I started run­ning around 4 months ago. I was imme­di­ately entranced by it and even blogged about my expe­ri­ence, extolling the virtues of run com­mut­ing and the dra­matic ben­e­fit I received from the activity.

I was par­tic­u­larly smit­ten in my last post, hav­ing man­aged to run over 5 km on the road with­out a rest in just 27 min­utes and 38 sec­onds. I gushed about how each and every run made me feel great about myself, and enthu­si­as­ti­cally announced my goal to begin run­ning at least 15 km per week (ide­ally over 20 km).

Given my sub­se­quent silence, you might sus­pect that my run­ning activ­i­ties grad­u­ally faded out. But sur­pris­ingly, this is one exer­cise fad which hasn’t fallen off with time. This fad has become rather more than just a phase; it’s become a lifestyle.

The week after my blog post in June I hit my tar­get and ran just over 20 km. The week after that I ran my first ever 10 km route. Dur­ing the month fol­low­ing my post, I ran an aver­age of over 15 km per week, hit­ting my tar­get. I kept that up right through July.

In the lat­ter half of July I ran my first ever non-stop 10km, and the week after that I ran a non-stop 16 km out-and-back route. In August I ran a total of 66 km, even though I was away at a fes­ti­val for four days.

Sep­tem­ber was expected to suf­fer from slow progress: I was going away on hol­i­day for an all inclu­sive week of binge eat­ing and loung­ing in the sun. Despite that, I ran 10 km non-stop, 13 km non-stop and 16 km non-stop. I even ran 5 km three times dur­ing my hol­i­day in Tener­ife! The hard work paid off, because I ended up run­ning 84 km (aver­ag­ing almost 20km a week). If keep that up for a year, I’ll have run over 1,000 km!

Octo­ber con­tin­ued the trend, and it has been a very good month. In 31 days, I’ve run over 125 km. I ran a 36 km week, a 20 km week, a 42 km week and a 27 km week. I ran my fastest ever 5 km route (24 min­utes and 19 sec­onds), my fastest ever 10 km route (51 min­utes and 10 sec­onds) and my first ever half marathon (a self-imposed race which took me 2 hours and 9 minutes).

I’ve achieved a lot. But what are the results? To quote from my last post:

Aside from the imme­di­ate boosts fol­low­ing the activ­ity, I really do feel bet­ter over­all. I have more energy. I feel more pro­duc­tive. My mind is more active. I need less cof­fee. My mus­cles feel stronger, my lungs strain less, my body feels less flabby and I’m grad­u­ally los­ing weight.

It’s all still true. I feel com­fort­able in my skin. I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been—mentally as well as phys­i­cally. I’m fit, I’m happy, and I’m healthy. My BMI is now rapidly approach­ing 25, and I’m about to hit “nor­mal weight” for the first time since I reached adulthood.

When I feel tired, I run to perk myself up. When I feel ener­getic, I run to let myself go. When I feel stressed, I run to clear my head. When I feel peace­ful, I run to enjoy the rhythm of my feet.

For me, run­ning has been life chang­ing. I can’t rec­om­mend it enough.

Last win­ter, I saw a post by Twit­ter come­dian and voiceover per­former Scott Fletcher jok­ing about how awe­some a knuckle tat­too gen­er­a­tor would be. You know what I mean by knuckle tat­toos, right? Pic­ture the clas­sic love hate tat­toos, each let­ter on a dif­fer­ent knuckle.

Scott’s throw­away tweet made me chuckle. Pick two ran­dom four let­ter word, and tat­too them onto a pair of fists. Hilar­ity is bound to ensue. Well, I found myself bored one evening a few weeks ago and fig­ured I’d spent a cou­ple of hours cook­ing up just such a gen­er­a­tor. It didn’t take too long—the recipe was simple.

1. Crack out some basic PHP, and whisk together a quick script.
2. Add one lov­ingly pho­to­shopped image.
3. Layer the base with a suit­able open source font from The League of Move­able Type.
4. Add a dash of HTML struc­ture and CSS posi­tion­ing to hold the mix­ture firm.
5. Gen­tly fold a 2,000 word list into the mix­ture. Do this grad­u­ally, painstak­ingly refin­ing the list as you go to ensure it con­tains only the fun­ni­est four let­ter words.
6. Bake at 180°C for 2 hours, and allow to cool.

