Infinity Video

Q10 Full Screen Text Editor

I continue to experiment with various types of technologies related to personal effectiveness and managed to stumble upon this simple text editor called Q10.

It's a bare-bones, no-frills full screen text editor that allows you to concentrate on generating content through a black screen that fills the entire monitor. It has features such as character count as well number of pages. This is customisable as you can set how many words go into 1 page.
What I like about Q10 is its simplicity. You can install it very quickly and it runs out of a thumb-drive even.

As someone who writes almost a post a day, it comes in quite helpful in allowing me to type quickly and efficiently and to see what I've typed all in one page.
Consider trying out Q10 as your text editor of choice if you are considering a simple, no-frills but effective tool to raise your writing productivity. :-)

How to generate ideas for blogging, being and believing

Idea generation is something easy for people. If you analyse your thoughts, there are literally hundreds of random thoughts coursing through your head over a weekend. But the catch is that most of us do not harness these thoughts into actionable tasks.

So how do you generate ideas for blogging for solutions to your problems at work or home?

Let Panzer share some of his ideas on how to generate ideas for blogging, being and believing.

How to Generate Ideas for Blogging

1. Note down ideas
I make use of my Palm Treo 650 (a PDA phone) to keep track of ideas of blogging. Writing article requires a decent command of English and some fluency, but really, what's important is to have a unique angle or perspective on issues that matter to you. Anyone who has genuine interest and passion about something can write about it.

Before I started my blogs, especially my main personal finance and financial freedom blog five cents ten cents, I used to jot down stuff in random, haphazard manners that didn't help me compile a database of ideas for blog posts. Ever since I've gotten serious about blogging on financial freedom, I jot down ideas that come to me in the bus, MRT, during meal times into my PDA. I try not to censor myself too much but just put down the genesis of the ideas down. I'll refer to these later when I actually have to sit down and write out the blog posts.

You can use simple notebook or get a fancy journal but the idea is to write it down. Thoughts are intangible until they are written down and acted upon. Then your ideas have power of their own. ;-)

2. Don't Censor
Censoring yourself is the quickest way to kill ideas at birth. Sometimes an idea may sound absurd but you won't know if it works till you try to do something about it. So keep it alive. Just write it down first WITHOUT killing it. You'd be surprised how some half-baked ideas may trun into useful actionable items later on.

3. Be a Keen Observer
Many ideas are generated through what you see, read or hear. Be a keen observer of life. Note down things that are happening to you. See some interesting characters in the bus or MRT, write it down. Feel something at that point in time that is out of the normal, write it down. Observe and note down what is happening in the world as many things are happening but sometimes we are not observing them.

4. Write and Generate Output
Ideas beget more ideas. Sometimes, when you write, you generate related ideas to the main one you started with. At times, you may go off on tangents. That is all right. Go with the flow and tap your creative juices by generating output. From the mass of writing, you may get one or two truly original and illuminating insights. Press on and write on!

5. Use Tools to Enhance Idea Creation
I've talked about mindmapping tools such as Freemind and Mind Meister that can be used to generate mind-maps to help idea creation. These help make associations and branching out of ideas easier and visual tools enable you to work with ideas better.

Share with Panzer what other ideas you have to generate more ideas for blogging, being and believing.