Idea Management for Lawyers?

Continuing my thoughts from my previous post ...

Mark Cuban has a great post on his Blog Maverick weblog. If you haven't made Mark's blog a daily read, you really should. He writes about his team, the Dallas Mavericks, but he also writes about his life, investing, and how he's succeeded in business. In the fourth installment in his "Success and Motivation" series, Mark writes about the making mistakes and the competitive advantages he has realized by consuming as much information as he could:

You never quite know in business if what you are doing is the right or wrong thing. Unfortunately, by the time you know the answer, someone has beat you to it and you are out of business. I used to tell myself that it was ok to make little mistakes, just dont make the big ones. I would continuously search for new ideas. I read every book and magazine I could. Heck, 3 bucks for a magazine, 20 bucks for a book. One good idea that lead to a customer or solution and it paid for itself many times over. Some of the ideas i read were good, some not. In doing all the reading I learned a valuable lesson.

Everything I read was public. Anyone could buy the same books and magazines. The same information was available to anyone who wanted it. Turns out most people didnt want it.

I remember going into customers or talking to people in the industry and tossing out tidbits about software or hardware. Features that worked , bugs in the sofware. All things I had read. I expected the ongoing response of “oh yeah, i read that too in such and such”. Thats not what happened. They hadnt read it then, and they havent started reading yet.

I think this stuff happens to blog readers all the time -- I know it does to me. We are exposed to an exponentially greater amount of information distilled from the blogs we read and the writers who write them then the average person. As a consequence, I think blog readers have a lot more ideas.

My question is what is the best way to manage this tremendous amount of great stuff? It doesn't seem like a problem of managing knowledge, but rather ideas. For me, ideas are the hardest thing in the world to manage. Google "Idea Management" and you get 11,700 results. Google "Knowledge Management" and the results top 3,000,000.

For me, one of the ways I manage my ideas is with this blog. Sharing the cool things I come across is just one side benefit to having a great place to store all of the things I find. Another way is by using mind mapping software (pay) (free) However, I need a better way to keep track of my daily ideas.