Have a creative weekend!

It’s Friday, so what better way to celebrate than with 9 quick tips for staying creative:

1. Get organized.

If you aren’t, you can’t focus on the task at hand. Creatives get a bad rap for being horribly unorganized (some deserved, some not), but a basic level of order in your life and work life will help create the calm you need to be truly creative.

2. Be realistic. Give yourself doable deadlines, and understand that a lot of your time is unfortunately spent on email or the phone – away from your project. Enduring self-induced stress will kill your creative streak.

3. Set boundaries. Other people need to know they don’t have a monopoly on your time. There are times you need to focus and not deal with calls. There are also times you need to relax. Ditto on not dealing with calls.

4. Get distracted.

Exercise, people watch, read a book, or whatever suits your particular interests. The key is just getting out of the office and letting your creative juices brew in your subconscious for a little while.

5. Stop making unfair comparisons. Suspend judgment of yourself and others. It creates too many artificially imposed restraints.

6. Push the medium. Think of alternative uses for traditional things, even if they at first seem ridiculous.

7. Don’t be afraid of it.

Don’t be afraid of deadlines, expectations, or trying something new.

8. Start projects before you need to.

This way you can step back and allow yourself to be distracted (see tip #4). A lot of your best creative thinking might me done when you aren’t even aware you are doing it. Giving yourself more time than you think you need will allow your mind to really go to work for you in it’s spare time.

9. Let it go.

Sometimes a project is not worth the stress it will cause and the damage it will do to your creative psyche. Knowing when to turn work down is crucial to keeping your sanity.