Everyone loses his or her creativity from time to time. Sitting in an office for eight hours can sometimes zap your creativity, no matter how chicly furnished – I mean our office is gorgeous! Since working at Rasor Marketing Communications in beautiful Montgomery, Ohio and settling myself into a new office/work environment, I decided to go on a mission to hone my creativity because creativity is vital in the communications and marketing field.

My hope is that my insights will help you cultivate a more productive and inspirational workday. Here are the four tools I use to capture my creative thoughts, even when they don’t want to be caught:

Insight One: Write it down!

Use a notebook, sticky notes, scraps of paper, your hand. I don’t care. From experience, I can tell you that if you don’t write it down you’ll lose it. I’m thanking my creative writing professor in college for assigning 10,000 thoughtful and creative written words due at the end of the quarter. I soon learned to have paper and a writing instrument with me at all times. By the end of the quarter I felt like writing down so many of my thoughts jump-started my creativity. One thought led to another and then another. Twenty thousand creative, thoughtful words later I noticed my creativity level was at an all-time high.

Insight Two: Find your Inspiration

Inspiration is a tough thing to find. Sometimes it just finds you – sometimes you just need a break from constantly trying to think of that amazing idea. There are a million or so ways to find inspiration. In case you cannot think of any:

• Go for a walk – take time to notice things around you and think about something else.
• Listen to music – suggesting Death Cab for Cutie here – my personal favorite to listen to when I need to be uber creative. Music has saved me from some terrible writing blocks.
• Do nothing – sometimes you need to accept the blank screen/paper in front of you. Don’t think yourself out of brilliance.
• Sketch – just start creating.
• Make lists – lists jump-start your thought process. You aren’t stressing yourself about finding that ‘amazing-wonderful-idea.’ By listing things, you are making associations – thinking about things you might not have thought about by only focusing on your end goal.

Insight Three: Don’t give up

Creativity will come – eventually…

Insight Four: Most importantly ask ‘What If’

If you don’t ask what if – who else will? And if you never do, imagine all the lost creative potential…