All writers know the problem of getting hit with an idea and desperately needing to write it down somewhere so you don’t forget about it. My amused husband has got used to my odd nocturnal wanderings to write down an idea (and has also got used to telling me, after writing it down, that now I should shut my brain down and actually get some sleep. He has a point.).

Since a lot of my great ideas come in the shower, I’ve often contemplated a method for making notes there – some kind of pen to write on my shower screen (an easily, but not-too-easily, washable one, of course) and sometimes I even keep a notepad on the bathroom sink when I’ve actually set myself the task of thinking through a writing problem in the shower.

Musicians need to write down ideas too

Well, it turns out us writers are not alone. I guess musicians are a kind of writer – they’re writing music and lyrics, which sounds infinitely harder than a novel – and so they are also hit with ideas at random times. Perhaps their equivalent of my being in the shower is playing their guitars or pianos or whatever – and that’s where this post I just read about Coldplay singer Chris Martin comes in.

He has hit upon a pretty neat idea for capturing song ideas while he’s at the piano. He simply writes them on the piano. Agghh! I hear some of you saying, and surely my mother who would have murdered me if I had written ideas on our shiny black piano (and don’t worry Mum, I haven’t started now that I’ve got the piano here with me). But Chris Martin is a famous man and he’s allowed to write on pianos.

In any case, the bit that intrigues me even more is what he does with the these notes over time. Basically, the piano gets full up, and eventually, he just gets the piano repainted. And then he starts all over again.

I love having scribbles about my ideas all over the place, so I can certainly imagine having a piano covered in them could be quite inspiring. Most of my ideas are tucked into beautiful notebooks, but now I’m imagining creating posters full of my odd ideas, framing them, and making a fortune by selling them when I become famous. I’d better go start making notes.

Because blogging is all about other blogs …

As a sidenote, I clicked over and found this story through a circuitous bloggy route – Darren Rowse of ProBlogger posted on Twitter that Gina Trapani (Lifehacker founder) had started a new blog – I trust him, I trust Lifehacker and so I found my way to Smarterware. It’s a nice looking blog and if you read me because you empathise with my procrastination problem and my to-do list addiction, then you might also get something out of it.