Voilà! You now have your very own knuckle tat­too gen­er­a­tor—I call mine Fist­bump.

If you fancy wast­ing a few min­utes, check it out and let me know what you think. Refresh the page or click the Ran­dom­ize link to get a new word combo, or use the Perma­link option to save your favourite phrase.

Of course, all credit for the idea goes to @MrScottFletcher.

Some of you may remem­ber (or may even have used!) my free tele­phone num­ber (and area code) to time­zone con­verter, Sun­dial. It’s a quick tool I threw together to solve a very par­tic­u­lar prob­lem: I make a lot of inter­na­tional calls at work to US clients and prospects and I want to con­vert tele­phone num­bers to time­zones quickly and easily.

Sun­dial was a very sim­ple web­ser­vice using a hacky Python script and a few CSVs. It did the job… and that was that. It had a fair num­ber of defects such as miss­ing DST sup­port and a clut­tered home­page, and I decided a few weeks ago that it was about time I addressed these issues.

I took the oppor­tu­nity to brush up on my Java, and I re-implemented the entire thing from scratch over the course of a cou­ple of evenings using Java servlets, JSON and the Google App Engine. (By the way, the App Engine is an excel­lent free plat­form for small tools and pro­to­types — check it out.)

As before, you can use dialti.me in a few dif­fer­ent ways. The sim­plest is to visit the dialti.me web­site and enter a US tele­phone num­ber that you would like to lookup. For­mat is unimportant—the num­ber will be extracted as nec­es­sary. And as before, the alter­na­tive way in which one can use dialti.me is to nav­i­gate directly to http://app.dialti.me/Mobile: (651) 342.2323 or sim­i­lar. It works well with Fire­fox key­words or as a Chrome cus­tom search engine, too.

Unlike Sun­dial, dialti.me might actu­ally see some fur­ther devel­op­ment such as sup­port for inter­na­tional num­bers. I’d love to hear any sug­ges­tions you might have, or feed­back on the design. Let me know how you get on in the com­ments, or drop me an email.

There are plenty of arti­cles online that tell us that work­ing out makes us bet­ter entre­pre­neurs, makes us more suc­cess­ful, keeps us awake, and so on. Exer­cise is reg­u­larly billed as being an excel­lent way to improve your gen­eral alert­ness, pro­duc­tiv­ity and lifestyle while get­ting fit­ter and adding years to your life in the process. No sur­prises there, then.

Well, I recently decided that it was time to start lis­ten­ing to this wealth of med­ical advice. I’ve been over­weight since my sixth-form col­lege years (around 17–18, for the non-British read­ers). I haven’t been a full-on fatty, but I’ve been larger than I’d like to be. A BMI between 20–25 is con­sid­ered nor­mal, 25–30 is con­sid­ered over­weight, and 30+ is con­sid­ered obese. I moved gen­tly but con­sis­tently from a BMI of around 24 in 2005 to a BMI of 31 in 2009. Yes, by 2009 I was tech­ni­cally con­sid­ered obese.

I’d like to stress here that real­is­ti­cally I was by no means obese, but I was cer­tainly over­weight and—more importantly—I was unhappy with my body shape. I was unfit, eas­ily caught out of breath and flab­bier than I was happy with. Sev­eral times over the course of my degree I’d attempted to break this cycle through exer­cise, and I repeat­edly failed.

In 2009 I fig­ured out there are two secrets to suc­cess for me.

1. Eat smaller por­tions. You’ll be full any­way, and you’ll con­sume sign­f­i­cantly fewer calories.
2. Find a way to inte­grate exer­cise into your daily rou­tine in such a way that it does not detract from your free time.

