At this point, you know what your book is about. You’ve tested, refined, and developed your idea. Now you need to research your topic.

You didn’t think that you already knew enough to write 50,000 words about this subject, did you? Let me clarify—50,000 great words. You’re probably inspired and informed enough to write a few good chapters, but there is so much you don’t know yet. You need great stories, different points of view, quotes, and research. You need to know what the prominent voices on the topic have to say. At a minimum, you need to know what the most read books on your topic are. Books are not written on inspiration, they’re written with information. The goal is to have too much material. That’s why finding, collecting, and organizing supplemental information matters so much.

Of course, I’m not suggesting you write a book filled with only other people’s thoughts. You need to have something unique and personal to add to the conversation, but you want to support and reinforce your views with the highest quality sources.

We want to avoid sitting to type and staring at a blank screen with nothing to say. During the writing process, if you find yourself struggling to finish a chapter, it’s likely because you don’t have enough research gathered to write a great chapter. Think of it like a game of tetris. You want to gather stories, research, quotes, and facts for the chapter and strategically use them to fit perfectly around your original ideas. There’s no quick way to do this.¹ As a general rule, you will read thousands of words to write a few hundred. You might read an entire biography in order to write a 500-word story to open a chapter. But that’s not a problem, because we’re not in a hurry.

You need a system to find, collect, and organize helpful content, not just for this book, but for future books, too. As someone who is always managing multiple writing projects at once, collecting great ideas and staying organized is how I survive creatively. I don’t claim that my way is the best way, but it has worked very well for me. ² I should also say this up-front: I am not a naturally organized person.

I’m going to walk you through my step-by-step process, but before we get practical, here’s the most important thing I’ve learned: The best system is the one you’ll actually use.

My system isn’t perfect, but the reason I stick with it is because I’ve proven to myself that I’ll actually use it. There are countless productivity methods out there. I’ve tried many of them, but for some reason or another, they didn’t last. Don’t aim to build the best system. Build one you’ll return to week after week. Consistency beats perfection every time. With that in mind, here’s how I do it.

Step 1: Read, Read, and Read Some More.

The first important question is: Where do you get your ideas? In theory, you can find material from videos, podcasts, and social media. I use those, too. But I honestly don’t know how someone who doesn’t read consistently finds fresh material over the long haul. The quote attributed to Mark Twain comes to mind: “The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”

I know you’re busy. Who has time to read? But the average person watches about 20 hours of television a week and spends nearly 5 hours a day on their phone—most of us could find time to read. I have the benefit of actually enjoying it, but even if you don’t, I think it’s part of the job. If you want to say something meaningful, you have to take in meaningful things, too.

I read recently that when James Mattis served as Secretary of Defense, he blocked off an hour every day for “lunch/reading time.” One of my heroes, Eugene Peterson, did something similar. He literally scheduled reading and thinking into his calendar. He treated them as appointments, not optional extras. It’s a luxury, certainly, but it’s necessary. Reading is rarely urgent—no one is emailing you demanding that you read a book today. That’s exactly why it gets pushed aside. But reading is one of the places where great ideas come from, so it’s crucial to make time for it.

If you’re unsure where to start, you can search your topic on Google and add the word “books.” The beauty of search engines is that they’re probably going to show you the most popular and relevant books on your topic. So if you’re searching for modern life and technology, you might find some of these in your top results:

• “Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life”
• “The Long History of the Future: Why Tomorrow’s Technology Still Isn’t Here”
• “Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World”
• The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

The second one might not feel as relevant to what you think your book is going to be about, so you might start with the other three. Or if you want to learn as much as you can, maybe you buy all four.

Step 2: Mark Anything Interesting

Always read with a pen. Underline sentences. Circle phrases. Write in the margins. There’s no right or wrong way to do this. Just make notes on anything relevant, interesting, or thought-provoking you come across, as well as anything you think there’s any chance you might want to quote or otherwise refer to in the future. 

I like to write the topic or project beside what I underline, so when I go through the book later (we’ll get to that in a moment), I know what I want to do with it. I also write down anything else that comes to mind, whether it has to do with what I read or not. If it sparked a thought, I write it in the book. That will be important later.

As I mentioned earlier, you’ll also want to make note of any other relevant books the author mentions or cites. This is how you’ll build up your reading list and find more books to help inform your research.

Step 3: Review Your Notes For Great Ideas

At some point, after I finish reading the book, I flip through it page by page and review all the notes I made. As I review, I’m refreshing my memory and deciding if what I found interesting at the time will be useful to save for later. If the note is still relevant, I make any additional notes I need and then fold down the corner of the page so I know where to find it later.

