Blog Posts

I experienced this in full force last year when I took a break from digital distractions.

Putting the phone down and keeping the TV off really did make me have a lot more ideas.

And while it might sound counterintuitive, I’ve started to ‘plan’ for what I call thinking time.

The trick here is that I don’t schedule a time to think about ‘The One Thing’. I simply leave room in my schedule to think or to mind-wander. In other words, I daydream.

And I recently discovered that there’s longstanding scientific validity to back this practise. Now, daydreaming has been linked to the creativity and innovation of Nobel prize-winning scientists and world-renowned artists quite a bit.

More recent studies revealed a few other interesting things.

First, it’s exactly the kind of ‘freely moving’ thought patterns that are behind the boost to your creativity. This supports the idea that you shouldn’t spend this mind-wondering time on a single, particular topic. Rather, you must allow your thoughts to move freely, without forcing or containing them.

So, you let your mind move from thinking how they used to pile bricks in front of windows to avoid a window tax in England to planning your next holiday in Italy.

What the studies show is that these moments of freely flowing thoughts could enhance convergent thinking. And the better this is, the better you may become in finding the best ideas to execute during brainstorming.

Daydreaming isn’t wasting time but rather exercising it.

Now, another interesting point in the research concerns the positive benefits of this type of intentional mind-wandering.

It’s not just our creativity but also our mood.

For instance, a study from 2017 suggested that mind wandering that is more self-reflective could actually help you feel better. Focusing on the future possibilities based on past results is the key. You’re not just ruminating but actively considering the future and scenarios of what could be.

And so, we should all allow our brains to switch off at times. Instead of going for the phone or putting on a YouTube video, next time you should just look out the window and let your mind wander. And to truly let it wander from your upcoming tasks to a dream holiday or a scientific novel about cheese made of moons.

While it might not mean you stop those 3am thoughts (in fact, it might invite more of them), you will be activating your brain and nurturing it towards more creativity.

You’ll start cultivating more of those a-ha moments and, just maybe, feel a bit better while doing it.

In an age where many of us simply turn to LLMs to prompt an ‘idea’, I believe there’s a lot of novelty and power in being able to wake up in the middle of the night to a random thought.

To the best idea you’ve had, so far.

That sombre six-word story is sometimes discussed as the world’s shortest story. It’s also misattributed to Hemingway, although he isn’t behind it.

Nonetheless, I’ve found it quite moving and, more so, a perfect example of the power of words.

And recently, it’s also gotten me to think about the relationship between simplicity and creativity.

If you’ve ever read a copywriting guide, any one of them, really, then you have undoubtedly come across the advice of ‘keeping things simple’. To all of you who might not be writers (or specifically copywriters), this statement is often code for: “edit out all the unnecessary words”.

As the world’s shortest story shows, short is beautiful.

A single word really can express a thousand when done right.

So, how do you keep things simple when you’re trying to be creative?

The creative dilemma, I think, stems from the tendency to make two assumptions about it.

First, creativity is often equated with thinking outside the box and letting go of all constraints. While there’s certainly a lot of truth in terms of not letting yourself get tied down and instead trying different things, sometimes this freedom to do whatever stops you in your tracks.

The second assumption, equally bad in my opinion, is equating simple with easy. I don’t think there’s anything particularly easy in keeping things simple, especially in writing. I’d argue that the ‘simpler’ you want it, the harder it might be.

Moving past these assumptions, I often find myself being creative through constraints and a healthy dose of ‘making it harder’.

In essence, the stricter the constraints and the more difficult the task might seem on the outset, the more creativity I squeeze out.

A good example of this is a 5,000-word whitepaper vs. a 30-character subject line.

While 5,000 words is a lot of writing, it’s not that much of a box in terms of word usage. The length alone gives a bit more leeway to get to the point or expand on it.

On the other hand, ensuring everything important is on into those 30 characters really puts your gears spinning. Ensuring you inform, entertain and hook with extremely limited wording really makes you think each and every one of them carefully.

Having a broad goal of writing a sad story gives you plenty of freedom to be creative, but the objective of writing a tragic story in six words really challenges your storytelling.

If I feel stuck on a writing project (or many other life goals), I sometimes zoom in and, so to speak, artificially build a box around me.

What if I had only a paragraph to tell the findings of this study? What if the sole reader is a 40-year-old lawyer thinking about adopting a dog named Twiggie? What if I had to eat 100 grams of protein every day, and I couldn’t eat meat?

And if you’ve been reading those copywriting books, they teach you to do this as well. This box is evident in the buying personas we create. Instead of defining the target audience as “a 40-50 year-old man that has disposable income and likes golf”, the better example is a fictional person like “Matt who is 45, works as a financial advisor at a boutique firm, playing golf at a country club every Saturday with his mates”.

Sometimes staying inside a box can be a powerful catalyst for creativity. Limiting your options can actually open many more doors.

