Turning Ideas Into Completed Projects

During 2025, I helped run my own marketing agency, raised a newborn to a full-fledged 1-year old with my wife, got more involved in my church, made weekly content on LinkedIn, maintained a YouTube channel, ran a Discord server / community, and built over a dozen plugins for Obsidian on GitHub.

That’s a lot to manage! So I wanted to share my process for taking the ideas I have and producing them into something tangible.

Capture and Execute#

I used to think there had to be just one tool to rule them all for productivity. However, the more I think about it, the less sense it makes.

Ideas are messy. They can come at you during inconvenient moments. You need a zero-friction, flexible way to capture what you’re thinking and store it somewhere later and forge it into something more useful.

Once you have it fleshed out a bit more, you can construct a plan or set of tasks. Then the real building begins.

Frictionless Idea Capture#

Not only does it make a great shared to-do tracking app, but Todoist is incredible for just getting ideas out of your head and sorted quickly. Particularly with its new Ramble feature. Simply speak your thought aloud, and it will automatically create tasks with descriptions for you to sort. I put all of my ideas into the inbox, and can just leave it if I need to for sorting later.

Basic Initial Sorting#

I can return to the Todoist app and sort my ideas into projects, categories, or tags. I use projects around things I’m actively thinking about or working on, but you can handle this any way you’d like to.

Fleshing Out and Planning#

When I’m ready to work on my ideas and fully flesh them out, I migrate them to Obsidian. I’ll create a note for each item, and a set of tasks underneath it, and include any other details, links, screenshots, or whatever else I might need. I’ll also link it to other relevant notes also.

Time Blocking and Execution#

The last step is to use my Google Calendar to block time to do the things I planned to do. I talk a bit more about that in my Digital Productivity blog post. This works because it’s easy to view and manage on both desktop and mobile, and it’s something I look at every day.

The calendar is also where our social lives, family activities, and other non-project plans live, so I can always see how my projects can fit in around the priorities in my life (family, church, community).

Daily Practices and One-Off Tasks#

Aside from these projects are daily tasks which typically don’t change from day to day. I keep these in a Daily Note in my Obsidian vault. I review it each night and make sure I did the things I need to do.

Time-bound, one-off tasks that aren’t daily tasks or things that don’t roll up into larger efforts I add as Google Tasks. This way my phone bugs me if I don’t do them, but they’re also not something I really need to store in any permanent location (things like take the trash out, reminder to check the mail, etc.).

Send Off#

This is the method I’ve used to build, maintain, and expand all kinds of various different projects, and manage my time effectively in order to juggle them all. I hope this helps you out, too!