Feeling challenged? Doh. Feeling overwhelmed? Hell, yeah.

If ever there was a time for some creative thinking, it’s now. We are all cooped up with our loved ones (who we pray we will still love when this is over). And the daily strain is a mental grind.

What we need now is to learn how to think creatively alone, or with the help of your loved ones (yup, really), or your virtual pals and colleagues. Granted, it’s not quite the same as a brainstorm in the boardroom with frisbees and jelly beans but there are many ways to creatively get around your current challenges – whether work, or life in general.

Creative thinking is about taking a fresh look, thinking of new, different, better ways to solve issues, as much as creating stand out campaigns. In Firefly’s professional world of marketers and communicators, we are always under constant pressure to come up with creative and interesting content every day; sometimes we are given exciting campaigns that spur and drive our creativity, and sometimes the challenge may be huge but the brief is less stimulating, and we get stuck.

And today, we have the added challenge of getting our creative juices flowing as we all work in isolation of each other – so now more than ever we need creative ideas to tackle the unforeseen challenges that ‘coronavirus disruption’ brings.

Luckily for you, I’ve found some great tools to help boost your creativity, amuse you and ease your day and hopefully get you back on the path to success and motivation.

Brainsparker

Brainstorming can be a brilliant way to boost creativity. Getting ideas from your colleagues and bouncing thoughts from one person to another can really help to build ideas. However, sometimes,  it’s not possible to bring all your colleagues together physically or virtually. This is where Brainsparker comes in.

Brainsparker is a free app that helps you stretch your creative muscles without relying on a colleague. The app contains 200 cards with thought-provoking words or phrases, you simply shake your smartphone and it produces a new card. These random trigger words will help you to relate to the problem at hand and hopefully, get thinking a little more creatively.

Back to basics

It’s great that we have a selection of tools which can help us think more creatively, but sometimes we need to go back to the basics and use the tricks we heard about years ago. One brilliant technique for encouraging creative thinking and boosting productivity is mind mapping. And no, I’m not suggesting that you do some Sherlock Holmes style, internal mind palace brainstorming. It’s far simpler than that.

The key to a successful mind map is to write down every idea you have, no idea is too silly or too farfetched. In fact, the more ideas you jot down, the better.

Mind maps can be used for any thinking or learning task, whether that’s coming up with a campaign or thinking of a topic for a blog, just make sure that you have fun with creating your mind map. Choose bright colours to link your thoughts and ideas together, draw images instead of words or use some funky software to make it look exciting. For some free mind mapping software check out Coggle.

Have some fun

When you get stuck in a creative rut, it’s easy to give up. But, if you give up too quickly, you’ll never learn how to overcome your creative block. Instead, try and have some fun while thinking up some creative ideas. A great place to start is to listen to someone inspirational and motivating. TED Talks are a brilliant way to get ideas and start thinking more creatively. The slogan for these conferences is ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’ and they attract some of the most innovative and creative minds on the planet. The free TED app includes hundreds of videos that can provide you with some refreshed creative inspiration and encourage you to think, dare I say it, outside of the box.

All of the videos can be downloaded to your phone and the ‘Inspire Me’ function allows you to select what kind of inspirational video you’re looking for.

It’s all child’s play

Young children are tremendously creative. They are constantly asking questions and using their imagination, primarily because they are often experiencing situations for the first time. Yes, it can be quite annoying when you have a child constantly asking you ‘why’ or ‘how’, but they have the right idea.

As we get older, we stop asking the ‘how’, ‘what’ and ‘why’ questions because we have experience, and those questions have been explained to us. But could this be affecting our imagination? Perhaps if we asked a few more questions, our content might be a little more creative.

This is where Alex Osborn’s checklist technique comes into play. This very simple exercise is essentially a list of questions that you should ask yourself before starting your work.

There are six main questions you should ask yourself before beginning any piece of creative work:

• What?
• Where?
• When?
• Who?
• Why?
• How?

If you can answer these questions before beginning a task, you’ll likely come up with some interesting and creative answers, saving you from getting halfway through a life challenge or campaign brief and then running out of ideas.

So, there you have it — hopefully I’ve given you some simple techniques to think about if you’re ever stuck in a creative rut.

As we all adapt to a new way of working we mustn’t let our creativity suffer – if anything, we need as much creativity that we can muster to keep us in good spirits.

Meanwhile, stay well and stay safe!

The brainstorm is one of the most important elements to a knock out campaign. But how do you get the creative juices flowing?

• Audience – always know who they are. My mother used to shout at me for judging people and stereotyping, but now it’s time to embrace it. Picture the audience, I mean physically draw them. What do they like? What do they read?

• Chill-ax – clear the mind of useless junk! Who can be creative when they’re envisaging an endless amount of emails creeping into their inbox or deciding where to go for lunch? Try to get rid of these distractions.

• Questions – force them out of people – chair the meeting, write everything down and question everyone. You never know what’s lurking in the depths of your HR manager’s mind – they could be a creative genius!

• One last thing to bear in mind is people bounce off each other.

And if all else fails, if your team is void of fun ideas and keeps contributing ‘research stories’ – a fail safe is just to suggest to get some flesh out. As a good friend once said, life’s short, play naked!