How to Draw Inspiration: For Digital Marketers and Designers
By Suryadathan E
A content strategist, copywriter, and content writer. Aspiring writer, on my way to write my first ever book!
@suryadathan_Social media is useful for seeing what other people made. It is a bad place to decide what you will make. The failure mode has a name: doomscrolling. Short clips hand you dopamine on a schedule your work never will. Dopamine is the signal the brain uses to mark a reward you earned. When the reward arrives without the work, you come back for another clip instead of using the idea you just saw.
The ideas are not the problem. They are ingredients. A grocery store does not cook dinner. If every gap in the day is filled with someone else's finished work, nothing in your head gets combined. One writer put that as social media killing the quiet part of creativity. I buy the description more than I buy any single cure.
What has worked for me is a task that occupies my hands and leaves the rest of my attention alone. Doodling is the classic version. I have ADHD, and a therapist suggested it years before I connected it to the margins of my college notes, which were already full of them. Harvard Health describes the same thing as a mild, constructive distraction: enough activity to stop you zoning out, not enough to crowd out the thought you were having.
A desk job rarely allows a sketchbook. Typing does the same job without looking like you have stopped working. I use Typersguild for that. It is a typing site, so the session has a visible result, speed and accuracy, and the text is a real book. Dracula and Les Misérables are long enough that my hands stay busy while a campaign line or a layout problem unsticks. When the line arrives, I switch to the doc, write it down, and go back to the paragraph.
The point is the gap, not the website. Scrolling fills the gap with someone else's ending. A chapter leaves the gap open and still gives you something to show for the time. If the writing side of that practice is what you want next, How Regular Practice Can Transform Your Writing is the companion. The library is where I start when the feed is louder than the work.
