The Best Tool for Creative Thinking

The number one tool for creative thinking, when you need to come up with a bunch of options, look at something from both sides, or name something, is anything that lets you treat thoughts as physical, three-dimensional objects.

For some people that's a piece of paper, index cards, Post-it notes on a wall or a window. Whiteboards are popular. If you want to stay digital, you're looking for an outlining tool.

An outlining tool isn't an outline. A Word document or a PowerPoint slide with bullets is an outline. An outlining tool is a mind mapping tool, or Dynalist, OmniOutliner, Craft or Workflowy. It lets you pick up each bullet point and drag it somewhere else as you reorganize. You treat it like a piece of paper you can put over there instead.

This makes a big difference. Not only does it help you generate new ideas quickly, it helps in the next phase, when you've run out of ideas. I did eleven and then hit a pause in my head. You can look at what you've done and say, that makes more sense if I drop it there, and I'll put these three over to the side.

In every type of creative thinking exercise, it's really helpful to have some tool, physical or digital, that emulates three dimensions, so everything that comes out of your head is an object you can move around, destroy or reorganize.