When it comes to making long-term plans for our lives, we all go through a “dream stage”…where we just kind of day dream about what our life might be like. Seriously, we’ve all, at some point in our life, thought about what it would be like to win the lottery or be super rich…and you kind of lose yourself in the dream. While I’m sure there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, it’s really more productive to do some systematic ideation. By dreaming systematically, you’ll likely improve your chances for success. For us, this is strategic simplicity.

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Ok, so what is “systematic ideation” and how can you use it? Well, I’m sure there’s lots of different ways to systematically come up with ideas. I’m a bit of a tinkerer…kind of a MacGyver type and enjoy product design. I even recently had a company put one of my ideas into production and they’re getting ready to release it. But years ago, I read a book (I can’t for the life of me remember or find the title) that sparked my interest in systematic ideation.

But today we’re going to share one ideation tool with you that you might be able to use on your simplicity journey. We adapted this from a post we saw on Governing.com that had absolutely nothing to do with strategic simple living. Still, the tool was intriguing, so we adapted it for our use.

So here you go: A good way to be more systematic about your ideation is by looking in all four “directions”. By that we mean, Outward, Inward, Backward and Forward. It’ll help if we give an example, so we’ll show you how we used this tool in our search for the “perfect” town or place for us to live. Of course, you can use it for any ideation exercise you wish!

Back in Episode 49, Live the Life of Your Dreams, we talked about our “Freedoms From” and our “Freedoms To.” One of those freedoms to was “Freedom To Choose Where & How We Live.” So, again, just to give you an example of using the tool on our quest for strategic simple living, let’s look at our search for the “ideal” place for us to live.

So, before we start the 4 directions, here are some qualities we know our dream location will have:

So Looking Outward:

Looking Inward:

Looking Backward:

Looking Forward:

So the major takeaway here is this: By all means, DREAM. Dream Big! But when it comes to getting serious about strategic simple living, be systematic about your ideation. Look Outward, Look Inward, Look Backward, and then look Forward.

By going through this process of ideation, you may come up with more questions than answers initially. But in the end, you’ll probably be a lot closer to what you want and be able to formulate a real plan of action.

So, what is one of your long-term simplicity or other life goals where you could use this ideation process? Is it your home, your career, a business opportunity, a passion, or even a relationship? We’d love to know.

 Be sure to leave a comment below.

Vanessa: I just turned 40 years old and feel great!

Dan:  Recently we had to do some document faxing. We usually bug Dan’s ex and send faxes from her office, but this time I just used the HelloFax extension for the Chrome browser. HelloFax makes it easy to sign documents and send faxes online. You’ll never need to print, sign and scan documents again! You can get 50 free fax pages each month, for 6 months! If you want to check out Hello Fax just go to SimpleLifeTogether.com/hellofax.

We just wanted to say thanks to Genevieve Parker Hill for including us in her post, 9 Websites To Help You Live Simply. She lists some fantastic simplicity blogs and we’re honored to make the cut!

And also to Sheryl and Dave Balthrop for mentioning us in their post The 7 Phases of Your Heroic Journey to Margin and Simplicity.

You can download a PDF of our show prep, too.

 Photo Credit: Marina del Castell