How often do you feel overwhelmed by your ideas, struggling to organize your thoughts, or losing track of your goals in the midst of chaos? How often do you find yourself staring at a blank screen or a messy pile of notes, unsure of how to get started on that essay, presentation, or project? There’s a powerful tool that can help you conquer these challenges, streamline your work, and unleash your full potential.
Outlining is a game-changer for writers, professionals, students, and anyone looking to enhance their organization, communication, and productivity skills. In this video, we’ll explore the technique of outlining, explore its applications, and share practical tips to boost your efficiency, and achieve your goals easier.
There are a myriad of uses for outlining:
- Managing projects
- Setting goals and milestones
- Keeping track of a meeting’s agenda and associated notes
- Planning
- Writing
- Identifying pros and cons
- …
I use outlining all the time when coaching my clients as it gives them perspective about their life, their goals, their options, their thoughts, etc. Because coaching is an opportunity to think deeply about things, putting those thoughts out helps going even deeper, confident that what they’ve thought of is being written down and brought into the conversation for exploration.
The main benefit of outlining is that it’s super simple and basic, wonderful to collaborate on. You don’t need fancy software or high-end computers. If you’re in person with somebody else or even an entire team, you’ll do even better with pen and paper, a whiteboard or a flipchart. If you’re online, a simple notepad application does the job perfectly.
The challenge
Watch the video and do an outline yourself. Take some time to really think it through. When you’re done, ask yourself these questions
- How organized do you feel this list is? The categorization, the clusters of information, the relationships between the different items.
- What was the impact on the importance of these ideas? How does outlining improve your process of prioritization?
- How much perspective do you gain from putting all of your ideas onto paper? Dedicating focus time to download all of your thoughts increases visibility and allows the brain to think. Most of the time you either store ideas or you think about them so you might as well leverage a separate storage mechanism so your brain can do what paper won’t: elaborate, criticize, observe, reflect, refine, review.
- How great is it to be able to revisit your ideas time and time again? When your ideas are organized, visible and prioritized, you become empowered to act on them with clarity and discipline.
Reference material
- Obsidian (https://obsidian.md)