Surprisingly Simple Solution for Storing Surprises

Recently I wrote a post about a sim­ple tech­nique for enhanc­ing your cre­ativ­ity that I learned from read­ing the book Cre­ativ­ity by psy­chol­o­gist Mihaly Csik­szent­mi­ha­lyi.  In a nut­shell 1. Be sur­prised by some­thing every day, 2. Sur­prise some­one every­day, 3. Write both down and chron­i­cle them over time.

I thought it might be wise to share my sys­tem for col­lect­ing this infor­ma­tion, as it is very sim­ple yet quite effec­tive.  I started by using google docs to cre­ate a web form.  To do this, just go to google docs and select “Form” from the New tab.  You can also open a spread­sheet and cre­ate a form from there. In the form I ask two ques­tions.  What sur­prised you today?  Who did you sur­prise and how?

Once saved, I then emailed this form from google docs to my gmail account.  I use the embed option to place the form directly in the body of the email.    Once the email is in my inbox, I opened it, and used the “Cre­ate a quick link” func­tion from Gmail labs.  The quick link to the blank form is now per­ma­nently located on the left of my screen, a lit­tle below the stan­dard inbox sec­tion.  So with one sim­ple click I can pull up the form, which I am reminded to do by see­ing it right there on the screen.  I also cre­ated a reminder in my google cal­en­dar so that I make cer­tain to remem­ber to update this daily.    Now all I do is go open my gmail, click the link to the form, com­plete the two ques­tions, and hit sub­mit.  The results are then dumped directly into a spread­sheet, which is stored online.  The responses are time stamped, ensur­ing that I know when the idea was sub­mit­ted.  This makes it very sim­ple to search, orga­nize, and track my thoughts. Just that easy.  Hope you found this to be sur­pris­ingly help­ful to you.