It’s worth noting that I don’t review my notes as soon as I finish reading the book. Often, I’ll go weeks without blocking off time to review the recent books I’ve read. As long as you’ve made notes while reading, it doesn’t really matter when you review them.

Step 4: Make a Table of Contents

After you’ve reviewed your notes, find a blank page in the front of the book and write a simple description along with the page number. You’re making your own table of contents.

It doesn’t seem important now, but in a few months or years, you’re going to think to yourself, “Where was that story I read about…” You’ll have a few guesses about where it was. When you go searching, having a Table of Contents makes the task of finding it much simpler and faster. It takes a little longer on the front end, but saves a lot of time on the back end. 

So to review, I go through each book three times:

• First, I read it and make notes.
• Second, I review my notes.
• Third, I catalog what’s worth keeping.

Step 5: Move the Notes Where They Need To Go

This is where a lot of people lose track of their ideas. At some point, you have to move the notes from the book to the place where you want to use them.

As I mentioned earlier, at any given time, I’m usually juggling several projects. I’m only able to do that because I have a very clear file-storage system. It’s not complicated, but that’s exactly the point.

I use Google Drive, and my setup is really simple.

• Level 1 is my different businesses.
• Level 2 is the projects I’m working on.
• Levels 3 and 4 are chapters and notes of those projects written in Google Docs.

Sometimes I use the note exactly as I found it. If it’s a quote, I’ll type it into the doc and add the source information immediately so I won’t have to hunt it down later. Other times, I type in the note so I’ll remember that I wanted to explore this part of the topic once I start writing. Either way, it goes where future-me will need it. And then at just the right time, future-me finds it. This means I am never starting with a blank page.

One note: I do not keep one massive folder or database with all my material. I know many people use apps like Notion or Evernote. I’ve tried that, and it never worked for me. My material only exists in the place where I plan to use it. I’ll admit I’m a little bit of a mad scientist in this way. I might write a book 3 years from now and remember something I read in the past, and go on a search through my bookshelf to find it. It’s not the most efficient system, but it has worked for years. If a larger database like this works for you, go for it!

So that’s my system for finding, collecting, and using great ideas. But what about ideas that don’t come from books? I have a system for that, too.

Write Down Every Idea

There’s nothing more frustrating than having a great idea, and then losing it because you didn’t capture it in time. Hemingway is often attributed with saying, “When you have an idea, you must write it down immediately, or it will escape.” He’s right. Ideas disappear.

That’s why I type everything that comes to my mind, and I mean literally everything that crosses my mind that I might want later, into my phone. Sentences for a book. A domain name. A question I want to research. A half-formed thought that doesn’t make sense yet. All of it goes in my phone.

There are no rules, no categories, and no pressure to organize it in the moment. I just get it out of my head and into the note. If I don’t type when I think about it, it’s gone.

Then, every few days or weeks, just like I review my book notes, I review my phone notes. After some time, if what I typed is no longer relevant, I delete it. If it’s still relevant, I move that note to wherever I need to use it, which is usually in that Google Drive folder system I mentioned above. If it stays in my phone too long, it gets lost, because I’m always adding notes, and the scroll keeps getting longer and longer. I try to organize my notes every Friday. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.

But what about something you see on YouTube or social media? I have a system for that too.

Bookmark Everything

Things often jump out at me while I’m scrolling through social media—a quote, a story, a statistic, or a turn of phrase. I think, “That’s a great idea.” But if I don’t do something with it right then, it disappears into the algorithm abyss. So I bookmark it into a bookmark folder I’ve created on the app.

If it’s something I know I’ll use soon, I’ll take a screenshot and either text it to myself or drop it into my phone. What matters most is capturing it immediately. You can always decide what to do with it later, but you can’t recover what you didn’t save.

That’s it. That’s my system for finding, collecting, and organizing ideas. It’s not the most elegant or impressive system. But it’s one I actually use over and over again. And because I use it, it works. What’s important is that you get in the habit of collecting, and create a system to organize the content in your projects. If you do, you will never start from zero and never stare at a blank page. You won’t use everything you collect, but you will have somewhere to start.

There’s one more long-term benefit to an organized system like this: over time, it becomes a library. A decade in, I can search my Google Drive and instantly access years of stories, research, and illustrations. It’s the compound effect of consistent collection.

I typically think of my book project in 3-month blocks. I commit to 3 months of rabid reading and research. (My kids know when I’m in the research phase because another book is getting delivered every day. “Dad, did you order another book?”) Then I try to write the first draft in 3 months. So if everything goes according to plan, I can have a well-researched first draft in 6 months. That’s next.

Challenge:

Purchase 5 books to research your topic. Start reading. If you start reading a book that is not good, stop reading it. There are too many good books out there to waste time reading a bad book.