How to add more creativity to your work

Creativity is one of the most important skills throughout your entire working life. It’s also the toughest one to exercise.

Designate time to brainstorm

Start getting into the mindset that taking time to think creatively and brainstorm new ideas is an essential part of your job. Looking for the right moment? Choose a time when you’re usually less productive, even a bit tired. Studies show this puts your brain in a much better ‘free roaming mode’, which is better for creativity.

Optimise your work station

Prepping your mind for some creative thinking might mean a change of scenery. While brighter lights and total silence can be especially good for focusing and maximising productivity, different lighting and background voices such as sea sounds can help get your creativity flowing.

Bring ideas to completion

Coming up with ideas can be inspiring and can really boost your creativity. However, simply coming up with ideas is not enough to truly hone your creative skills. Being creative means bringing ideas from the first brainstorming stage through to completion. 

Take a break and doodle

Take a break from your brainstorming session to doodle. This will relax your mind, but it will also bring your brain into that ‘free roaming mode’ we talked about. Equally, taking a break from your usual tasks to doodle can help unlock your creativity.

Play to your strengths

Another common misconception about creativity is that it involves art and pretty pictures and other such visual things. Someone who considers themselves extremely logical and straightforward might think creativity is out of their reach.

Write something down

The hardest part of being creative is starting a creativity session. While that might sound a bit naff, you might notice that all these tips revolve around setting aside some specific time especially for being creative, and then protecting that time.

So, when you’ve done all of that, it’s time to make that time worthwhile. Outline some goals that you want to get out of your creativity sessions, spend some time thinking about those goals and coming up with ideas, and then write something down.

Set deadlines

Finally, while deadlines might seem like the enemy of freely roaming creativity, applying light pressure to yourself makes you more likely to come up with more.

Creativity is one of the most important skills throughout your entire working life. It is also the toughest one to exercise.