The Threepenny Idea Folder

What to do with excess creative ideas?

Ideas are terrible. I mean, a lot of them are terrible, but what’s truly terrible to me is how quickly they accumulate. I can’t come up with a good analogy, but anyone who’s had the problem of having too many ideas knows that it’s incredibly tempting to say “yes, I could work on that someday.” And maybe you can, but someday never comes.

Meanwhile, you have too little room in your creative schedule for all the brilliant ideas, and the new brilliant ones are making it harder to focus on the old brilliant ones.

So what’s the solution? As with the problem of too many games, I’d be lying if I said I had one fully formed and ready to go, but I do have part of one.

It’s the Threepenny Idea File. If I recall correctly, the best justification for this name is that ideas, however good, are cheap. In fact, they’re so poor a pauper can afford them--just like the Threepenny Opera was meant to be. My file used to be a Google document, but that’s changed now: It’s a spreadsheet.

Here’s how the folder, or document, or whatever, works. Once I’ve figured out that an idea is:

• Just not working

• Going on the back-burner “for now”

• Is ethically tricky

• Requires resources you don’t have

• Is way more fun to think about than to do

It goes into the Threepenny Idea File, which I’ve now published here. Example code-names/descriptions include:

• filorogue: roguelike where you have an infinite bag of holding but everything that goes into it has to come out in the opposite order

• 0armedadventure: How brave can you be...if you have no arms?

Zátonyi Sándor, CC BY 3.0

I did make the effort to categorize the ideas, following some old advice from Mr. Derek Yu:

• Do I want to make this?

• Do I want to see or to have made this?

• Would I be good at making this?

And the fourth, non-diagrammed portion:

• Do I have time to make this?

For each idea, I answer each question “Yes,” “No”, or “Maybe,” and track the answers in the spreadsheet (in the folder, most ideas have them listed.)

This doesn’t eliminate the problem, or these ideas, but it gives closure in the likely event I’ll never get to most of them.

Missvain, Public Domain

I recently heard something that resonates with the public Threepenny Idea File in a video called “How To Get Started: The Cult of Done”. It was: Publishing the idea for something on the internet is the ghost of having “done” it.

And maybe, if someone besides me has the opposite problem, putting these unused ideas out into the ether might help.

There’s not really more to say here; I hope anyone reading this has a lovely evening!

Thanks to Toastmortem for proof-reading this article. Any errors remaining are almost certainly things I added later.