Design is a process that alternates between generating various ideas, and weeding out the ones that do not fly.
Generating new ideas is the fun part, but it is highly overrated. New ideas come cheap, and they are rarely new anyway. As Edison famously said, invention is 1% inspiration and 99% transpiration.
It is all too easy to fall in love with a novel idea and forget about the alternatives. But is is vital to fan out first before funnelling into one option. For this you need lists.
This may sound extremely boring, but pipe dreams without context are useless. It can be very disheartening to have someone else point out to you a fatal flaw in your idea after you spent a year developing it. And there is joy in exploring alternatives too, especially in zooming out and gaining a new perspective and a new, more general idea on the problem you are trying to solve.
For design you need a huge working memory, bigger than most people have. You need the minds of other people, either in the flesh or in books, and you need to write down and catalog your own ideas. This section of the website is an example in itself. It lists various methods of mapping out and logging your path through the design space, that greater minds than yours have exploited over the centuries.
At first, documenting your own ideas may seem like rote discipline, and a waste of time. But writing down your thinking as if to convince somenone else is a surefire way of finding the flaws in your own thinking before someone else catches you with your pants down. Having a new idea is exhilarating. But it also makes you blind. So, remember this : "if you are in a hurry, slow down", or as the Romans said, "festina lente". Or as the Africans say : "if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together".
Documenting your own ideas is a good way of talking to yourself. It is also a good way to show your ideas to others for feedback. You will find the others very skeptical, which is good. The risk that they will steal your brilliant idea and run with the ball is minimal. In the end it will always be you who has to push the ball through the mud to the finish line.
You will soon find that keeping track of your own ideas is hard enough by itself. Keeping track of the alternatives is overwhelming. The menu items on this website give a few tricks of the trade.