How to Be More Creative: Build Your Personalized Creativity Plan

If you have been searching for how to be more creative, you have probably already read the same five tips I had read: make time for it, carry a notebook, go for walks, try new things, stop judging yourself. All of that is true. None of it helped me, because not one of those articles told me what to actually do on a Tuesday when I had eleven minutes, no ideas, and a growing suspicion that I had used up whatever I once had.

So I built the thing I wanted to find. The tool above asks you eleven questions about what you make, how much time you honestly have, when your brain works, and what specifically keeps stopping you. Then it gives you a creative profile, one daily anchor practice set up to your own schedule, three supporting methods chosen for your weakest habit, and a thirty-day plan with a specific instruction on every single day. You can print the whole thing. It does not want your email address.

Below the tool I have written out everything the plan is built on: the four habits that separate people who have ideas from people who wait for them, the exercises that actually work, and how to adapt all of it for writing, art, work, teams and children. If you would rather read than click, the whole method is here.

Is creativity a skill, or are some people just born with it?

This is the question underneath every search for how to become more creative, so let me answer it plainly. Creativity is a skill. It behaves like every other skill: it responds to practice, it decays without use, it improves faster with feedback, and it is far more sensitive to your habits and your environment than to anything you were born with.

The reason this does not feel true is that we only ever see the output. You see a finished painting, a good song, a clever solution at work, and you do not see the four hundred bad versions, the borrowed structure, the six years of noticing, or the ordinary morning habit that produced them. Creative people do not have more ideas because they are wired differently. They have more ideas because they have built a system that catches them, and because they generate a large enough volume that some of them are good.

I want to be honest about the part nobody says out loud: raw talent is real, and it matters at the very top. But almost nobody reading this is limited by their ceiling. They are limited by not having a practice. That is an enormously good problem to have, because a practice is buildable and a ceiling is not.

The four habits behind how to improve your creativity

When I went looking for research rather than blog posts, the framework that changed how I thought about this came from work by the psychologist Robert Epstein, who argued that creative output rests on four trainable competencies rather than on inspiration. In one training study, employees taught these four skills went on to generate new ideas at a substantially higher rate than before. Four habits, all learnable, all boring in the best way.

The tool above scores you on all four and then builds your plan around whichever one is weakest, because that is where your gains are. Here they are in full.

Capturing: keeping the ideas you already have

Most people who tell me they have no ideas have plenty of ideas. What they do not have is anywhere to put them. An idea that arrives in the shower and is not written down within about ten minutes is, for practical purposes, an idea that never happened.

Capturing is unglamorous and it is the single highest-return habit on this list. One notebook, or one pinned note in your phone. Ten words or fewer. No judging on the way in, because judging at the point of capture is what teaches your brain to stop offering. Then, and this is the part almost everyone skips, you have to go back and read them. A capture system you never revisit is the same as no system at all.

Try this today: write down every thought you have about your work in under ten words each, and count them tonight. The number is almost always higher than people expect, and seeing it is what makes the habit stick.

Broadening: feeding on things outside your own field

If your work has started to feel repetitive, this is nearly always the reason. You are running on material that is already in your head, and there is only so much of it.

Original ideas are, overwhelmingly, unusual combinations of ordinary things. Velcro came from burrs on a dog. That means the width of your inputs sets the ceiling on your outputs, and the most reliable way to have a new idea is to go and learn something that has nothing to do with what you make. A book from a section of the library you would never enter. Twenty specialist words from a trade you know nothing about. A conversation with a plumber about how they decide a job is finished.

The instinct when you feel stale is to consume more work in your own field. That is exactly backwards. More reference material from inside your discipline makes your work converge on the house style. Going sideways is what produces something nobody else could have made.

Challenging: working at the edge of what you can do

Comfortable practice maintains a level. It does not raise one. If you cannot remember the last time you worked on something you might genuinely fail at, that is the reason the work feels flat.

