creativity
Is Structure Stifling Your Creativity?
Is Structure Stifling Your Creativity?

For many people, having structure is very beneficial to their work. Having goals, milestones, and plans on how to achieve them is a great way to keep yourself on track and focused.
However, that doesn’t mean that more structure is going to be equivalent to more or better results. In some cases, if you have too much structure, you might actually end up doing more harm than good to your creativity processes.
If you were to have every little detail of your work planned out and highly structured, down to when you’re going to do what, where you’re going to do it, and how it’s going to get done, then you’re really not leaving yourself with much wriggle room.
If you feel like doing a different part of your work on one of those days, but force yourself to follow the schedule and plan, then you’re going to be unhappy with your work and probably end up creating something that isn’t your best effort, because you didn’t want to do it.
Some of these ideas will have to come naturally, and you can’t really predict when you’re going to be feeling creative and when you’re going to be feeling more work oriented.
You need to have a bit more flexibility in your plans. Instead of planning day by day or hour by hour, you should instead have weekly goals to fulfill, so that depending on how you’re feeling on various days throughout the week, you can accomplish everything you need to for that week without being overly dependent on a schedule.
Of course, if there’s a case in which you’re feeling a bit too loose, and you’re unable to focus or you’re struggling, you can tighten up your schedule as needed. But when it comes to your day-to-day life, you should have a bit more flexibility and freedom to approach your work as you see fit.
Tightening up your schedule is something that you can do if you really need to see more progress, just know that when you’re in a more comfortable spot, you can let up again in order to regain a better sense of creativity.
One of your goals should be that you’re able to constantly maintain a flexible schedule, so work towards that goal diligently.
Don’t Allow Your Work Days To Bleed Into Your Time Off

Many people have begun mixing their work and off time together, so that they’re always thinking about or doing work throughout the entire day.
They might take small breaks between work, and what ultimately ends up happening is that they don’t get enough work done, but also don’t end up relaxing that much.
Instead, you should separate the two, so that you have dedicated relaxation time and dedicated work time. It’s necessary for your mental wellbeing to have ample time off to relax and unwind from strenuous work.
If you’re working all day every day, with random bits of “relaxation” strewn throughout, you’re going to be getting the worst experience of both parts. You won’t have enough focus in your work, but you also won’t have enough time to properly relax.
During the times that you have dedicated to work, you’re not distracted by anything else, and you can give 100% effort into getting your job done. Once you’re done with work and you’ve worked hard, you can actually fully relax without having to worry about working again until the next day.
Just as work requires your full attention, relaxation requires you to have a clear mind. If you spend your entire relaxation time worrying about the work you haven’t gotten done yet, you’re not going to relax at all, but rather you’ll just be distracted while getting more stressed out.
You should take the time you’ve set aside for relaxation and use it fully. Completely take work off of your mind and just enjoy whatever it is you’re doing. You can be watching TV, chatting with friends, reading a book, or doing absolutely nothing.
Whatever it is, just make sure you’re not letting work bleed into the time you have, otherwise you’re not going to enjoy it very much. Some people can blend their work and enjoyment together, but this doesn’t work for everyone.
If it truly works for you to do both around the same time, then you shouldn’t stop doing that. If you’re unsure, you should try to separate work and relaxation time as much as possible, because that may be what’s going to work best for you.
Get Used To Thriving With Background Noise

If you only work well in complete silence and complete focus, you’re going to need to learn how to adapt. Very few places are dead silent. Even if you have your own home office, chances are you’ll hear your family in the background, as you should.
If you’re at a café, there will be people talking. If you’re at an office, there will be background noise and voices. You need to train yourself to be able to either tune out or work well with background noise.
Only working well in near or complete silence is indicative of larger problems with focusing. You might be able to focus in those situations, but you can’t let the smallest things throw you off completely, otherwise you’re going to struggle to keep up with your work in all kinds of places and situations.
One option you have is to simply get used to it and work in places with background noise more often. Instead of holing up in your apartment or house where it’s all quiet while you work, go and work at a nearby café.
This will allow you to work under more and more circumstances, meaning that you’ll be able to efficiently keep up with your work anywhere you go. Of course, not everyone has a nearby café that they’d want to work in for extended periods of time.
Coffitivity is a website that you can use in order to better get used to working in environments with a bit more noise. You have a few free selections to choose from, in various levels of noise, and you can adjust the volume as you’d like.
This allows you to get used to it, even from your quiet home or office. You don’t have to get used to a ton of noise. Everyone has their limit. Nobody is expecting you to work well in the middle of a theme park or at some other loud location.
The point is to be able to handle fairly common level of background noise that you would encounter in a wide variety of situations, so that you don’t need a special place to get all of your work done.
As you can appreciate, a lot of this is dependent on the way you think and if you want to know more about developing a good mindset for success, please click on the featured resource below for a free Strong Mindset report; download, read it and take action 😊
Balance Between Focus And Creativity
Balance Between Focus And Creativity

