From a post at Innovation Weblog

The top 10 catalysts for best ideas are:

1. When you’re inspired
2. Brainstorming with others
3. When you’re immersed in a project
4. When you’re happy
5. Collaborating with a partner
6. Daydreaming
7. Analyzing a problem
8. Driving
9. Commuting to and from work
10. Reading books in your field

In their analysis, Tim Moore and Mitch Ditkoff discovered an intriguing paradox: creative people seem to have a need for solitary retreat and reflection, but also enjoy opportunities to collaborate and brainstorm with others.

Where do you get your best ideas? And how do you capture them?

There is an insightful post at Business and Blogging that I’d like to share with you:

Friday Fun: Business Blogging Epiphany

One that particularly stands out is the shift that occurred when I realized that perhaps even more important than knowing the right answers, is knowing the right questions to ask.

This holds true in business blogging as well. Many professionals who start a blog feel pressured to exhibit their expertise and provide well-reasoned answers to all of their readers needs.

While it is important to provide some answers, it is also important to remember that the best blogs build a sense of community and engagement.

They enable the blogger to learn about his or her readers as much as for the readers to learn about the blogger.

What questions could you ask your readers that will get them engaged in your blog?

What thought provoking topic can you raise?

What opinions can you solicit?

What knowledge could you gain that would help you build a better business and a better blog?

So for you dear readers, what are your questions for me?

• What if I told you that I was thinking of changing things up a little around here?
• What if I stopped posting on the non-productivity and workflow topics that I am interested in and put those articles somewhere else?
• What would you most like to see here? (something that you would share with your friends and colleagues)

Please let me know in the Comments, and together we will make it happen!

Mike St. Pierre of The Daily Saint is on vacation this week, so the GTD Cafe is one of my own suggestions.

Gmail is a remarkable free service that offers a massive amount of storage for your e-mails. In fact, there are “ Over 6886.008202 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so you’ll never need to delete another message.” What a deal!

One small problem, though, is that a free G-mail account does not have the professional cachet that an e-mail address based on your business has. This is the second small problem: an e-mail account provided by your web host probably will not have almost 7,000 megabytes of storage.  Yet you will want to save nearly every e-mail that you receive, because you can.

My new small business is In Context MultiMedia.com, but I certainly can’t put ICMM @ g-mail on a business card! (Or can I? Topic of another post, I think)

A solution to this dilemma: set up your hosted e-mail account to CC a copy of every e-mail that you send and receive to a “secret” G-mail account. In this way you can archive and search all of your e-mail correspondence without worrying about what computer you are using, or where you might be in the world.

This came in very handy for me recently when I upgraded my laptop to a newer model, and my old e-mails (stored on the hard drive) were stuck there. The transfer was a real pain, and only partially successful.

Darren Hardy has an excellent article at successmagazine.com (SUCCESS — What Achievers Read.) that brings together many of the tips that you may have seen scattered all over the interwebs.

Of all the resources in the world, what are the most crucial for gaining efficiency, productivity and achievement? Now there are a lot of intangible answers—pertaining to attitude, philosophy, character, belief, faith, expectation, strategies, techniques, ideas, skills, behaviors—and we will reveal these over the many issues of SUCCESS. The objective of this article, however, is to identify the essential tools, technologies and resources to support your greater success.

1. List of Goals. The first step toward achieving your dreams and ambitions is to identify them. Hopes and dreams remain fantasies until you write them down and create a plan for achieving them.

2. Nutrition and Well-Being Plan. YOU are the most important person in your life, and your good health is your most important priority. People often list other priorities such as spouses, children, employees, customers, etc., above themselves and their health. If you are sick, or worse, dead, how good are you going to be to your spouse, children or customers? Take care of yourself first, so you can properly take care of everyone and everything that is most important to you.

Read the whole thing!