Challenge also covers constraint, which is the most underrated creative tool there is. Give yourself three colours instead of twelve, ten minutes instead of an afternoon, three words instead of a paragraph. Constraint removes the default choice, and the default choice is the one everybody else makes too. Every time I have made something I was proud of, there was an artificial limit somewhere in it.

Surrounding: your space, your slot and your people

This is the one people dismiss, and it does more work than any of the others. Creative habits fail for three environmental reasons far more often than they fail for lack of talent: the materials are not out, the time is not defended, and there is nobody to show the work to.

Fix them in that order. Clear one surface so you could start in thirty seconds. Put the slot in the calendar as a repeating event with a real title. Then find one person who takes your medium seriously and tell them what you are working on. Isolation is a better predictor of quitting than any lack of ability, and it is the easiest of the three to solve.

Morning pages: the one daily habit I would keep if I could only keep one

Every plan the tool builds has morning pages at its spine, and I want to explain why rather than just assert it.

The practice comes from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. The original instruction is three pages, longhand, first thing in the morning, written without stopping and without reading back. They are not journalling. They are not meant to be good, or interesting, or even coherent. You write whatever is in your head: the argument you are still having in your mind, the shopping, the low-grade dread about a deadline, three lines of I do not know what to write repeated until something else arrives.

What makes it work is that it is a clearing exercise. Most people sit down to create and spend the first twenty minutes wading through mental noise before anything useful appears. Morning pages move that noise onto paper before the session starts, so the time you actually have goes to the work. There is a second effect that took me months to notice: because nobody will ever read them, including you, the internal editor has nothing to do, and switching that voice off for ten minutes a day makes it quieter the rest of the time.

Three pages is a lot if you have five minutes, so the tool adjusts the length, the time of day and the medium to your answers. If your brain genuinely works at eleven at night, you do them at night and they are still morning pages in every way that matters. If your handwriting cannot keep up, you type with the screen dimmed almost to black so you cannot read back what you wrote. The rules that matter are that you do not stop and you do not edit. The rest is negotiable.

Cameron pairs the pages with a second practice she calls the artist date: an hour or two, alone, somewhere interesting, with no goal of producing anything. A hardware shop, a garden centre, a market. The pages are output and the artist date is input, and a practice that is all output runs dry. The alone part is not optional, which sounds precious until you try it with company and notice you spent the whole time talking.

I have written about the full practice in more detail, including how the artist date works alongside it, in The Artist’s Way: morning pages and artist dates. If the longhand format does not suit you, stream of consciousness journaling is the same mechanism with looser rules.

Creative thinking exercises that take five minutes

These are the creativity exercises I come back to most, and they are all short enough to survive a bad week. The tool distributes them across your thirty days, but you can start any of them right now.

• Ten deliberately bad ideas. Set a timer for ten minutes and produce the worst possible ideas you can. Actively try to be useless. Then read them back and mark the one that is secretly interesting, because there is nearly always one. Aiming for bad removes the evaluation that jams idea generation at the moment of production.
• Ten uses for one object. Pick up the nearest ordinary thing and list ten uses for it that are not its real use. Push past the first four, which will be obvious. This is a version of a standard divergent-thinking task, and fluency on it improves with practice.
• Thirty circles. Draw thirty empty circles and turn as many as you can into recognisable things in three minutes. Speed over quality, no going back to improve one. Count how many you filled and try to beat it next time.
• Two random things. Open a book twice at random, take the first noun your eye lands on each time, and force the two together into a single idea. The more incompatible they are, the better the result tends to be.
• The what-if game. Ask five what-if questions about what you are making, each more absurd than the last. What if it had to fit in a matchbox. What if a child made it. What if it were illegal. Then answer the fourth one properly.
• Twenty questions, no answers. Write twenty questions about your subject and refuse to answer any of them. You will dry up around question twelve. Keep going, because the last five are the ones worth having.
• The thinking walk. Take a walk of twenty minutes or more holding one open question, without trying to solve it. Stanford researchers found that walking substantially increased output on creative-thinking tasks compared with sitting, and the effect carried over shortly after people sat back down.
• Twenty minutes of nothing. No phone, no music, no podcast. Just be bored, with paper nearby. Studies that deliberately induced boredom found it improved performance on idea-generation tasks afterwards. Boredom is not empty, it is unstructured processing.