I used those meth­ods with vigour, and by 2010 I was down to a BMI of 27.5. Not tech­ni­cally a “nor­mal” mass, but out­wardly I appeared healthy enough, I’d reduced by waist size sig­nif­i­cantly from 38 inches to 34 inches, and I felt bet­ter about myself. I kept a bal­ance for the next 18 months, didn’t change much in terms of weight, and aside from the loss of some mus­cle mass I’d built up I remained in pretty good shape.

Fast for­ward to Spring 2011. I’m bit­ten by an over­whelm­ing urge to lower my cur­rent BMI of 28 and finally hit that “nor­mal weight” to which I’d always aspired. I had moved house to a new loca­tion around 5km from my place of work, yet despite cycling to work every day and eat­ing sen­si­bly I didn’t really seem to be able to lose any weight. But mov­ing house really opened up a new door for me: the real­is­tic prospect of “run commuting”.

Now, I’m no run­ner. Between 2005 and 2011 I prob­a­bly ran less than 100 km — and that includes a sum­mer dur­ing which I ran on a tread­mill almost daily! So why was I so keen to run to work? Well, run­ning has a quin­tes­sen­tial prop­erty which seems to be miss­ing from cycling: it feels like hard work.

You know what? It is. I threw myself in at the deep end and just decided I’d run to work — and if I couldn’t man­age it, I’d have to damn-well walk. So I did. And I ran fur­ther than expected. I had to stop reg­u­larly to walk, but it felt really good. I ached, but I felt as if my body was ener­gized all day. It might be my imag­i­na­tion, but I thought I could feel the increased metabolism.

It was great. So the next week I did it again — this time using Run­K­eeper and the accom­pa­ny­ing Android app to track my pace, loca­tion and dis­tance. And the next week, I did it again. Twice.

It’s now just over a month since I started run com­mut­ing, and in that time I’ve run over 55 km. This morn­ing I ran over 5km on the road with­out stop­ping for the first time in my life, and I did it in 27 min­utes and 38 sec­onds — a per­sonal best. Every time I run I feel great about myself, and every time I run I’m dri­ven to go fur­ther and faster than I did before. I now plan to start run­ning three times a week, with a min­i­mum dis­tance to cover of 15 km per week (ide­ally over 20 km).

What are the results? Aside from the imme­di­ate boosts fol­low­ing the activ­ity, I really do feel bet­ter over­all. I have more energy. I feel more pro­duc­tive. My mind is more active. I need less cof­fee. My mus­cles feel stronger, my lungs strain less, my body feels less flabby and I’m grad­u­ally los­ing weight — now sport­ing a BMI of around 27 (and falling).

Run com­mut­ing has been an unmit­i­gated suc­cess, and I would rec­om­mend it to any­one who lives less than 4 miles from work. Just try it, take walk­ing breaks as often as you need to, and soon enough you’ll be run­ning the whole dis­tance non-stop. It won’t be long before you’re fit­ter, hap­pier and more productive.

Even the most slovenly of brains are con­stantly solv­ing prob­lems. We look for ways to make our lives eas­ier, to make our­selves hap­pier, to make our­selves richer or even just to pass the time. We all solve prob­lems all day, every day. Our brains are churn­ing out novel solu­tions to every­day prob­lems in every wak­ing moment. For some of us,

There’s only one dif­fer­ence between entre­pre­neurs and the rest of the world. To sum it up in 10 words:
Entre­pre­neurs don’t just have ideas. They bring them to life.

Next time you won­der what the dif­fer­ence is between you and the next young mil­lion­aire (or bil­lion­aire), I want you to stop pre­tend­ing you don’t know the answer. It’s sim­ple: every­one has ideas, but entre­pre­neurs make their ideas into real­ity. Now stop read­ing Red­dit, stop watch­ing TV, stop play­ing games and get out there and build something.

I just wanted to write a quick follow-up to my post yes­ter­day on Diaspora’s fail­ure to prac­tice what they preach and imple­ment real pri­vacy con­trols on basic user information.

