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Catching Those Fleeting Bed and Bathroom Ideas

Bed-Idea-RememberEverythingOrgYesterday, I was lying in my bed, ready to go to sleep, but my mind wasn’t yet. A few ideas for upcoming blog posts popped up, and I surely wasn’t going to let them go. Not wanting to get up again, I quite literally stored them in my brain – in a small mnemonic filing system.
What do you do with ideas or other thoughts that occur to you while lying in your bed, sitting on the toilet, or taking a shower? Do you always have your smartphone, or pen and paper by your side?

Well, here is my suggestion:

  1. Learn a small mnemonic filing system like the Number Rhymes. It only takes a few minutes to learn them.
  2. Whenever an idea or thought you want to capture crosses your mind and you don’t have anything to write, just store it in the next free position in the Number Rhymes.

Here is a quick review of the 10 rhymes you need to remember. Make sure, you visualize each object as you learn the rhyme.

  1. One –Sun
  2. Two – Shoe
  3. Three – Tree
  4. Four – Door
  5. Five – Knife
  6. Six – Pigs
  7. Seven – Heaven
  8. Eight – Gate
  9. Nine – Wine
  10. Ten – Hen

This gives you ten locations to store ideas or other thoughts.
For a more detailed description, please check my earlier post, Number Rhymes.

How did I use the rhymes last night?

The first blog idea that came to me was a post about “Spaced Review”. In the Number Rhymes, the first storage location – one is a sun. I imagined (visualized) myself traveling through space towards the sun. It was getting hotter and hotter. Space is the keyword I used to remind me of Spaced Review.  The next idea was a post about “The Last Lecture”, an incredible public speech by Randy Pausch I watched a few years ago: So, I imagined Randy Pausch putting his dirty brown duck shoes on the lectern (my keyword), just to make a point.
The third idea was “How to turn your life around”. To capture this idea, I just imagined a car being stopped by a large tree (my location number three) standing in the middle of the road. Unable to continue, the car has to turn around.

In the morning, I just went through the numbers: One was a sun, and I remembered, I was traveling through space. –  Spaced Review. Two was a shoe – yes, brown duck shoes on a lectern – The Last Lecture…

I highly recommend giving the mnemonic Number Rhymes a try to capture those fleeting thoughts whenever you cannot or do not want to write them down. The rhymes are good fun, easy to learn, and work wonders.

 


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