If you only take one thing from this list, take the boredom one. Filling every idle moment with input leaves no gap for anything to connect in, and connection is the entire mechanism.

For visual work specifically, the art prompt generator and the what should I draw wheel both remove the blank-page problem in about four seconds, and a 30 day drawing challenge runs on the same thirty-day structure as the plan above.

How to be more creative in writing

Writers get stuck in two distinct places and the fixes are completely different, so work out which one you are.

If you freeze at the blank page, the problem is starting, and the answer is to stop starting. Begin at the end instead: write the last line first, then work out what would have to happen for that ending to be earned. You are no longer inventing from nothing, you are reverse-engineering, which is a far easier cognitive task. Alternatively, write the worst possible opening on purpose. It is almost impossible to be blocked and deliberately terrible at the same time.

If you have plenty of ideas but never finish anything, starting is not your problem and more inspiration will not help you. You need an externally imposed definition of done. Set a ten-minute timer, produce something complete inside it, and when the timer goes you stop and call it finished regardless of its state. Then show it to one person in that unfinished state with the words: not finished, just showing you. The habit of showing unfinished work is the thing that separates writers who publish from writers with a hard drive full of drafts.

For prose specifically, the oldest trick still works best. Take a paragraph you admire, copy it out, put it away, and rewrite it from memory a day later. Benjamin Franklin taught himself to write this way. The gaps between your version and the original are not failures, they are your own style becoming visible.

How to be more creative with your art

Artistic creativity stalls most often because the hand has learned a set of automatic moves and stopped consulting the eye. The fix is to make the automatic version impossible.

Ban the thing you always reach for: your favourite color, your standard composition, the mark you make without thinking. Work with your non-dominant hand, or standing, or with the lights low. Give yourself three colours and no more. When you find yourself wanting a fourth, that is the exercise working rather than failing.

The other half is looking, and looking is trainable. On your next walk, find three details on a familiar route you have never registered before, and write them down in specifics: not a nice door, but the brass letterbox with green corrosion under the flap. Being artistic is downstream of noticing, and noticing improves fast once you start scoring it.

One more, which is uncomfortable and works: find an artist whose work you actively dislike and spend half an hour identifying what they are genuinely good at. Taste narrows with time. Deliberately studying work outside your taste is one of the very few ways to widen it again.

If you are suffering from creative block, our free Art Block Breaker identifies your block type and gives you exercises matched to it.

How to foster creativity in teams

Almost everything that suppresses ideas in a group is social rather than cognitive. People have the ideas. They do not say them, because saying a half-formed thing in front of colleagues carries a real cost and nobody wants to pay it.

So stop running sessions that ask for good ideas. Run a round where the only goal is the worst possible solution to a real problem. Everyone contributes, nothing gets defended, and the social risk disappears because being bad is the assignment. Then take the worst three and ask what would have to be true for each of them to work. That last question is where the usable ideas come from.

Three other things that reliably help. Ask for quantity rather than quality, because the first ideas are always the stock ones and volume is what gets a group past them. Have people write silently before anyone speaks, because whoever talks first anchors the entire room. And spend ten minutes having each person teach the others something only they know how to do, unrelated to work, because groups that pool unlike expertise produce more unusual combinations than groups that share a background.

If you are trying to build creativity in the workplace more broadly, the single structural change with the best return is protecting unstructured time and then visibly rewarding an experiment that failed. Creative behaviour at work is governed almost entirely by what people believe is safe.