Yes­ter­day I said that to date, the Dias­pora devel­op­ers had “failed to inte­grate their most basic premise into the soft­ware design. They’ve missed the point from first prin­ci­ples.” Well, a cou­ple of friends on Twit­ter called me out on this and asked whether I’d actu­ally checked out the back-end code to be sure about my accu­sa­tions. Maybe Dias­pora was just lack­ing a UI to make the rel­e­vant changes? This is alpha soft­ware, after all.

Well, they had a point. And thanks to the beauty of open source source, I was able to down­load the source code directly and take a look for myself. I only got as far as look­ing at the data­base schemas, but it looks to me like the data­base layer would require sig­nif­i­cant work to bring pro­file infor­ma­tion into their aspect-based pri­vacy model.

The aspect model is clearly built around con­trol­ling vis­i­bil­ity of posts, which starts out by encom­pass­ing “wall posts” and will cas­cade to include com­ments, pho­tos, men­tions, videos and every­thing else that flows from there. At first glance, the team have done well. They seem to have laid the foun­da­tion of their pri­vacy approach on bedrock, build­ing their phi­los­o­phy into the soft­ware from the ground-up. Their ini­tial design will nat­u­rally affect every­thing based on their cen­tral idea of a “post” as the net­work grows and fea­tures are added.

The only prob­lem? Pro­file infor­ma­tion does not sen­si­bly fall into this model in any way. It’s cur­rently stored in fields in the Pro­file model in a non-extensible way which is entirely dis­con­nected from posts. To allow pro­file infor­ma­tion to fall into line with the rest of their aspect-centric approach, they’d need to refac­tor the user pro­file mod­els pretty heav­ily (which admit­tedly they will likely want to do any­way even­tu­ally, given the lim­ited nature of their cur­rent design) and they will also have to rework with the basis of the aspect model or the way in which users and user pro­files are connected.

In other words, their foun­da­tions aren’t built on bedrock at all. They’ve laid them two storeys up, estab­lish­ing their ground­work on top of the hastily-constructed user model they already had in place.

Fix­ing this omis­sion cer­tainly doesn’t look like a triv­ial job. And in addi­tion, let’s not for­get that any rework­ing of their basic mod­els at the data­base layer would nat­u­rally have to fall through the rest of the MVC lay­ers to the UI too. This is not an insub­stan­tial over­haul. Given that the Dias­pora project doesn’t even have a note about this on their roadmap, my ini­tial assump­tion that they’ll have to hack this sup­port in and bolt it on later when it’s too late to refac­tor prop­erly seems accurate.

All of the above shouldn’t be taken to mean that noth­ing can be done and the prob­lem is unre­solv­able, but there is a rea­son­able amount of work involved and it would mean pretty fun­da­men­tal changes to their core mod­els. It’s not some­thing that could get imple­mented as a quick patch; this change would require full sup­port of the core devel­op­ment team. Open source is indeed beau­ti­ful thing that enables us to trust our soft­ware and gain under­stand­ing of how it works, but some­times you just have to hold your hands up and admit defeat.

Dias­pora is fun­da­men­tally miss­ing the point of their own phi­los­o­phy, and there’s noth­ing we can do but wait and see how they end up fix­ing it later down the line. Will it be a Facebook-style mess of pri­vacy con­trols? I hope not, but at present the odds aren’t look­ing good.

I was recently able to sign-up to Dias­pora thanks to the kind­ness of some friends on Twit­ter. I’d been quite excited at the idea of an open-source net­work, dis­trib­uted across many machines and admin­is­tered by any­one who cares to run their own instance (or “pod”, as Dias­pora calls them). The pods inter­con­nect, the net­work grows, and every­one can feel lov­ingly involved in a real social net­work that was built from the ground up on open technology.

It’s a bit dead at the moment, and very lack­ing in fea­tures com­pared to any other ser­vice you might care to join, but that’s fine. It’s in alpha, and miss­ing fea­tures are to be expected (along with a good help­ing of bugs). My real issue with the ser­vice, and the one that lead me to com­pose this blog post under such a dis­mayed title, is that Dias­pora is already fail­ing to meet the expec­ta­tions they set about con­trol over pri­vacy and sharing.