It’s not that you should or even could write a comprehensive case study with 100 words, but by challenging yourself with constraints, you might realise the things you can’t omit or the points that do require expanding. You’ve suddenly energised your writing and opened up opportunities.

Matt’s habit of playing golf on a Saturday might help identify unique patterns in shopping behaviour or tell that weekends really matter to him. Crafting copy only for people who like golf can be less emotionally appealing to them than discussing how vital that weekend retreat is for wellbeing.

With a box around you, you realise that you don’t always have to write a whole book to move people hundreds of years later.

You may end up doing it with just six words.

Take data by the National Literacy Trust. They’ve been quizzing children and young people on their reading habits since 2005. And in 2025, only 1 in 5 said they read daily, which is the lowest level yet.

I also remember recently reading a piece in which a university professor said students were overwhelmed by their course reading lists.

The issue?

Tough topics? Controversial materials? Foreign language?

No. Just full-length books.

Students had supposedly not come across the requirement to read a whole book before, let alone multiple.

To someone who found university reading lists the best thing about the courses, this was rather shocking. I loved having curated lists built around topics I was interested in!

It’s also saddening to someone who lives off writing words, creating content for people to read.

But I’ve felt this shift.

I recently began working with a new client. I did the usual things, researching and analysing the ideal reader (i.e. the client’s client). I thought about what type of text would resonate with this person. The usual bits and bobs of being a content writer.

And while in the past, we content writers also needed to consider search engine optimisation (SEO), especially in terms of keyword placement and such, there is now another ‘reader’ in my mind.

Now, I’m also conscious, not only of search engine rankings, but how LLMs will read the content. I need to consider that my ‘ideal reader’ may never, in fact, read that content directly but only hear about it through these models.

And so, I need to ensure that, however the AI clips and summarises the content, the context isn’t lost and the message I’m trying to convey always gets through.

For a moment, I felt a slight dread. I felt like my future is now not to write for people but for machines. And frankly, I’d much prefer human eyes.

After a moment of existential crisis, I remembered another truth.

People and clients I’ve interacted with still want the real deal. Good content and good writing still matter. It is still possible to capture audiences with words. Many people do still simply use AI to find good content to interact with directly, not just to read summaries.

For all the conversation around AI and spotting AI-written content (looking at you, countless em dashes and lists of three posts on social media), I find that it’s the humanity behind the text that still shines through (and often quite glaringly!).

We human writers add richer context and lived experience to text, even when it sometimes is just cheesy marketing text. And so far, it is exactly what’s often missing in these machine-written pieces.

To me, this realisation of being a writing human being came through the strongest recently as I worked on my first blog post.

I like writing. I like reading. They both bring me joy.

Taking a client story and turning it into content is a process I always look forward to. Crafting a compelling narrative and picking the right words is just so much more interesting than purely prompting an AI.

I believe — and know — that there are still people out there who feel this joy and appreciate the effort that content writing takes.

And even if you’ve only ever come across my writing through an AI summary, I hope it gave you the information you were looking for, and perhaps just a bit of joy to brighten your day.

And with that, I wish you all a successful start to the new year.

On the one hand, they’ve been found to boost productivity. I think many of us remember pulling an all-nighter at university to get that paper written. However, this boost often comes at a cost to our accuracy.

Additionally, other studies suggest that deadlines can enhance our focus and speed. But before you set yourself ten deadlines to sprint through your to-do list, you should pause.

You see, for creative thinkers (and tasks), limited time for reflection and exploration can be a significant downside.

I’ve certainly felt this way. Writing with a deadline can seem stifling.

It’s like saying, “Be creative and original but, please, do it within the next 24 hours.” Go ahead and try it; it’s not easy.

Yet, I also agree that sometimes having a due date just makes you act with a bit more determination.

The less urgency I give to a task, especially when it’s not work-related, the more likely I am to procrastinate on it. You see, there is really no deadly line, right?

And so, in my quest to make more sense of my own approach to deadlines and to make sense of the complex human nature, I’ve become one of those people. You know, the ones who break tasks into tiny steps and time-block even the smallest of tasks.

However, it actually really works and adds focus and clarity to my days.

The truth is, I don’t really expect to appease that green owl at a set time most of the time, or meditate when the clock strikes 8pm.

It’s more about just having a vision and a framework for my days.

And with those creative tasks like writing?

Well, I don’t expect an excellent idea to come to me at 9am even if my schedule says so.

My framework uses deadlines as a roadmap to the end goal, while allowing me to break free and do those second-round edits.

So, while I often have deadlines to ‘have an idea’, to run with it for a while, and to edit this idea into a presentable form, I also leave room to completely rethink it all, if necessary.

You could say I'm creating a deadline within a deadline.

I let myself be creative while still moving forward. I don’t feel the anxiety of trying to wait for that ‘perfect’ idea to strike because I make myself work with whatever comes around the first time — at least for a bit.

