A few days ago I ran across a mental exercise that I haven’t done in a few years. I have a feeling it was mentioned in one of the RSS feeds that I subscribe to. I wish I could remember where I saw it because they deserve a nod, but my mind is drawing a blank. If you figure out where I came across this, let me know in the comments so I can give credit where due. The idea: make a list of 100 items.

The purpose here is not to just write down the first 100 things that pop into your mind. (Although that’s close.) The list needs to have a unifying theme. For example, if you will be bringing a baby home soon, you could list 100 possible baby names. Why would you do this?

I have a feeling that this applies to some degree to most people, but I’m going to talk specifically about myself here. When I am brainstorming ideas in my head, I often come up with the top 3-5 that I think are the big winners pretty quickly. With a little mental concentration I can wrangle up some other ideas from the darkest recesses of my mind, but I keep coming back to my top picks. I really have to focus on setting those aside, so that I can consider other possibilities.

Something different happens when I actually write out a list. Once I’ve got those top ideas written down on paper, it’s much easier to stop thinking about them. The challenge changes. Instead of trying to brainstorm the “best” or “correct” answer, the challenge becomes to get as many possibilities down on paper as I can.

The result is that I get the obvious answers out of the way quickly. After the first 20 or 30 options, I start stretching my brain to come up with ideas that are new. Obviously some of the ideas will end up being impractical or flawed in some other way, but I usually find a few gems.

So how do you use this? I think it is particularly effective when you focus on a goal. Do you want to make money? Lose weight? Get in the Guinness Book of World Records? I just did this exercise to brainstorm ways I could be making money from my freelance web development business. All of the things that one would expect on this type of list made their appearance. I could do web hosting, I could branch out into related services like SEO, and I could sell template sites.

I also came up with some ideas that I’d never had before. Most of them don’t fit the direction I want this business to go, but there were some interesting ones in the mix. I noticed at the end that several of my ideas revolved around the idea of creating a curriculum to teach people how to become freelance web developers. I came up with the notion of building an entire business around creating seasonal style sheets that would give sites a different look for Christmas and other major holidays.

I also had a few juicy ideas that I might implement, but you won’t hear about those for a few more months.

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