Everyone has different sweet spots that help them focus or be more creative. Essentially, different locations or times of day can either be more conducive to daydreaming and creativity or more conducive to focus and continued hard work.
If you try to do one where you succeed better in the other, you can either become unfocused or uncreative, so it’s important to keep them separated. For example, you may be most focused and hardworking late at night.
Sweet spots aren’t just times of day, though. You may also find that different locations that you choose to work at may help or hinder various things like focus. Some people have dedicated office spaces where they find it really easy to focus, while others may find it best to focus out at a café.
You might be really creative being outside, or laying comfortably in bed. Regardless of what your sweet spots are, you should utilize them to the best of your ability. Studies have found that location and time of day can greatly affect mood and productivity, so if you’re in the right sweet spot at the right time, you can get a lot more work done.
It also helps to separate areas that you work in and relax in. For example, if you tend to spend a lot of time on your couch relaxing, if you sit there to go and work all of a sudden, you probably won’t feel like focusing very much.
Your body can easily become accustomed to locations and will default to whatever you typically feel there, such as relaxation on the couch, and it’ll be hard to switch from relaxing to hard work.
The variations in these sweet spots are why 9-to-5 jobs don’t work well for many people. If you need to be focused throughout the time you spend working, but you don’t focus well until the wee morning hours, then the entirety of the 9-5 time slot is going to throw you off and make you less productive.
By allowing yourself to get things done where you feel is best, you’ll benefit yourself by enjoying the work a bit more, and also benefit your business by being more productive. It’s all about personal preferences and wielding them effectively.
Focused Versus Unfocused – Where Creativity And Productivity Clash

There are two main “settings” you’ll work with throughout your career. Typically, you’re either doing productivity-focused work, or creative work.
You need to be able to separate the two into different periods of time. The reason they need to be kept separate is that each one requires you to be in a different state of mind. While creativity lets your mind wander and come up with new and exciting things, productivity and focus require you to home in on one specific thing and do it as well as you can.
When you’re trying to be creative, it’s fine to be unfocused. This doesn’t mean that you can be outright distracted, of course, but more so blurred while still looking at the project you’re working on.
It allows your mind to have room to experiment with different ideas and fresh, new ideas. When you need to be productive, you need absolute focus to get things done. You should follow your strict methods that work, and that you know work.
Don’t experiment with different things – just keep working with what works best. At this time, you don’t have room to maneuver very much, and you’re probably really locked in to whatever it is that you’re doing.
Depending on the job you have, each of these modes might have different times spent on them. For example, a construction worker or someone working in engineering might not want to experiment and be creative too much, but rather they want to work with what they know will work well and be effective.
You need to have separate times of the day for each one to take place. You might be more focused in the mornings, but more creative at night, or vice versa. If you try to force the two together, you won’t be happy with the results.
You’re either going to end up stifling your creativity with an over-focused mind, or you’ll have a mind that’s too open that ends up hurting your productivity. Test your timing and strengths and see what works best for your schedule and planning.
Eliminate Multi-Tasking To Fully Focus On Your Creative Endeavors

