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[Ep 207]\n\n\n\nOn my drive to Minneapolis to serve on the faculty of Northwestern Christian Writers Conference, I listened to podcasts: one after another, back-to-back.\n\nI welcomed that stream of input filling my mind with ideas, strategies, and solutions that I can apply to my writing life.\n\nBut it\u2019s easy to listen and then forget what I heard. What a waste if I devote hours to listening but never remember or apply what the experts recommend!\n\nLife is short. I want to learn and grow and transform\u2014I want to become wiser and more discerning. I\u2019m committed to implementing those ideas!\nSort and Stack\nSo first I capture the information. Later, you know what I do?\n\nI sort and stack it.\n\nI\u2019ve done this for years without having a name or phrase to put with it, but author Robin Jones Gunn said it in her keynote address: we must learn to sort and stack.\n\nSort and stack.\nSort and Stack Conference Notes\nSometimes conference attendees report that by the end of the weekend they feel like they\u2019ve been drinking from a fire hose. They\u2019re blasted with so much new information in session after session, they feel hit with input and ideas and vocabulary and concepts they've never heard before.\n\nIt\u2019s overwhelming.\n\nIt would be easy to set aside the notes from those sessions and return to status quo when they arrive home.\n\nBut life is short. Those attendees came to learn and grow and transform, so I hope they\u2019re committed to implementing those ideas.\nAvoid the Overwhelm\nHopefully they scribbled down copious notes, captured them someplace\u2014to sort and then stack them into logical, usable groups.\n\nMy breakout session offered probably 30 ideas, maybe more, of ways people can put some heart, soul, and a little laughter into social media. Another session may have offered 20 or 50 more ideas. Soon, the writers will have filled a notebook.\n\nIt\u2019s easy to get overwhelmed. We don\u2019t have to do it all, and we don\u2019t have to do it all right away.\n\nBut we don't want to lose those ideas.\n\nThe conference attendees don\u2019t have to implement every idea the day they get home from the conference, and I don\u2019t have to implement every idea I heard on the drive home in those podcasts I listened to.\n\nWe want to sort out what to do when so we try things out in an order that makes sense.\nCreate a Master Stack\nIf we successfully capture the information, we can create a master list and continue to work through it, sorting and stacking over time.\n\nWe can convert our notes from the master list or \u201cstack\u201d into more lists, labeled however we wish:\n\n \tResearch\n \tTry next month\n \tArchive\n\nAs you sort notes from your master list into these sub-stacks, you can label them in many ways. Use the nomenclature from the organization, time-management, or productivity systems that make sense to you.\n\nAgain, think of each new list as another stack. Move notes to one stack or another, sorting as you go.\nSort and Stack Based on ROI\nThe Writer's Guide to ROI series helps with sorting and stacking. By thinking through return on investment of any given idea, I can comb through the stack of ideas I collected from my podcast marathon and sort them based on values and goals and efficient use of time.\n\nThen I can sort them into new stacks or categories to figure out how and when to implement them. This moves me closer to action I\u2019ll take\u2014specifically the very next step.\nWhat\u2019s the Next Action?\nLong ago I read David Allen\u2019s book Getting Things Done, which explains his productivity methodology. He recommends a Next Action list formed by asking, \u201cWhat\u2019s the next step?\u201d\n\nFor a long time I stuck a Post-It on my computer monitor with that on it: \u201cWhat\u2019s the next step?\u201d Asking that helped me sort all the possible actions I could take and zero in on the very next one to do. The rest could remain on the Next Actions stack.\n\nI learned to phrase each item with a verb so the task or action would be expressed as a specific,