How to encourage creativity in kids

The most useful thing I can tell you about creativity for kids is that access beats instruction by a very wide margin. Children create far more when materials are permanently within reach than when creativity is scheduled as an activity.

So set up one small area that stays ready: paper, scissors, tape, pens, offcuts, boxes, all reachable without asking permission, and nothing put away between sessions. That single change usually does more than any set of prompts.

Beyond that, protect boredom rather than solving it. The stretch of complaining that nothing is fun is not a failure of your parenting, it is the beginning of the process, and filling it with a screen ends the process before it starts. Resist praising the output, and ask about the decisions instead: why that colour, what nearly happened, what you would change. Praising the result teaches children to produce what earns praise, which is the exact opposite of what you want.

The idea jar works well with children and with adults who have forgotten how to play. Everyone adds at least one idea a day for a week, however silly, and nothing is rejected on the way in. On the seventh day you draw three at random and actually do one. Doing one is the part that matters.

How to spark creativity when you are completely stuck

Being stuck is not one condition, it is four, and the right response depends entirely on which one you are in.

• If you cannot start, shrink it. Ten minutes, one element, deliberately bad. The blank page is not a lack of ideas, it is a standard set too high for a first attempt.
• If you have no ideas at all, this is an input problem and no amount of sitting at the desk will fix it. Go and get something from outside your field, then come back.
• If you have too many ideas and finish nothing, add a deadline with a witness. Tell one named person you will show them something at a named hour this week. Vague private intentions do not survive an ordinary week.
• If everything you make feels like something you have already made, ban your signature move for one session and see what turns up in its place.

And when none of that works, hand it to your sleep. Write the unsolved problem down as one clear sentence last thing at night, stop, and write again first thing before you look at anything. Sleep restructures newly learned material, and a problem stated clearly before bed is meaningfully more likely to look different in the morning.

What most advice about creativity gets wrong

Three things, and the first one is everywhere.

The right-brain myth. If you have been told that creativity lives in the right side of the brain and logic in the left, that is a distortion of some genuine research on split-brain patients from the 1960s. Brain imaging of people doing creative work shows something quite different: creative thinking recruits distributed networks across both hemispheres, including the same executive control regions used for analytical thinking. There is no creative side. It follows that being analytical does not disqualify you, which is the practical point, and I have watched that belief stop more people than any lack of ability ever did.

The inspiration myth. Waiting to feel like it is the single most common way creative work dies. Almost everyone who produces consistently works to a schedule and reports that the feeling arrives after they start rather than before. If you only create when inspired, the fix is not more inspiration, it is a smaller and more defensible daily slot.

The originality myth. Nobody makes anything from nothing. Everything worth making is a recombination, and the honest strategy is to widen your inputs and combine more distant things rather than to sit in a quiet room straining for something unprecedented. Borrow structure openly. Keep a folder of work you admire with one line beside each about the specific decision that makes it work. That is not cheating, it is how the craft has always been transmitted.

How the thirty-day plan works

Thirty days is not magic, but it is long enough for a habit to take hold and short enough to actually finish, which matters more.

The plan the tool builds has a spine and a rotation. The spine is your daily anchor, which is morning pages sized and scheduled to your answers, and you do it every day. The rotation is one specific exercise per day, and the weeks are themed: the first week is about capture, because you cannot select from ideas you never wrote down. The second widens your inputs. The third makes things harder on purpose through constraint and difficulty. The fourth is about conditions and finishing, so that the month turns into a practice instead of ending.

Roughly a third of the days aim directly at whichever of the four habits scored lowest for you, and the exercises are filtered by the time you said you actually have. Day twenty-nine sends you back to whichever exercise produced something you liked, because a second attempt at something that worked beats a twenty-ninth new technique. Day thirty asks you to choose the two practices you will keep and name the slot each one gets. Two is the maximum, and being ruthless there is the difference between a good month and a changed year.

