 |
| Pixabay CC0 License |
For many people, this time spent at home – while being stressful and filled with uncertainty in various ways – is also a potential opportunity for working on side projects and business ideas, investigating various hobbies, and checking in once more with dreams, chores, and plans that have been lurking in the background for some time.
If you have a decent plot of land at your disposal during this period, your circumstances likely seem more upbeat and promising. But even if you are confined to a small apartment, there are various ways that you can use this time in a positive way.
For many different potential projects, it would be a great help to fuel and enhance creativity while stuck at home. Here are a few suggestions on how to do that.
Allow enough leisure and “fuel” for your creative fires
Creativity is an interesting thing, because on the one hand it typically happens, or at least as expressed, through “work.”
On the other hand, though, you can’t exactly “grind out” creativity on demand. Rather, creativity needs to be fuelled by a series of internal motivations, interests, and the ability to engage with ideas and projects in a relaxed and “fresh” way.
One mistake that a lot of people make when they’re trying to be as productive as possible with their businesses, is to simply not allow enough time for leisure. And yet, there is evidence to show that when people do allow for sufficient leisure time – such as by taking their full annual vacation allowance, for example – they are more productive, and perhaps more creative as well.
Work hard when you’re working, but ensure that you also have plenty of time for simply relaxing, having fun, and building your motivation and interest in an array of different manners.
Work on several different projects and hobbies at a time, that interest you
It can be very easy to fall into a state of “tunnel vision” when you are too focused on one project, for long stretches of time without any variation.
One solution that has been suggested by several entrepreneurs and public figures is to always be working on several projects and hobbies at a time, all of which interest and motivate you in a significant way.
That way, when you start to run up against a dead end with a particular project, you can draw insight and inspiration from the other projects you’re working on at the same time. Or, you can switch over for a while and focus your energies on something else – and when you return to the original project, you will often find that new approaches and solutions have occurred to you that you hadn’t originally foreseen.
Generally speaking, your creativity is likely to be higher when you have a greater variety of experiences and information sources to draw on when tackling problems and coming up with approaches to things.
Try things out in a spirit of play
The famous Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman argued that his great breakthroughs were only possible at all because he had been allowed by his employers to essentially “play” in an undisturbed manner, which might have seemed like time-wasting to casual observers, but which ultimately ended up providing him with invaluable insights.
Creativity largely comes out of a spirit of play – and the ability to try different things out, experiment with different ideas, and simply have fun with the process of discovering what might be possible, and what might be interesting, without being held ruthlessly to various performance metrics such as KPI’s.
So, try things out in a spirit of play. In other words, try taking a more light-hearted and “fun” approach to your various projects and interests, with no pressure or expectations – or at least as little as possible – that you will actually have to churn out a finished project by a set time, or that you will have to share the results of your experiments with anyone else.
The thing about “good ideas” is that you only discover which ideas are good through a process of trial and error, which involves generating many ideas that may not actually work for your original intended purpose.
That’s fine. Just play around and see where your own creativity takes you after a while.
