With more and more companies discovering the positives of remote work, the days of the stifling office environment may be numbered — meaning spending countless hours staring into space in a stuffy, noisy, office may soon be a thing of the past .

This change of environment is the perfect opportunity to reset our brains and embrace the innovation that often comes with increased creativity .

Creativity , like a muscle , needs to be flexed. Some people are inherently creative while others have to work at it every single day. Regardless of whether you are on the spectrum, here are a few simple tips to help you be more creative at work.

Make the space work for you

If you’re in an office you may not have the luxury of customizing an entire room or area but you can certainly make your desk more inspiring. First of all, keep it tidy, and then add whatever tickles your fancy: photos, mood boards, flowers, candles, stationary — the world is your oyster.

On the other hand, if you have a home office or designated work space in your house, you can totally go wild.

Try and ensure you can work near a window or any other source of natural light. Decorate as you wish and make use of the space that’s truly yours. If you can’t stand the idea of working from the same space every day, grab your laptop and move around. Basically do whatever works for you.

Brainstorm on the fly

You may be under the impression that you need to brainstorm as part of a group but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

I would recommend having a whiteboard — or a pin board — where you can jot down all your ideas, no matter how crazy they may seem at the time.

Make use of the notes app on your phone and write stuff down as soon as it pops into your head. This doesn’t have to be a tidy, curated list but rather a stream of consciousness which you can edit and adapt as you see fit.

There’s no right way to be creative so don’t restrict yourself to a space, an object, or a medium.

Take inspiration when it comes and engage with the world around you both online and offline.

Be an individual

You are unique so embrace every single part of you. Celebrate being different, thinking differently, looking at things from a different perspective — but most importantly, be aware of others’ differences and embrace those too.

Think outside the box, question the status quo, and don’t settle. You don’t need to take everything to the extreme, but it’s important that you take a wider perspective and oscillate between mainstream content and thoughts, and those of a more niche nature.

Look at what you enjoy doing outside of work and try to incorporate it into your job. For example, do you work in marketing and have passion for calligraphy? This will give you a unique perspective which may prove useful if you’re working on a branding or marketing campaign.

Walk the talk

You need to take matters into your own hands. Coming up with ideas is great, but it’s easy to let these fall by the wayside and you should hold yourself accountable.

So, don’t just think about how to change or improve something, actually do it. You’ll undoubtedly come across countless challenges and roadblocks but see these as an additional opportunity to be creative.

Learn from every experience and whatever you do, don’t work in a silo.

Disrupt existing processes

Once you’ve figured out how to boost your individual creativity , look at the wider picture: is your team being as creative as it could? If not, think about what you can do to help.

For example, are your weekly team meetings becoming a little stale? Is there any way you can motivate the team to contribute more original ideas? For example, it might help if you lead by example and share some thoughts to help spur creativity across the team .

Don’t fear creativity

As I said earlier, there will be times when creativity will be blocked by specific challenges , but the trick here is to acknowledge them and keep going.

You will of course need to be reasonable and realistic but this doesn’t mean you should allow your creativity to be stifled.

If you believe in something, stick to your guns, and find ways to make others see what you can see. Use your time and language creatively, make sure you’re inclusive of others around you, and listen. You will have lots of ideas but it’s also important to bounce these of each other.

Get outside

Last but by no means least, make sure you take full advantage of your surroundings.

Don’t get too caught up in your own reality or fall into the trap of being constantly hooked to your computer or phone screens.

Go outside, look up, take in the shapes, colors, and differences in nature and use them to spark new thoughts and ideas.

Learn about different cultures and ways of doing things, engage, and take an interest — it’ll pay off in the long run.

How do you motivate your team to be more creative? And why do you foster creativity? Share your experience with the Growth Quarters community .

The one question every leader should ask themselves

Boris is the wise ol’ CEO of TNW who writes a weekly column on everything about being an entrepreneur in tech — from managing stress to embracing awkwardness. You can get his musings straight to your inbox by signing up for his newsletter!

I know a business coach who always starts his sessions by asking his clients a single question: ”Who would you be if you weren’t you?”