Print it, tick the boxes, and let yourself miss days without starting over. The people who succeed at this are not the ones who never miss. They are the ones who treat a missed day as a missed day rather than as evidence.

Frequently asked questions about becoming more creative

Is creativity a skill?

Yes. Creativity behaves like any other skill: it improves with deliberate practice, it fades when you stop using it, and it depends far more on your habits and environment than on anything innate. Talent affects the very top of the range, but almost nobody is limited by their ceiling. They are limited by not having a practice, which is a fixable problem.

How can you be more creative if you have almost no time?

Shrink the practice until it survives a bad week. Five honest minutes every day beats an hour on the two Saturdays a month you manage it, because consistency is what builds the habit. One page of morning pages and one five-minute exercise is a complete practice. If you set the plan to five minutes, the tool above only gives you exercises that genuinely fit inside five minutes.

How do you become more creative when you have no ideas at all?

Treat it as an input problem rather than a talent problem. Having no ideas nearly always means one of two things: the ideas are arriving and you are not writing them down, or you have been running on material already in your head for too long. Start capturing everything in ten words or fewer for a week, and go deliberately learn something outside your own field. Ideas are combinations, so widening the pool is the mechanism.

What side of the brain is creativity on?

Neither, in the way the question implies. The idea that creativity lives in the right hemisphere comes from a popular misreading of split-brain research from the 1960s. Imaging studies of people doing creative work show it recruits networks spread across both hemispheres, including regions also used for analytical thinking. Being a logical or analytical person does not disqualify you from creative work.

What are morning pages and do they actually work?

Morning pages are three longhand pages written first thing, without stopping and without reading back, from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. They are not journalling and they are not meant to be good. They work as a clearing exercise: the mental noise you would otherwise spend the first twenty minutes of a session wading through goes onto the page instead, and because nobody ever reads them, the internal editor has nothing to do. Give them two weeks before judging them.

How long does it take to become more creative?

You will notice the first change within about a week, and it will be fluency rather than quality: ideas come faster and more of them get written down. Quality follows fluency, usually somewhere in the second month. Thirty days is enough to build the habit and see the shift. It is not enough to master a craft, and any plan that promises otherwise is selling something.

What are the types of creativity?

Rather than sorting people into creative types, it is more useful to think about the four habits that produce creative output: capturing ideas when they arrive, broadening your inputs beyond your own field, challenging yourself with difficulty and constraint, and shaping the space and people around you. Everyone is stronger in some than others, and your weakest one is where your fastest improvement is waiting. The tool above scores you on all four.

How can I be creative when I do not feel inspired?

Start anyway, at a smaller scale than feels satisfying. Almost everyone who produces consistently reports that the feeling arrives after they begin rather than before, which means waiting for it is a strategy guaranteed to produce less work. A fixed two-minute starting ritual, the same drink or the same three songs, removes the negotiation about whether today is a good day.

How do you become more creative in your thinking rather than in a craft?

Practise divergent thinking on ordinary objects and situations, because the skill transfers. List ten uses for the nearest object that are not its real use. Ask what-if questions that get progressively more absurd and then answer one seriously. Force two unrelated things together and make them into one idea. Five minutes a day of this measurably improves fluency, and fluency is what makes you look quick in a meeting.

How can I increase my imagination as an adult?

Protect boredom and narrow your inputs. Imagination needs unstructured attention to work in, and filling every idle moment with a screen removes the gap where associations form. Twenty minutes of walking with no phone, holding one open question, does more for imagination than any exercise I know. Then narrow rather than widen your reference material for a week: one photographer, one decade, one colour. Unlimited reference produces averaged work, while a single narrow source forces you to invent in the gaps.

Do I need to be artistic to use this plan?

No. The plan adapts to writing, drawing and painting, design, making and craft, music, photography, work and problem-solving, or simply thinking more creatively in everyday life. The exercises change accordingly, and there is a setting for doing it alongside your children or with a team at work.