The least creative place you can be is most likely where you’re sitting right now.
Like many people, I spend the majority of my workday in one room, sitting in front of a computer. And while my office may be on the more creative end of the spectrum — filled with all manner of interesting objects — it’s still the least inspiring place I find myself on a regular basis.
Workspaces are places of familiarity, but if you’re looking for inspiration, you actually need the exact opposite: an influx of the unknown and a sprinkling of the completely random. And there’s no better way to finding these experiences than just simply getting out of your environment.
For a year, Skull-A-Day, my daily art project, was my excuse to spend part of every day away from my desk. Sometimes it was just going to another part of my office to make something by hand, but very often it required me to get out of the building entirely and spend a some time really paying attention to the world around me.
I spent a few hours lighting sparklers outdoors to get this long exposure shot during my Skull-A-Day project. It was a delightful way to end my workday and much more fun than anything I would have done otherwise.
Again and again I made wonderful discoveries that I would never have encountered otherwise. And at the very least I had some fun and a breath of literal fresh air; this made the rest of my workday much more enjoyable and thus much more productive.
Even without a project spurring me on, I still make a point of getting up and going out when I need to get unstuck. In fact, some of the best creative thinking happens when I’m on my bicycle. My mental wheels spin like the wheels below me as I pedal along, and I almost always find I’ve gotten some solutions to my current problems by the time I’ve arrived at my destination.
So how can you get yourself out of your work environment today? Can you schedule a meeting in an unusual place and get there a bit early to have a moment alone? Can you take a random walk as part of your lunch break? Can you take your work to a new location? Or maybe give yourself a special task that requires you to go to out and about?
Even just a ten-minute excursion away from your desk today, for the sake of creative inspiration, could make a big difference. Why not try it out and see what happens?
