How to get inspired
Inspiration is a quite complex and multifacetted topic. Also inspiration comes with a lot of myths on how it works and on how people are getting inspired. The truth is that every person has a quite different take on it and thoughts vary a lot — we however, found a few key apsects of our worklife that works like a charm.
Regularly change your working environment
Even though quality time in the office without interuptions like meetings or phone calls is by far the most efficient time, we also enjoy getting out of our regular working environment and work in a café or a shared office every now and then. Especially if it’s conceptual work (that requires a lot of texting or typing) the fresh and often distracting environment lets you focus even more. We travel a lot and love to go by train. Train rides also have this power to amplify your productivity and your inspiration by giving you different impressions as well. The basic problem is, that office work narrows your view to your screen and table only — getting out of the office opens up your views and that is what you want!
Trip to a city
Working in different environments always feels inspiring. Travelling and city trips are by far the best method to get inspired and motivated again. Our best projects so far started and have been carried out in cities like New York, London, Oslo or Zurich. Whether it be a different culture, the busy and fast city lifestyle of those destinations or simply the sheer amount of impressions you get while underway, business travel has always been the time where we focus the most on the stuff we usually don’t have time to.
When running a small studio like ours you constantly try to improve (we already covered that in a previous article) and while on travel we naturally fall back in a state of reflection and focus. Talking about future projects, new endeavours or how to get better in what we’re doing while having fresh prawns in Oslo is the best — nothing can compare to that.
Also this article was written while on a flight to Tokyo, Japan.
Getting out of your comfort zone
If it’s eating alone in a restaurant, talking and expieriencing different languages and cultures or having the guts to do a project that’s out of your usual scope — all those things force you to think differently and forge different mindsets. Your comfort zone is all about anxiety — people refer to ‘getting outside your comfort zone’ in terms of trying new things, anything that raises your anxiety levels can be counted as being outside that zone. And surpsingly a little anxiety is good for you. We often need just a hint of anxiety to push us to get our work done or to improve our performance.
