing songs is like turning on a rusty tap: at first it’s brown, dirty water, and you have to let it run before the clear stuff comes out. That’s exactly what I practice daily. I keep documenting the stupidest thing too that comes in my head. Most are bad, some are embarrassingly bad, and a few feel so good I don't stop thinking about them. This is a simple list I compiled during my flight back to Bengaluru a few weeks ago.
Write five ideas & thoughts the moment you sit down with your morning coffee. It's mostly random pileup of things and clears your head.
Keep a running “Idea inbox” in your notes app; clear it once every week so it doesn’t get stale.
Pick one of yesterday’s ideas and improve it by 10%. Add specifics, details, and one next step.
Create a recurring 15-minute “Idea sprint” on your calendar every day at the same time.
Do an “Idea warm-up” before deep work: write three impossible ideas, then one realistic one.
Force yourself to write 10 bad ideas first, then 10 good ones. These are private notes so no one judges you.
End each day with one new question about something that annoyed you.
Use the last 5 minutes before bed to voice-memo half-formed thoughts while you’re tired. I keep a small notebook by the bed for this.
Keep a physical notebook near spaces of inconvenient moments like the shower or kitchen.
Pick one random Wikipedia article daily and write an idea inspired by it.
Spend 15 minutes in a public place and note three inefficiencies you see.
Change where you sit in your house or office. New views trigger new thoughts.
Rearrange one shelf or drawer every month just to trigger fresh associations.
Add one book to your shelf you’d normally never touch.
Rotate your playlist: swap music for silence, or silence for background noise.
Keep one “weird” magazine subscription and flip through it for unexpected sparks. I subscribed to Vogue. Something that I otherwise wouldn't.
Watch someone use a tool wrong and write three ways to make that “wrong” way easier. Using the back of a fork to screw.
Pair idea writing time with an existing habit like having coffee or afternoon snack break.
Set up an “idea dump” folder on your phone’s home screen for quick capture. Use reminders widget.
Use a monthly theme (transport, health, education) and generate 10 ideas just in that bucket.
At the end of each month, turn one idea into a sketch, however crude.
Build a simple ritual: light a scented candle, put your phone in another room, and write.
Keep a small “fail folder” where you revisit it every quarter to see which “bad” ideas now make sense.
Generate five ideas that cost nothing but time.
Come up with three ideas that can be built in one weekend.
Write 10 ideas that use only objects in your kitchen.
Take a product you love and remove its most important feature and see what’s left.
Invent a version of your favourite app that works offline only.
Shrink a process into 60 seconds and see what would you cut.
Force yourself to write only absurd ideas for one day.
Write five ideas that would only work if you lived on Mars.
Reverse the constraint: write the most expensive, ridiculous solution first to your idea, then find the scrappy version.
Combine two random objects in your room into a product (mug + headphones = ??).
Give an object a personality and write what it would complain about.
Write five ideas that would get you laughed out of a boardroom.
Pick your favourite villain and design a product they’d love. Think Thanos.
Imagine Instagram for ghosts, Tinder for plants, Uber for cows.
Write three ideas that would never make money but would make you happy.
Take a childhood game and turn it into an adult utility tool.
Imagine a product that would get banned in your country.
Design a service for people living underwater. It's absurd so go crazy.
Revisit your notes from six months ago and “remix” one idea with today’s context.
Take a failed idea and write five new ways it could work.
Translate an idea into another medium. E.g. turn an app into a poster, a product into a game.
Rewrite one old idea in a single sentence by asking 5 whys.
Pair your most boring idea with your wildest one and see if they make sense.
Keep a jar of random words and draw two each morning by forcing a connection.
Talk to someone outside your field once a week and ask them what frustrates them most.
Read one-star product reviews and turn them into improvement ideas.
Use AI to generate bizarre combinations and build on them manually.
Create a “reverse mentor” relationship with someone younger. E.g. ask what’s broken in their world.
Compare two industries that never overlap and borrow solutions from one for the other.
Study how kids improvise with toys and list five products that mimic that behaviour.
Watch a foreign TV ad and generate ideas that could work locally.
Visit a museum and list 10 products inspired by what you see.
Go to a hardware store and pick five tools you don’t know how to use. Turn them into startup ideas for yourself.
Write five ideas to fix the last time you waited in line.
Take the last three customer support tickets you filed and solve them yourself.
List every “Why is this still so hard?” moment from your day and solve them.
Fix your least favourite feature in your favourite app.
Write ideas to remove one step from a process you do every day.
Capture every “I wish…” sentence you say out loud for a week.
Improve the worst part of your morning routine and turn that into a service.
Make a list of chores you hate most and write an idea for automating each.
Fix one thing in your house this week and write down what you wish existed to make it easier.
Share your top three ideas every Friday with someone.
At the end of each quarter, pick one idea and make a rough prototype.
Do a quarterly “idea purge”: delete or retire everything that doesn’t excite you anymore.
Start an “Idea wall of fame” where you keep the 10 best ideas visible at all times.
Change your capture method every 3–4 months to keep it fresh.
Once a year, take a weekend retreat just to read through all your old ideas.
Randomly pick a page from a book on your shelf and riff an idea off whatever you find.
Collect three physical objects from around you and draw them combined into one absurd machine.
Watch how an older relative uses their phone and turn their struggles into app improvement ideas.
Choose a random emoji and write three startup ideas based on it.
Draw your morning routine as a flowchart. Then circle the most annoying step and write five ways to remove it.
Watch a sport you don’t follow and write ideas to make it more exciting for a casual viewer.
Look at the last five things you bookmarked online and make one mashup idea that combines all of them.
Spend 10 minutes on Google Maps zooming into a random city and list five local things you liked and wish was around you.
Take your last online order and design a better unboxing experience for it.