One of the core thrusts of Dias­pora is the big bold mes­sage on their home­page: “Share what you want, with whom you want.” In accor­dance with this, they have imple­mented aspects: con­tacts must be cat­e­go­rized into dif­fer­ent sets of users (which may over­lap as required) so that you can choose what you share and only dis­close it to the cho­sen con­tacts. This, they sug­gest, allows you to share the 3 nice pic­tures from your night out with col­leagues while your friends can see the full dam­age (i.e. the other 47 images). It’s a nice idea, and one that appeals to me. It’s sim­pler than Facebook’s messy pri­vacy model and seems to be built-in from the ground up. Or does it?

One of the first things I tried to do was to hide my birth­day from any­one other than close friends and fam­ily. It’s a silly thing, but I thought it would be nice to share my real date of birth only with my friends; the rest of the world should see noth­ing, or per­haps just the year in which I was born. Not a big deal, but a rea­son­able thing to want to pro­tect given how often date of birth is used in var­i­ous secu­rity mechanisms.

I flipped to my Pro­file Set­tings, but couldn’t see how one might restrict cer­tain parts of one’s pro­file to par­tic­u­lar aspects. Nei­ther biog­ra­phy, loca­tion, photo, or birth­day could be hid­den away. It’s not just that I was in the wrong part of the web­site, which was my first thought: there is no way to con­trol which of your con­tacts see which parts of your user profile.

This is a very basic start­ing point. Even Face­book gets this right. Yet Diaspora—the social net­work that allows you to “share what you want, with whom you want.”—has missed the point entirely.

I know this is almost silly. After all, there’s not much in your pro­file you’d real­is­ti­cally want to restrict at present. But there are use cases for doing so now, even para­noid secu­rity rea­sons. And what’s more, when you can even­tu­ally add infor­ma­tion like employ­ment details, reli­gion or sex­u­al­ity, one might very well want to restrict cer­tain infor­ma­tion to close friends or family.

I did post a con­tracted ver­sion of this rant on Dias­pora itself, and a friend com­mented that per­haps I should try to get involved with devel­op­ment. It’s not a par­tic­u­larly sat­is­fac­tory response. Indeed, the only bad thing about open source tech­nol­ogy is that one can­not make dis­ap­pointed noises with­out some­body else sug­gest­ing they get involved and fix the issue them­selves. It’s a poor response when peo­ple say it on the Gen­too forums, and it’s a poor response when it gets trot­ted out on a social net­work too.

To date, the devel­op­ers have failed to inte­grate their most basic premise into the soft­ware design. They’ve missed the point from first prin­ci­ples. And, like secu­rity mod­els, try­ing to bolt the right behav­iour on to the appli­ca­tion later down the line will be a los­ing bat­tle: you’ll never plug all the holes. I’m not sure any indi­vid­ual hack­ing on the exist­ing code­base can make a real difference.

Despite all of the above, I will indeed keep a close eye on Dias­pora and I’m not going to give up on it. But at present, the dis­par­ity between their mar­ket­ing blurb and their soft­ware is almost unpalatable.

Last week marked a momen­tous change for the UK account­ing indus­try. On April Fools Day 2011, it became manda­tory for UK com­pa­nies to report their statu­tory accounts and tax com­pu­ta­tions in a new for­mat called Inline XBRL. This change trans­formed the way in which orga­ni­za­tions report to HMRC in one fell swoop, simul­ta­ne­ously end­ing the centuries-old prac­tice of fil­ing on paper and unsanc­ti­mo­niously boot­ing PDF fil­ings out of the door (except in very par­tic­u­lar cir­cum­stances). As of now, every com­pany in the UK must file elec­tron­i­cally using a struc­tured data format.

Inline XBRL, oth­er­wise known as iXBRL, is an incred­i­bly ele­gant solu­tion to finan­cial report­ing. A deriv­a­tive of XHTML, iXBRL allows users to pro­duce human-readable doc­u­ments that can be ren­dered in web browser while also allow­ing them to embed addi­tional struc­tured data. When processed by a com­pli­ant proces­sor, an iXBRL doc­u­ment is trans­formed into an XBRL instance document—a for­mat used by gov­ern­ments, reg­u­la­tors and ana­lysts world­wide. For those of you that don’t work in the world of finan­cial report­ing, iXBRL really is a very neat option: the very same data that is read by human eyes can be trans­formed into an XML–based machine-readable for­mat by any iXBRL com­pli­ant proces­sor, allow­ing a sin­gle source doc­u­ment to be used by ana­lysts and BI tools alike.

