7 tips to boost your multimedia creativity

Posted by on Dec 13, 2010 in Featured Articles, Storytelling, Thoughts | 0 comments

Watched this interesting video on TED, which if you haven’t seen it, goes something like this:

Nobody does anything at offices and they are enormous, corporate wastes full of distractions like useless meetings where creative people are hampered.

Let’s face it. How creative we are as multimedia producers is what’s going to define us and our work, so here’s a list of some ways to be proactive (one of my favorite words) about being creative:

  1. Find your creative zone. For me, it’s a quiet place when I’ve had enough sleep. If I take a nap during the day (this never happens), it’s almost guaranteed that I will wake up at some point during the night and have a creative rush. What’s your time/place when you’re in “the zone?”
  2. Cultivate the zone. Now that you know where or when you work best, you have to actually make it happen. Schedule to go there or rearrange your schedule so that “zoning” actually happens. Make it important.
  3. Stop working. Not entirely of course, but if you really want that creative breakthrough, it likely is not going to come on deadline or when you’re working 100 hours a week. Quantity in the creative space does not equal quality. If you fail to live life and give your brain a chance to rest, you won’t have a fresh reservoir of ideas to draw from.
  4. Negotiate with your employer. See if they’ll let you either move your hours or your location to where you’re most creative. I would hope that they would be open to that, but I can imagine scenarios where it might be difficult.
  5. Eliminate distractions. There’s this wonderful little app for your Mac called Self-Control that lets you blacklist email, websites and other distractions. I use it all the time to postpone the allure of Mashable, TechCrunch and the latest gear review. This also means don’t check your email and turn off your phone. I’ve read about the most productive people, and they all do this. Even if you’re in journalism, how much correspondence actually has to be answered right now? (Also in this category: do-not-disturb signs, missed meetings, etc.)
  6. Make big chunks of uninterrupted time for yourself. It’s true, once you get locked in, you need a couple uninterrupted hours to really get things done. If you’re like me, you can get more done in three focused, creative hours than you can in 10 uncreative, tired hours.
  7. Stop thinking about work. (Related to #3) OK, maybe this is just me, but all my best ideas come to me when I am not worrying, stewing, or fretting about a project. The fresh take or missing piece just appears out of some unrelated circumstance or thought. So make your project better by not thinking about it (Oh, you know what I mean).

Those are some my suggestions, some of which you’ve maybe heard before but may need a recommitment. What are yours?

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