Do you have a lot of ideas but no clue how to organize them? Or maybe ideas come to you and by the time you have a chance to record them, you’ve forgotten? Enter the Spark File. As Alex Hillman explains, this tool doesn’t just capture half-baked ideas—it helps you turn small concepts into great things.

Where Good Ideas Come From in 4 Minutes

The Spark File, Steven describes, is a process/tool that he uses to collect “half-baked ideas” and then revisit them. For eight years, he’s maintained a single document with notes and ideas with zero organization or taxonomy, simply a chronology of thoughts. He calls this document his Spark File.

Once a month, he revisits the ENTIRE Spark File from top to bottom, revisiting old ideas and potentially combining them with newer ideas.

we don’t have ideas all at once and we certainly don’t have them in any particular order. Perhaps more importantly, we tend to either have a compulsion to_act_on our ideas immediately, or not at all.

This compulsion is blocking your greatest work.

By using a Spark File, I’m able to “act” on an idea simply by writing it down at the bottom of the document. Compulsion fulfilled.