For the aver­age user, iXBRL means that the doc­u­ments seen on-screen are com­pa­ra­ble to the Word doc­u­ments, Excel doc­u­ments or even PDF doc­u­ments which they are replac­ing (and in many cases, the doc­u­ments from which they were gen­er­ated). Pro­vided it doesn’t hin­der machine-readability or require dupli­ca­tion of data, this famil­iar­ity can only be a good thing. The fact that iXBRL also hides away the hideous angle-bracket-and-slash-infected nature of XBRL doesn’t hurt either. XBRL may well be a great for­mat which is ideal for con­sis­tent, com­pa­ra­ble, and process­able finan­cial report­ing, but it’s miles away from any­thing an accoun­tant would actu­ally want to use or understand.

On a global scale, iXBRL is going to be a big deal pri­mar­ily because it solves the kind of prob­lems that the US have been endur­ing for years. The largest cor­po­ra­tions in Amer­ica have to file their 10-K and 10-Q reports to the SEC, but they have to file two copies of their returns: one in XBRL for­mat, and one in HTML for­mat. One pro­vides struc­tured data, and the other merely allows the ana­lysts who have been rely­ing on read­able returns for decades to con­tinue doing their jobs. This leaves us in a hor­ri­ble half-way house, with dupli­ca­tion of effort (and data!) plus a bor­ing, tire­some job com­par­ing the two doc­u­ments to ensure that they are con­sis­tent. Worse, it means that every­one can ignore the XBRL fil­ings for a few more years and work with the same HTML EDGAR fil­ings they’re already com­fort­able with—reducing the impe­tus for com­pa­nies to pro­duce high-quality XBRL returns.

In the UK, the sharp charge to iXBRL has deliv­ered all of the ben­e­fits of HTML and XBRL for­mats while cut­ting out the draw­backs of being forced to pre­pare both. I’d be will­ing to bet that even though the UK is the first coun­try to make the leap to iXBRL, it won’t be the last.

Wel­come to the world stage, iXBRL. You’re a wel­come addi­tion to the sta­ble of finan­cial report­ing for­mats, and I bet you’ll also be one of the most durable.

(With apolo­gies to Lou Bega…)

Ladies and Gen­tle­men, this is Quan­tum Num­ber 5.

s, p, d, f, g
Every­body in the lab, so come on let’s see;
Drive a quan­tum oscil­la­tor
They say that it’s clas­si­cally for­bid­den
But so did Weber.

Funded like we were last week
We need more kit,
but hydrogen’s cheap
I like Niels Bohr, Max Born, and Erwin Schro­dinger,
(I won’t touch Marie Curie
Cos she was a minger!)

Blame uncer­tainty, nothing’s cer­tain any more,
Posi­tion or time, we just guess what’s in store,
Nobody knows, but it’s all good, let me dump it
Please send in the trumpet

Cho­rus:
A lit­tle bit of Heisen­berg in my life
A lit­tle bit of Fermi by my side
A lit­tle bit of Pauli is all I need
A lit­tle bit of Planck is what I see
A lit­tle bit of Feyn­mann in the sun
A lit­tle bit of Zee­man all night long
A lit­tle bit of Ein­stein here I am
I’m quan­tum theory’s biggest fan.

(Quan­tum num­ber five)

Spin up and down and tun­nel all around
The ideas are pro­found
But keep your feet on the ground
Emit a pho­ton left
And a pho­ton right
One to the front
And one to the side
Check spec­tral lines once
Spec­tral lines twice
And if it looks like this
You didn’t model it right

Cho­rus:
A lit­tle bit of Heisen­berg in my life
A lit­tle bit of Fermi by my side
A lit­tle bit of Pauli is all I need
A lit­tle bit of Planck is what I see
A lit­tle bit of Feyn­mann in the sun
A lit­tle bit of Zee­man all night long
A lit­tle bit of Ein­stein here I am
I’m quan­tum theory’s biggest fan.

