What happens if you start giving your index cards steroids? They grow real big. As you know, I’ve been chatting on about The Blog Studio for a couple of weeks now. I’ve been doing rather a lot of reading and note taking, and the idea is starting to take form. To help it along, I’ve begun to organize my thoughts and develop a formal business plan.

I’ve had such success working with my hipster PDA that I decided to take the idea up a notch. We’ve just finished renovating our basement (thank you line of credit), so I have a couple of undisturbed walls to work with. I simply taped up a bunch of newsprint, and labeled each one with a concept related to TBS. For example, the sheets you can see on the right are labeled packages, FAQ, Handbook, Who should blog?, Technical issues, Marketing ideas, etc. If I thought of another concept I just added another sheet.

Next I went through my notes and jotted the idea on the relevant concept sheet. Sitting down on the floor (note to self: sweep), I was able to see my whole idea. I could go from macro to micro with the sweep of an eye. I felt kind of like I was inside the idea. I could make connections that would have otherwise been too obscure. Walking back and forth from sheet to sheet, my neurons were firing at a fantastic pace. Because I was only a few steps from each concept sheet, I was able to get everything down and into its proper spot. Talk about being in the flow!

Suffice it to say that this has been a rather valuable experience. I was struggling with how to cope with an idea as large as TBS. But this technique has allowed me to grasp the whole thing in a particularly visceral way.

The whole TBS concept has gelled to the point where I’ve started to work on the site. I had a stack of sticky notes with me, and decided to try to layout the site map using the few square feet of wall I hadn’t already plastered. I haven’t gotten very far with it yet (it was mother’s day yesterday and all), but it seems very promising.

There’s something very different about interacting with a physical environment vs my computer. It’s as though my body’s intelligence was acting in addition to my brain’s. Moving my head, I’d catch something in my periphery that was somehow related to whatever I had on my mind. It happened too often to be a coincidence. My brain was working in a different way than had I been sitting at my desk. I learned a couple of lessons:

• big ideas need big spaces
• moving is great for brainstorming
• looking at a physical space is a good way to grasp a complicated concept.

I have no doubt there’s nothing particularly new about either of these techniques. They’re new to me though, and grow directly from my experience with the hipster PDA. They are very powerful tools for brainstorming and organizing ideas. I’ll be doing this a whole lot more.