How to successfully implement your ideas

How to successfully implement your ideas

Business and self-development are great topics! You learn a bunch of new things in a very short time, meet really cool people and find inspiration on what you can improve in your life and your businesses right away. But very often, you return inspired and motivated, but after a week or two, nothing has changed. The motivation drowned in day-to-day operations, the cool people already forgot about you and none of the improvements have been implemented. So, how can you change that? How to successfully implement your ideas?

Step 1: Schedule the idea implementation

Ideas are worthless if not implemented. Therefore, the first step is to schedule when you will take a deeper look at your idea. You won’t always have immediately time to work on an idea. So, you may need to schedule it to not forget about it.

You think this sounds simple? Yes, it is. But this is THE step, most people already skip – and then they wonder why nothing happens.

Our brain can only memorize a certain number of things in a day. If you are at an event, you will get so much input in a short time, that you will ultimately forget at least 80% of it in the first 2 days. The longer you wait with the implementation, the more likely you are to forget what you wanted to do. So, write it in your schedule!

Step 2: Evaluate and assess the idea

Before you jump right into implementing your ideas, take a moment to evaluate what impact the idea implementation will have for you.

• What results do you expect as an outcome?
• How much time are you willing to allocate to it?
• Are there other ideas that could generate similar results?
• Have you had other ideas that you could implement jointly with this idea? (to kill 2 birds with one stone)
• Did you try to implement this idea previously? If yes, why did it fail? What are your lessons learnt and why do you think that this time will be better?

I strongly recommend taking time for this assessment and being 100% clear about what you are going for and why. Because you will need commitment to get it done. As a result of this evaluation, you should decide on whether you want to move forward with the idea implementation. If yes, you should be clear about the scope of what you want to do.

Step 3: Prepare and plan implementing your ideas

If you decided to move forward with the idea, start creating a plan to implement the idea. Write down what needs to get done to make it happen and break it down into work packages. This means, cluster the required activities to implement the idea into logical packages.

For example, if you want to create a new online course, you will need to create the content, record the material, set up everything technical, market and sell it. These are different packages. Some packages can be done in parallel; some require certain other tasks to be finalized first. Thus, you need to know whether there are dependencies and how this could impact your overall completion status.

If you lack any information, research it online or ask people who already did what you plan to do. Last but not least, put a timeline to your work packages. Define milestones that break your project into smaller pieces and that help you keep the motivation high.

Step 4: Implementing the idea itself

Once you have your implementation plan, go to work to get it done. Now you have the choice to either do it yourself (if you have the time, the skills, and no other conflicting priorities) or you can get yourself support for the implementation.

The support could be through delegating the task to your own team. Alternatively, if you have no team yet to support with this, you can outsource the implementation to external experts. Depending on your idea, these could be designers, consultants, assistants, technical staff, or any other specialists.

If you keep delaying the implementation of ideas frequently, use the option to delegate the tasks. It does not move you forward if you treasure up all the tasks on your desk and never get them done. Be pragmatic: if you have no time and you want it to be done, delegate it.

Step 5: Track your progress

Whether you implement the idea yourself or whether you outsource or delegate it, you always need to track the progress. Life happens to all of us. And if we don’t keep an eye on things that matter to us, we tend to get off track.

Based on your milestones, track whether you are still on track or whether corrections are needed. Is the project moving forward? Are you still in the originally planned timeline? How much is still to do?

Especially when you outsource or delegate tasks, you want to get regular updates on the status. If you realize that it is not really moving forward, you need to intervene. Nobody will have a bigger interest in getting this done than you. Don’t expect other people to do your job. And it is your job to make sure things are moving forward.

Always keep your eye on the prize – your target! Never start implementing an idea that does not generate a positive result. And to measure whether the result is achieved, you need to track it regularly.

That’s how you implement any idea, whether small or large. It may require some exercise if you have never done that before. But the more often you do it, the more natural it becomes to you – and the faster you will implement your ideas. Because as you know: speed of implementation is everything!