It’s very easy to get distracted these days. In addition to the normal situation of people trying to get you to do different things, you also have the distraction of technology that allows you to focus on all kinds of things at the same time.
This can be a big problem for your creativity, and might end up being the reason that your creative projects are taking longer. Multitasking is usually seen as a beneficial trait. In many work-related situations, it is.
You’ve probably encountered times when you’ve gotten into a creative flow, where you’re working well and you’re quickly moving along with your work. This flow is key to quickly finishing good creative projects, because it’s the time when you’re working at max efficiency.
The only thing is, this flow requires focus on the project at hand only, and if you’re getting distracted by other things, then you’re not going to be able to maintain that flow. You may not even notice that you’re multitasking when it happens.
You might see it as a normal part of your work day, where, while you’re working on a project, you stop for a short bit to work on something else before quickly getting back to the project at hand.
It might also be a situation where you’re doing something congruently with the project, such as making a phone call or reading some emails. Multitasking forces you to break your focus, even if just for a moment, and your mind has to quickly play catch up to get back to where you were.
Going through the movie all in one sitting without any distractions is like cutting out multitasking. It goes fast, and is also the best way to do it. You can pause the movie and do other things in between scenes, or you can mess around on your phone while it’s running, but that’s going to cause you to lose focus and make the whole process take longer.
As you can appreciate, a lot of this is dependent on the way you think and if you want to know more about developing a good mindset for success, please click on the featured resource below for a free Strong Mindset report; download, read it and take action 😊
3 Quick Tips To Boost Creativity And Focus
3 Quick Tips To Boost Creativity And Focus

Creativity is sometimes a difficult process to capture, and you can’t force it.
When you are trying to get into the creative flow, it can sometimes be difficult to get ‘into the zone’ and get the creative juices flowing.
That being said, there is always a way to dial in your focus and get the best creative work out of you, from devising the optimal workspace to choosing the right tools and even whether it is a good idea to collaborate with others on a particular project and we are going to look into these options right now. Use them to boost your creative thinking to get things done.
Create A Workspace That Helps You With Creativity And Focus

The environment that you choose to work in can have a significant impact on your performance. The way your workspace looks and feels and how it’s set up can completely change your ability to work well, both creatively and normally.
It’s a copy-paste design that’s easily manufactured and highly efficient to build, but is absolutely awful to work in. Plain, bland, neutral colors in an area that looks nearly identical to everyone else’s, with very little in terms of customization.
This type of space will stifle your creativity for sure, and may not even be the best place to focus for some people. The first thing you’ll want to do when creating your own workspace is think about the aesthetics and décor you select.
It may seem unimportant, but if you’re going to be spending hours upon hours in this same place each day, you’re going to want it to look nice. Get comfortable furniture for you to use.
So many office chairs are uncomfortable, so get yourself a nice, ergonomic chair that you can stand to sit in for hours at a time. Additionally, get yourself a top-quality desk that fits your space well and has everything you need, from drawer space to the right height to fit your personal build and preferences.
Don’t shy away from putting up decorations. Don’t just go for the typical office motivational posters but put up stuff that you actually like the look of. Some people might put up some floral designs, while others might prefer a more old-style wood design.
Get your computer and monitor set up, and maybe even a phone charging station. For creative designers, have a drawing tablet set up that you can work with. You can even include amenities like a mini fridge that might not be directly related to work, but still make the place nice (and convenient) to work in.
The idea is for you to create an atmosphere that you really don’t mind spending time in, because if you hate your office space, you’re definitely going to lose your focus and stifle your creativity.
Choose Tools Wisely So Focus Doesn’t Interrupt Creativity

Technology and the tools we use to boost our productivity are usually discussed in tandem, and for good reason. Technological advancements have made productivity go through the roof, allowing people to communicate and work faster than ever before.
Choose your tools wisely in order to better focus while you’re working. For example, if you’re a graphic designer, and you use a tablet to do your work, such as an iPad, you’ll know that it’s not just a device for drawing and designing.
Rather, it can instantly access movies, TV shows, social media, and more. If you’re easily distracted, then you’re left with a tool that can instantly allow you to distract yourself, if you so choose.
If you can instead do your design work with the simple pencil and paper, and later on transfer it to your photo editing program of choice by scanning it, then you won’t be distracted during the creative design process.
The final touches of it can be done using technology, but all of the meat of it can be made without distractions with the bare essentials. Another example would be a writer using a laptop.
Sure, it has things like Word on it that you can use to work, but it of course has the internet, which can quickly suck you in if you’re not careful to avoid distractions.
In this case, writing out something long like a book or something would be a bit much to ask using paper and pen, but you could possibly have a separate work laptop, one that’s disconnected from the internet so that you don’t run the risk of getting distracted.
For example, someone who is new to Photoshop might be quite intimidated when they open it up and are presented with so many different options. You could spend hours upon hours going through all of the different options, settings, and tools in that program, but instead you need to focus on your work and be productive.
If a program of that calibre is intimidating and distracting, try using a more basic one that you can use to focus.
Collaboration Is Distracting Compared To Solo Creativity Sessions

