Brainstorming sessions. They’re the best thing going for getting ideas on the table fast, but they’re difficult. Is it an art or a science? Yes, both. And when you brainstorm for poll question ideas, brainstorming sessions take on a very different dimension.

Learning to brainstorm itself is easy to do. It may burden your cognitive abilities to the maximum, but usually the sessions are short, sweet, and targeted.

The two main ingredients in brainstorming is focus and concentration. You keep all ideas; you reject none. You tape the session or you write everything down.

To emphasize, you never reject an idea (initially) because it’s a bad idea or undoable. That comes later. The idea is to increase the positive flow of information.

Sessions last from five or ten minutes to a full week (the website Twitter was formed out of a brainstorming session that lasted an entire day). Your sessions should be intense and focused. But those five or ten minute sessions should be very productive.

To get the most out of a brainstorming session, it helps to create an open environment, one that is free of clutter and chaos. Groups of three to seven brainstormers are ideal. Keeping the group small helps to keep the focus clearer.

Now you throw in the idea of brainstorming for poll questions. You may not have the luxury of having three to seven in your brainstorming group. It may be just you! That’s quite alright.

Make certain you keep the sessions short and focused. Give detailed instructions to the participants so they know what’s expected of them. Five to ten minutes at a shot will generate a lot of good ideas. Next, Choose an overall category: sports, current news, religion, politics, that sort of thing. You may want to narrow your focus even more: for religion, choose a denomination. For sports, narrow it down to one sport, for current news or politics, choose a current international situation. You get the idea.

Now you’re ready to associate, brain dump, and record. Here’s how such a poll question brainstorming session could go: Sports leads to baseball, which leads to a steroids, which leads to a big name who’s admitted to taking steroids. From there you’ll need to determine if there’s anything in the sporting news section about steroids or the big names in Baseball. Then you carefully craft a question that talks about steroids and the big names taking them.

As you do this, it becomes easier. Don’t take shortcuts with this process. You may uncover several questions that you can use.