I don’t know who said it first, but I agree that “inspiration finds me working.”  I don’t know if that makes it on demand, but discipline does help.

In my work, creativity comes from getting multiple types of inputs, reading, and talking to others in diverse fields or industries (which I don’t do enough).

The best tools for creativity for me are that which forces me to simplify.  I’ll give a pretty tactical example.  Working on a proposal for how we will support a portion of our business in a different continent.  After struggling with the formatting and such, I asked myself three questions:

1.  What is the problem I am trying to solve?  It wasn’t really a proposal.  It was that we wanted something that we could communicate to partners at an upcoming trade show.  That was the problem to solve.  What to tell them.  That changed the focus not to creating all the infrastructure and making all the decisions, but being able to weave a story that our audience would trust would address their requirements over time.

2.  How can I tell this in 30 pt type (a tip from Guy Kawasaki’s in his Art of the Start)?  It forces you to use less words, which is a good forcing function to make sure you understand your content.

3.  What will some distributor in this country do the day after this presentation?  How will they know who to call for what?  This lead me to create a summary page (this was the story from #1) and a contact matrix.  Putting in a chart, forced me to think about what we could do accellerate some portions of the plan.

I know this is very different work than what you and others readers of your blog do for a living, but I bet many of the same things apply.  I often find myself burning out or stalling out on a problem or project, because I am not really focused on what I have to accomplish, how to do it in the most efficient way, and how my audience/users need me to deliver.

Hope this is helpful.  I look forward to reading other posts on this topic.