We have been talking about the importance of a growth mindset. If we look at growth as a natural byproduct of good habits we practice on a regular basis, the first habit is preparing the soil of your mind. The second one is planting.

We writers deal with thousands of seeds. Those seeds are ideas. They are scraps of stories, articles, books, speeches, or workshops. Ideas come and go by the dozens every day. It’s hard to tell in the moment which ones are worth keeping, and which we should discard.

That’s why we need to make a habit of planting those seeds—in other words, keeping track of them. Much has been written about different systems to organize your ideas. You can use printed journals, computer apps, a notecard system, or any of a dozen other ways to store and organize ideas.

The system doesn’t matter as much as your consistency in recording those ideas and keeping them somewhere you can retrieve them. A good option is to use a combination of tools—perhaps a small notebook you carry with you, plus apps where you transfer ideas and then search for them later.

If you want a harvest of good writing, you have to plant your ideas in some kind of system where they can take shape. Don’t trust your memory. Many great ideas have been lost because people forgot to write them down.

If you don’t have a good system, ask three writer friends what they use and start implementing a system within the next day.

Question: Do you have a system in place to record and retrieve your ideas?