Having people to work with on creative projects can be both a blessing and a curse. While it’s true that others can provide you with additional insight and more inspiration than you originally had, it can also harm your creativity in two main ways.
If you’re no longer used to working on your own, you can become overly reliant on others to bring their ideas to the table so that you can adapt and mould them into your own.
Without your own sense of raw creativity, when you start to work on your own, you’re going to feel a little bit lost. What tends to be more common though, is other people’s ideas intruding on your own, and muddling your vision of your work.
It might seem a bit pretentious to claim that you work best on your own, because you don’t want other people’s ideas interfering, but sometimes it’s very true. If your vision isn’t complete when other people start to comment on it, it can veer you off from your original completed concept that would’ve been better than what they steered it towards.
Commentary and suggestions are welcome after the fact in order to adapt your idea to better suit your needs, but that should come after the initial draft, so to speak. It’d be like if you were writing something, and someone behind your back started throwing out words while you were mid-sentence.
One very common one is through social media. Posting work-in-progress items online opens up a floodgate to the masses, allowing them to throw in whatever off hand comments and critiques they might have, which can really get in your head and make you second guess yourself.
Another common way this happens is in person. While you’re working, people might walk by and make suggestions or criticisms, and while they may or may not mean well, it can still be very distracting and very frustrating to deal with.
As you can appreciate, a lot of this is dependent on the way you think and if you want to know more about developing a good mindset for success, please click on the featured resource below for a free Strong Mindset report; download, read it and take action 😊
Boost Focus And Creativity With Purposeful Meditation Techniques

You may have heard before that some people use meditation to increase their focus and to help them clear their minds. This is true, it does work well for a lot of people.
However, if you’re trying to do something specific with your focus or creativity, you probably won’t benefit as much from a random generic meditation class. You may need something a little more purposeful or specific to assist the creative process!
You shouldn’t be thinking about anything whatsoever during it, allowing your mind to go entirely blank. This helps people destress and relax, because they’re not thinking about all the things they have to worry about.
However, while this is helpful for that, it might not be as conducive to helping you focus or figure out a project. You should instead try more purposeful meditation, where instead of having your mind go blank, you focus on one thing and one thing only.
By clearing your mind of all other distractions, except for the project at hand, you’re going to be able to completely focus on that and come up with much better solutions.
Ideally, this would be accomplished in a space where you’re free of any noises, obnoxious sights, or people trying to get your attention.
There aren’t many places that would fit this bill perfectly, so just work with what you’ve got. The most important thing should be to not have people interrupting you, so if you can get to a space like that, even if it does have errant sounds and sights, you should still be able to focus well.
You might end up finding that different things help you more or less while you’re meditating. Try experimenting a little bit. You might not be able to focus in dead silence, so you might have some ambient nature sounds playing through some headphones.
You might want the lights up or down, and you might want to keep your eyes open or closed. It’s different for everyone, so try a little bit of everything at first to see what helps.
For most people, this is worth a try, but don’t be upset if it doesn’t work for you. A handful of people don’t focus well under meditation conditions, so you might find it’s simply not right for you. At least with a purposeful meditation, you have something to focus on (your task) rather than just trying to clear your mind which can be very difficult for some people. Give it a try; what have you got to lose?
Be Available To Creative Moments Whenever They Happen!