What he means is; if you didn’t have your current job and responsibilities, and if you wouldn’t have invested time and energy in your current career, who would you be and what would you do?

It’s an excellent question to ask yourself every now and then, but it can be extremely difficult to answer. It’s because you are the result of a very complicated puzzle, consisting of thousands and thousands of pieces, and you’re only half-assembled.

The same thing goes for companies and projects. There are a lot of things you do simply because you’ve been doing them for a while. You might stick with projects that you’ve started only to find yourself now stuck with them.

That’s why you should ask yourself — at least once a year — if you were starting today, would you still continue with this project? The answer could be a firm “yes,” and that’s great. But a hesitant “no” is also interesting because it will allow you to reassess your work.

It doesn’t stop there, though, because you can apply the same thinking to your partners and employees.

If the person you work with applied today , would you hire them? It can be a painful realization when your answer is less than an enthusiastic “yes,” but maybe that discomfort shouldn’t be avoided. In fact, I tell my managers to think about employees not as fixed assets but as living beings who change alongside your company and the world — because they are.

I think it’s healthy and respectful to have a conversation with someone you work with and establish how long you’re going to work together. Back in the day, people might’ve stayed at the same job for 40 years, but I expect most people to work for you for about 5 years. Some a little bit longer, some a lot shorter.

The great thing about setting these expectations from the beginning is that when they leave — instead of feeling betrayed and abandoned — you can thank them for their contribution and accept that they gave it all they had.

You can then also view the opportunities it provides clearly and ask yourself: now that I have the budget for a new employee, who can I hire that’ll be perfect for what I want to achieve now?

So when an employee decides to leave, you can both look back on a fruitful partnership, and you’ll both have something to celebrate. You can now hire the perfect person for your next goal, and the leaving employee can move on to their next challenge. Everybody wins.

Back to the original question and your homework for the week: who would you be if you weren’t you?

Can’t get enough of Boris? Check out his older stories here , and sign up for his newsletter here .

Embrace your craziest ideas — they may be the start of something special

Boris is the wise ol’ CEO of TNW who writes a weekly column on everything about being an entrepreneur in tech — from managing stress to embracing awkwardness. You can get his musings straight to your inbox by signing up for his newsletter!

A friend of mine is filled with ideas, and every time I meet him, he’s always got a crazy new pitch. I love those conversations because his passion and out-of-the-box thinking always make me eager to discuss it and think about how it could be done.

He recently told me I’m one of the few people who’s always supportive, no matter how crazy his ideas seem. When he pitches his crazy ideas to others, most people start looking for holes in his theory or find reasons why it’s unrealistic or just stupid.

I do understand that reaction. After all, I’m not just a blind believer who’s unable to give constructive criticism or point out flaws. But I’ve also made it a habit to just assume that any idea is better than no idea.

That’s why my first reply — to any pitch — is to say, well, yes, why not?

If you pitch putting computer servers on Mars, my first inclination is not to shoot that idea down. Instead, I see it as an opportunity to realign my worldview and come up with ways to support this seemingly crazy idea.

And that’s not just because I have a vivid imagination, but also because I’ve learned that ambitious goals and crazy ideas often lead to better results and random realistic thoughts along the way.

Just look at Google. Its founders would often challenge their employees to think big, huge, or even unrealistically gigantic. Once, when discussing the cost of hosting servers, one of them pitched an idea to host their servers off-planet. I don’t think anybody actually took that pitch seriously, but what it did do was remind them all to think bigger.

So if you tell me you want to build a huge artificial mountain in the middle of the Netherlands, so people can go skiing in our incredibly flat country, I’ll happily think along (and yes, there really is an entrepreneur pitching this idea). And even if that mountain will never materialize, just working on it will trigger a hundred new ideas.

While I will never shoot down an idea when I first hear it, I will also never guess how successful it will become. So if you come to me for confirmation on that, my standard reply is: I have no idea. But I’ll always move straight on to encourage you to just start and see where you end up.

I’m firmly in the ‘the journey is the reward’ camp of trying out things and seeing where they lead — because that’s where the real magic happens.

Can’t get enough of Boris? Check out his older stories here , and sign up for his newsletter here .