It's just a simple folded card that lives in his back right pocket, ready at any moment to be the tabula rasa of those insights that come in a flash and often disappear just as quickly.
According to him, the ideas can be of any kind: small observations about things not quite right with the world, fresh metaphors that shed new light on an old problem, inventions he wishes someone would make, etc.
He just keeps a running list, and then every once in a while, he "harvests" the ideas for use in a conversation, a client project, even a book.
For Tom, the amount of creative output he generates directly correlates to the number of times he pulls his idea wallet out of his back pocket.
"I genuinely believe that keeping an idea wallet can make you a more creative person. Even if it doesn't increase your rate of creative idea generation (which eventually it will), it increases the percentage of those ideas that you can save and use later. So the idea wallet effectively increases your creative output. Who wouldn't want that?"
He adds, if a new idea relates to a book he's writing, he'll transfer it to a notebook — just one idea per page, so that there's room to later expand on it.
[Source: Well Read Life: Working with Ideas ~ The Online Literary Community of Levenger]
[Appended below is a sample of what Levenger designates as a shirt pocket briefcase & leather notepad, which is designed with a 3 x 5 card holder. It has 2 pockets for the cards, to keep fresh cards separate from completed ones, plus a centre compartment for receipts.
I own one myself.]
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