I am sure this has happened to you at least once. Or if you are someone like me, quite often.
Imagine this.
You are browsing your Instagram or YouTube feed.
Maybe you are on a much-deserved break from work or more likely from the household chores that mom gave you.
While browsing, you come across a really insightful video(it’s most likely from GaryVee). The video inspires you, charges you up, or gives you that Aha! moment to your life’s most pressing problem.
You get that dopamine hit of discovering something amazing – a Moment of Inspiration.
But then……..nothing happens.
You get back to work. Answer the boss’s email. Clean the dirty vessels in the sink.
Most likely, you forget to act on your inspiration.
That positive rush of finding an answer or discovering an idea is lost as another fleeting thought.
And this keeps on happening again and again.
I wanted to change this because I felt that I was missing out on good ideas that were within my reach.
In this blog post, I’ll share my process of scheduling moments of inspirations. This process has helped me find good ideas more deliberately and less serendipitously.
What are Moments of Inspirations and why we need to schedule daily time for them?
To put it simply, a Moment of Inspiration is an Aha! moment.
It is that moment when you realize something insightful, something life-changing.
They are little nuggets of wisdom from people, books, blogs, videos, podcasts, etc. which
- helps you solve a potential problem
- inspires you to take action
- motivates you to achieve something
- creates a desire in you to become like someone
In a sense, they are the foundation of everything we do and become in life.
When we describe it this way, it feels obvious why we need Moments of Inspiration. It seems almost stupid to not have them, not just daily but as often as we can.
The reality, however, is that most of us still rely on serendipity and chance to give us these life-changing insights.
For instance, remember the last time you came across an inspiring blog post or a video.
Did you take notes?
Did you record the idea somewhere?
Did you bookmark the link for future reference?
My bet is that most of us didn’t.
Because it happened randomly and we were not prepared for it.
Moreover, we always delude ourselves by thinking that
“Oh! I will remember this for sure when I need it.”
But the truth is that we forget. We forget stuff all the time.
A lot of you will agree with me when I say that
“We have lost many amazing ideas across humanity because we didn’t write them down.”
But the good news is that this is a completely solvable problem.
Personally, I was tired of relying on serendipity for inspiration and frustrated with my inability to act on that inspiration.
And this got me thinking
“What if I could actually schedule my daily dose of inspiration?
What if I created a process that allowed me to act on my insights instead of missing out on them?”
I not only found the answers to these questions but achieved tremendous success as well. Let me show you how.
4 step process to schedule and capture your Moments of Inspiration
At The Evening Project, one of my core principles is “Living Deliberately”.
I believe that we need to be more proactive in shaping our life rather than reacting to what happens around us.
If you’re someone who also shares and appreciates this belief, then this approach will help you be more deliberate.
So. how do we ensure deliberate inspiration?
It’s a four-step process
1. Identify your Sources of Inspiration
2. Create a Daily Feed of Inspiration
3. Schedule a Time and Place for its Consumption
4. Use “Quick Capture” to record insights and ideas.
Step 1: Identify your Sources of Inspiration
Is there a Blogger whose content you admire?
Is there a YouTuber who always inspires you?
Is there a Podcast that always gives you new insights?
Identify these content creators and list them down. Feel free to categorize them as per your comfort.
For example, I categorize these sources under Personal Growth and Marketing since these are the topics I am interested in.
Additionally, don’t limit this list to individual content creators. You can also include company blogs, YouTube channels, and community groups as well.
The bottom line is to identify sources of content that inspire you, irrespective of their format or type.
Step 2: Create a daily Feed of Inspiration
What is this daily feed of inspiration?
Like any other social media feed, it’s a place that aggregates content and displays it to you.
THE BIG DIFFERENCE here is that you only see content from the people and pages that inspire you.
Remember the list you created in the first step. Use it to create your own daily feed of inspiration. How?
Download an app that aggregates RSS Feed.
In other words, download the Feedly app.
Here, you can choose the content creators, blogs, websites, YouTube channels, etc. you want to follow. Feedly will then show you any new content that these creators have published.
In a nutshell, you are curating your feed for inspiration.
It’s possible to do this on any channel.
For email newsletters, you can create a separate label and put in place filter rules to create your feed.
For YouTube Channels, you can create separate playlists and add the channels that inspire you.
And so on. You get the point.
Step 3: Scheduling a dedicated time and place
In the science of Habit Formation, there is a popular concept called “Implementation Intentions”.
An implementation intention is a plan you make beforehand about when and where to act.
Broadly speaking, the format for creating an implementation intention is:
“When situation X arises, I will perform response Y.”
Implementation intentions leverage the cues of time and location to help you trigger and form a new habit.
In our case, we can use this concept to schedule our daily dose of inspiration.
All you need to do is pick a dedicated time in the day and a dedicated place in your house.
In practice, this can be something like
“I will watch 1 GaryVee YouTube video at 11 AM at my study table.”
or
“I will listen to The Knowledge Project podcast by Shane Parrish at evening 7 pm when I go for a walk.”
Be as specific as you can with your implementation intentions. The more clear your intention, the more your chances of actually implementing it.
I like to take this a step further and be specific about my sources of inspiration as well as the number of content pieces I will consume.
For instance, I make sure I read at least two Seth Godin blogs every day and listen to at least 30 minutes of the Time Ferris Show.
But you don’t have to do that.
Step 4: Capturing your Moments of Inspiration
This is the most important step in the process but luckily the easiest.
Frankly speaking, all you need here is a pen and a paper. We can, however, be a little more strategic about it.
While following this process, I realized that it’s not enough to just capture notes. You also need to be able to find it at the right time and connect it with other similar thoughts.
That’s why I suggest you use a note-taking app. Some of my favorites are Notion, Evernote and Google Keep.
You can use any note-taking app as long as they have these two features:
1. Quick Search based on keywords
2. Tags to link and categorize similar notes together
Let me show you how to use these features with an example of Evernote.
Suppose you are watching a Tim Ferriss video from your Inspiration Feed. You come across an interesting piece of advice on the topic of Productivity, especially Morning Routines.
You want to capture this immediately.
So, you open Evernote and take the following note
“A good morning routine involves exercise, meditation, journaling, and reading.”
And you tag this note “Productivity”.
Later, when you get more time to think about your Productivity and Morning Routines, you can use Evernote to quickly access this note.
All you have to do is a quick search for Morning Routine. Alternatively, you can also click on the Productivity tag to see all your ideas and insights on this matter.
This is the easiest way to ensure that your Moments of Inspiration don’t get lost.
Conclusion
I have been using this 4 step process for more than a month now and it has completely changed my life.
I never have to worry again about losing out on good ideas and great insights because I have a system in place. A system that allows me to schedule my Moments of Inspiration and capture them easily.
Try it out. Customize it for yourself. See what works for you.
I can promise you one thing.
It will change the way you operate by and help you develop more understanding over more information.