If a better idea comes along, I’ll (probably) have time to play around with it as well. If I feel like editing, I (mostly) do so even if I technically should be doing the laundry.

These days, with my framework, I allow creativity to emerge while staying focused on what needs doing.

And I avoid having that awful sense of dread I used to get when the question of deadlines came around.

I also saw that a 2019 study found that 40% of surveyed working adults said they have a fear of failure and making mistakes between 20-40% of the time — or more.

That’s a lot of fear for a whole lot of time.

And yet, as Keller said, misfortune could also happen to those who avoid rather than act.

Then, I heard in passing how someone said that they are often afraid, but they take action because they are more afraid of stagnation rather than failure.

This view of fear has stuck with me ever since.

It got real personal recently when I was given the opportunity to take a +13-hour flight to Malaysia. Yes, I do not enjoy flying.

So, I nearly turned down this opportunity due to my fears. But I didn’t. I took that flight because I questioned what I really fear.

Instead of being afraid of the flight or what could go wrong, I convinced myself to be more afraid of missing out on new experiences and encounters. My comfort zone is nice but it isn’t exciting.

I told myself that there was no real growth on the sofa. You don’t build muscle by staying still.

Stagnation and lack of growth started to scare me much more than taking action and possibly failing.

And as I was flying in the blue skies, I looked back on many of the moments of growth in my life. The reality is that it’s always been these moments of taking the plunge that have led to growth and new discoveries.

I’m the first to admit that it seemed easier when I was younger.

I moved to a different country, put myself in leadership positions—heck, I even began working as a freelancer. And that, I can tell you, can be very scary indeed.

As I settled into adult life, I started to settle a bit too much into the comfortable and the known.

And yet, even in that comfort zone, bad things sometimes happened. Sometimes I didn’t get the contract I really wanted, sometimes family and friends faced unfathomable illnesses and setbacks, relationships were broken and lost.

Life happened. And it happened all the same whether I felt fearful or ‘courageous’.

I’ve been hurt when I’ve taken action and fallen flat on my face. But I’ve also been hurt when I’ve been fearful and avoided things.

The comfort zone isn’t indestructible. The regrets for not taking action are so much louder than the mishaps you make.

Fear has a purpose.

But it’s important to listen to that fear and see what it tells you.

Whenever I find myself fearful and wanting to avoid an action, I try to pause. To take a hard look at what I am actually afraid of, and, more importantly, to see what inaction is going to rob me of.

Fears can be a great mover and motivator. You just need to frame them right. And it doesn’t mean turning into a superhero. You don’t need to do all the things all the time or go wrestle with bears.

Just have a bit of Hellen Keller’s attitude with you next time you want to stay in the comfort zone.

That’s the question Youtuber Struthless, challenged everyone to ask in the face of the current upheaval around the world. His video wanted to look at the chaos many of us feel today through a positive spin. He argues that, throughout history, the dark times have often resulted in a ‘creative renaissance’.

When things go dark, the artists, writers, musicians, and others create and find the light.

In Dante’s case, when you get exiled from Florence, you go and create the Divine Comedy.

Competing factions, political turmoil, and the weight of choices. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

We’re currently living in rather dark, tumultuous times. Negative news and distressing events happen constantly in different pockets of the world.

I’d even argue that what’s making it all feel so much worse is the loudness of it all. Our access to news, events and platforms to voice our thoughts is instantaneous.

And voice our opinions we do. An event can happen and instantly it will be discussed and debated on social media. There is no pause for thought or, often, consideration of what actually has occurred.

So, what would Dante do?

Well, I think a bit of introspection never harms. And so I felt like drowning out the voices for a bit might be a good starting point. I did what quite many people have done in recent months and quit technology for a bit.

I wanted to see if stepping away from the negativity and loudness of it all has any impact on how I feel. While I’m not the biggest phone user by any stretch of imagination, I find myself looking at breaking news stories or reading through comment sections a bit too often for my liking.

And without technology, aside from during my workday, I found the world much less noisy and invasive.

Suddenly, I had time to think — indeed, I often had nothing but my thoughts to entertain.

After, I noticed I also began to engage with slower and more thoughtful forms of media and even art. Books instead of tweets. Long-form journalism instead of breaking news.

Short-term, instant gratification leaves you hollow. Reading a headline and a five-minute summary removes so much of the nuance. You don’t truly end up knowing anything.

I felt more connected with the world when I wasn’t constantly ‘connecting’. I was actually living, feeling and contributing.

Sometimes, it’s good to take time to gather thoughts. To put things on paper, to edit them, to refine them.

I think it is time we start focusing on creating and not ‘opinionating’. To go on a deeper self-discovery rather than purely shouting about what is happening.

Not only would it lead to more meaningful art, but also to change. Because we’d be figuring out what is happening around us and within us, focusing on the future we truly want to build.

To create our divine comedies instead of purely participating in someone else’s dramas.