Creativity Exercise - week 3

 

    Welcome back y'all! To the weekly creativity blog! For this week’s creativity exercise, the goal was to keep things simple and let ideas flow without overthinking them. The exercise asked us to choose a random topic and spend a few minutes listing everything that comes to mind. No editing, no judging just writing. Through past exercises, I’ve learned that this kind of low-pressure brainstorming is where some of the most honest and useful ideas come from.

    I decided to base my list around things people do while scrolling on their phone. It’s such a common habit that it often goes unnoticed. I set a short timer and wrote down whatever popped into my head, trying not to second-guess whether something “counted” or not.
    Some of the things that came up were scrolling with no real goal, switching between apps without thinking, liking posts without fully reading them, rewatching videos that autoplay, checking notifications that aren’t there, and closing an app just to open it again seconds later. I also noticed how often people save posts they never return to, compare themselves to others, or get pulled into comment sections instead of the original content. Other habits included refreshing the feed repeatedly, muting or skipping stories halfway through, screenshotting things “for later,” watching videos on mute in public, adjusting screen brightness without noticing, and losing track of time completely. By the time I finished, the list felt surprisingly long for something so routine.

    Overall, What I liked most about this exercise is how it made the ordinary feel intentional. Listing out these small behaviors shows how predictable and pattern-based everyday actions really are. From a creative standpoint, this kind of observation is valuable because it trains you to notice real habits instead of imagined ones. Also that this exercise reinforced something I’ve been learning throughout these creativity prompts: inspiration doesn’t always come from big ideas or dramatic changes. Sometimes it comes from paying attention to what people already do every day and using that awareness as a starting point for creative thinking.