How to Get More Creative Ideas for Your Next Project in Fifteen Minutes
This simple motion-activating strategy will solve two problems at once
Our brains aren’t build for stasis. Which is sad, because most of us sit before a computer monitor all day, while moving little but our fingertips.
Our best ideas — the ones buried in our subconscious (the brain’s powerhouse) — are activated best through movement.
If you’re like me, you don’t have a lot of free time. Everything’s on a schedule. Movement is a nice idea, but we can’t just walk-around and think about things all day. There are kids to feed and bills to pay, right?
You probably have a bunch of chores on your to-do list.
It’s time to put those chores to work for good instead of evil. The next time you look at a dirty toilet, you’ll smile instead of frown. We’re about to turn your cleaning tasks into idea-generating, money-gathering, creativity boosters.
No more wasting your precious creative time, doing mundane yuck-jobs. It’s time to turn that toilet into a creativity university!
How to get the most bang for your creative cleaning sesh
I like to listen to educational, motivational podcasts or audiobooks while I’m doing chores. This is a staple at my house. It’s one of the ways I read 100 books a year while writing prolifically at the same time.
Chores are mindless. You don’t have to be present to clean a toilet.
This is the perfect environment to let your mind get into flow-state, while you keep your hands distracted with work.
Keep a capture device nearby.
Whether you use paper or digital, audio recording or carrier pigeon, it doesn’t matter. What matters is capturing your ideas as they come to you. You’ll always have time to edit your thoughts later, but never censor an idea when it’s gifted you.
Ideas are a gift.
You can use music if you want, but I always find the added, educational audio in the background is extra fuel for the creative flame.
While you can’t tell your subconscious what to create (then it would be your conscious mind), you can feed it the right fuel for the project you want it to work on.
By walking into your cleaning session with a loose idea in your head, and couple that loose idea with motivating audio — I always get 5–10 new ideas quickly, using this technique. One of them might even be a good idea.
Take action
Ideas without action are nothing but air and electricity.
It’s the action we take on our new creative insights that bring us more income, more happiness, and more customers. Capturing the idea is easy.
The important part comes later, when you re-visit all your new ideas. You choose one. You implement the idea fast and ship it. Good ideas like momentum.
If an idea finds you and you don’t act on it, the good idea will find a new host who will.
After fifteen minutes of cleaning you can change the direction of your business, but you’ve got to act on those great ideas. Another way to get ideas is by asking your audience.
The people you serve are the perfect resource for inspiration.
If you want to build a list of the people you serve, so you can contact them any time you need more great ideas, you’ll need an email list.
This should be a list you own (instead of relying on social media or some other big-business platform). Tap the link below. Enroll in my Tribe 1K indie email masterclass. I’ll show you how to get your first 1,000 subscribers (and your next 1,000) without spending one hot nickel on ads.
We’re waiting for you.
Enroll in my Free Email Masterclass. Get Your First 1,000 Subscribers
August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. As a self-appointed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indies how to make work that sells and how to sell more of that work once it’s created. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing, August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.