(Pro­ton)
(The pro­ton)
(Quan­tum num­ber five)
(laugh)

Cho­rus:
A lit­tle bit of Heisen­berg in my life
A lit­tle bit of Fermi by my side
A lit­tle bit of Pauli is all I need
A lit­tle bit of Planck is what I see
A lit­tle bit of Feyn­mann in the sun
A lit­tle bit of Zee­man all night long
A lit­tle bit of Ein­stein here I am
I’m quan­tum theory’s biggest fan.

I do all to
Get entan­gled with a girl like you
When you inter­act, we’ll change together
With spooky action through the ether.

(Quan­tum num­ber five)

In the past, I’ve extolled the virtues of work­ing with a pen and paper to enhance cre­ativ­ity. I’m a firm believer that get­ting offline and giv­ing your­self some room to be cre­ative beyond the key­board is a great way to dis­cover and develop new ideas.

I prac­tice what I preach, and over the past few months I’ve been using a cheap ruled note­book for this very pur­pose. But this cheap note­book which is on hand wher­ever I go, so it some­how seems to get used for every­thing from meet­ing notes to shop­ping lists. The sim­ple util­ity of always car­ry­ing a pen and paper has in itself man­aged to detract from my cre­ative process. Now when I try to get inspired, I have to trawl through page-upon-page of scrib­blings about other menial tasks and irrel­e­vant notes which seem to end up dis­tract­ing me from my imme­di­ate goals.

This prob­lem was a sim­ple one to solve: get a new note­book which will be used purely for busi­ness ideas and inno­va­tion, and carry both note­books around with me.

The note­book I chose for this pur­pose is the won­der­ful Mole­sk­ine Pocket Ruled Note­book. Con­sid­er­ing this is essen­tially “just” a note­book, I can’t over­state the sim­ple beauty that Mole­sk­ines offer. The form fac­tor is stun­ning. The hefty 192 pages have a won­der­ful weight to them, as well as being lined and acid-free. The note­book also has a rib­bon place­holder, elas­tic strap to hold the note­book shut, and a back pocket to hold any loose slips of paper.

Buy­ing such a beau­ti­ful note­book has helped me out in more ways than one. Now I have a ded­i­cated space for creativity—something I find myself treat­ing as an hal­lowed, almost sacred object. I wouldn’t dare use it for any­thing other than the intended pur­pose. Plus the pages are thread bound, so any temp­ta­tion to rip them out when I write down some­thing rub­bish is dra­mat­i­cally reduced.

I’ve decided to use the Mole­sk­ine as a library of busi­ness ideas. When­ever I think of a poten­tial busi­ness propo­si­tion, I turn to the next free double-page in the note­book and write as much or as lit­tle as comes to mind. I leave the full double-page ded­i­cated to that sin­gle idea, move the rib­bon place­holder to the next page, and close the book.

This process is slowly but surely pro­vid­ing me with a beau­ti­ful repos­i­tory of raw poten­tial. When­ever I want some inspi­ra­tion, I have pages of oppor­tu­ni­ties to browse. Each time I do, it seems inevitable that I come up with new addi­tions and thoughts which can be noted against each cen­tral idea. In time, I expect that this book will be full of such a vari­ety of ideas (some won­der­ful, some ter­ri­ble) that start­ing a side busi­ness is almost inevitable!

The point I’m try­ing to make is a sim­ple one: cre­ativ­ity is impor­tant, but so is respect for your ideas. Treat­ing inspi­ra­tion with rev­er­ence beyond a quick scrib­ble will help you to build a bank of great ideas with real potential—and doing so in a book you can be proud to carry will only make the process eas­ier. Invest in ideas today. You’ll thank me in the future.

How do you cap­ture your win­ning ideas and make sure you don’t for­get them for­ever? Do you have a great process for refin­ing them over time? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.