Unless you’re particularly lucky or skilled, creative ideas probably don’t just happen on demand for you. In fact, in most cases, creativity will appear whenever it happens to, and you tend to have very little control over when it will occur.
The purposeful meditation techniques described above may help you to get yourself into creative flow so may be worth a shot.
Otherwise, creativity can come up and interrupt you at any moment, even if you’re in the middle of something important. You could be trying to focus on your normal work, trying to sleep, or in the middle of a call or meeting with someone very important.
In these cases, you have to treat it the same way you would a toddler. The first thing you should try to do is train yourself to reserve your creative thoughts for later.
If your mind wanders even a little while you’re trying to focus, you can get flooded with all these different ideas that you can get lost in.
Sometimes a creative idea will pop up that could be life changing for you, and in that case, you need to stop what you’re doing and at least write it down quickly. Don’t ignore your creativity outright if it’s something that’s a really good idea or something that you really want to work on.
If that’s the case, try to come back to it later and continue expanding on it. You just can’t let random intrusive thoughts take over your work. Focus can be extremely important while also being rather fragile.
The slightest wandering thought or break in your concentration can pull you way off track in some instances. While some people’s focus isn’t easily broken, yours might be one little distraction away from crumbling, allowing you to get fully enveloped in that distraction.
As you can appreciate, all of this purposeful meditation, creativity process and maintaining focus can take a lot of self-discipline and a positive attitude. If you don’t have this, you will probably struggle to maintain any focus and creativity, so it is well worth your while to adopt the correct mindset; I know this may sound a little cliched, but it does really work.
If you want to develop more self-discipline, click on the featured resource below to get a free report, The Power Of Self-Discipline; download, read it and take action 😊
A Proven Way To Boost Creativity And Focus

You might be a creative who wants to find more ways to up your productivity and your focus. But if you’re like most creatives, focus might not be your strength. You’re not alone in thinking that way.
Most creatives don’t think in concrete, specific terms when it comes to business things. That’s because the business side feels removed from the creative side. So what you need to do is tap into the creative side to boost the business side.
It’s only when something is specific that you can identify it and work on accomplishing it.
Once you’ve narrowed down what it is you’re after, add a time constraint. For example, if money is what you need, you wouldn’t spend time saying, “Think about where or how I can get more money.”
Instead, you’d say, “What are 5 business models I can put into effect within 10 minutes?” This helps you to develop concrete ways to help take your creativity to the next level.
By having a specific goal with your thoughts, you’ll come up with ideas to improve whatever it is that you need.
The ideas that you come up with by adding time constraints can also be put into play faster than if you were vague and spent hours or days trying to come up with a solution.
With your business, you’ll need to learn the best way to market it.
You might have gone back and forth trying to come up with ways that you could do this, but you weren’t able to pin anything down.
Rather than spending a lot of effort thinking about this step, you could say that you were going to make a list of the pros and cons of a certain kind of advertising within 15 minutes.
By giving yourself that time limit, you turn it into a game and this can produce quicker results and give you ideas for solutions.
OK so you can see how specificity can help you to become laser focused and thus boost your creativity.
So, let’s flip it and look at the reverse and take a look at something that can be detrimental to your creativity and focus and it seems so simple and innocuous that you may feel that it won’t make a difference.
However, just bear with me and give it a go and see what difference it makes for you.
The simple idea to try is to only use your workspace for work and nothing else. Make sense? Well, let’s dive a little deeper…
Don’t Use Your Work Space For Other Things

There’s a reason that the IRS says if you have a home office it should be used solely for that purpose and nothing else. It’s because using a home office for multiple purposes can lead to a crossover between professional and personal use.
If you have a workspace, you should be working. Mixing up the space can happen anywhere that you’ve set aside to work. It happens when you let boundaries slide.
But it really is best just to use it for the intended purpose and not for any other reason that people commonly choose to do.
For example, some people choose to eat at their desk or whatever their workspace is. This is a bad idea – not just for health reasons, but it’s also bad for productive purposes. You get less done physically and mentally.
At your desk, your purpose should be to focus and to be productive to work on whatever task or project is before you. But when you choose to eat or to do something else instead, it steals that focus and productivity.
This happens because the brain is straddling two functions when you do that. You need to have boundaries between personal tasks and professional ones. Otherwise, your brain remains in the work mode and doesn’t relax and get a break from the work.
This can lead to overwhelm, which in turn can lead to brain fog. On the other hand, if you’re constantly using the space for other things in addition to work, the brain won’t want to get into work mode.
It’s important to establish what your workspace is for and what it’s not for. Your space isn’t supposed to be a spot to hang out and watch TV. It’s not meant to be the area where you play with your pets or your kids.
You can establish the work habit to create a routine in the mind. As soon as you sit down in your chair, your brain automatically kicks into thinking, “It’s time to work now,” but if you use the space for other purposes, it won’t do that for you. Save the relaxing activities and tasks not related to work for other spaces. You’ll get more done.
Having a strong mindset is critical to any attempt to nurturing creativity and staying focused, so click on the featured resource below to get a free report on how to develop a strong mindset. Download, it read and take action 🙂






